Absolute nonsense... Manafort was found guilty of bank fraud for things he did before Trump even decided to run for president.
On what planet was Trump involved in Manafort's lobbying effort to convince Yanukovich to sign a trade deal with the EU?
Cohen did some outright foolish things that anyone in their right mind wouldn't agree to... HE is in charge of whether or not he makes a decision or not. He didn't have to lift a finger to "pay off" Daniels, yet he did out of his own volition.
Obstruction of Justice FOR WHAT?!?!? Firing Comey? LOLZ
Comey was found to have exercised repeated lapses in judgement and his subordinates were found to have operated in a similar fashion. His FBI was a fucking mess. The IG already exonerated Trump from an Obstruction of Justice Charge... if he was at all guilty of an obstruction of justice, he would have been impeached by now. Before the IG report there was idle speculation among constitutional and law scholars over whether or not Trump was guilty of an obstruction of justice... after the report? Nada... not a fucking peep out of them.
In the
Inspector General Report,
Michael Horowitz challenged Comey’s approach to two connected incidents The first is Comey’s July 2016 public announcement that he would recommend no charges against Clinton. The second is his decision to write to members of Congress 11 days before the presidential election, with the shocking news that the FBI had discovered new evidence in the Clinton case.
In the first instance, Comey violated protocol by making a public announcement, rather than sending a recommendation to Lynch. Comey has said he made that decision because Lynch had met briefly with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac at a Phoenix airport some days earlier, and he believed that if she made the announcement, it would be viewed as politically tainted.
Horowitz’s report also determined that Lynch’s lapse in judgment did not grant Comey license to make his own recommendation public.
We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct. We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the Attorney General, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of Department prosecutors. -
Michael E. Horowitz
In addition, the report faults Comey for withholding his plans to announce the recommendation from his bosses at the Justice Department, and for instructing employees to do the same.
That decision was “extraordinary and insubordinate,” the report says,
adding that “none of his reasons [was] a persuasive basis” for breaking longstanding policy.
The second incident came in the closing days of the presidential campaign, when Comey wrote to members of Congress to say the FBI was reopening its inquiry in light of newly found emails on devices belonging to disgraced former Representative Anthony Weiner, who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. DOJ
policy holds that the department should not make announcements that could affect the outcome of an election, but Comey has said he was concerned that if he did not announce the emails publicly, he would be misleading Congress by omission, having publicly closed the case.
The IG report notes that the emails were actually discovered in late September, and says that given the political sensitivities, the FBI should have acted much faster to deal with the material. FBI leaders explained the lag to investigators, in part, by blaming staffing issues. The inspector general rejected these and other excuses by the FBI.
The report concludes that Comey incorrectly engaged in “ad hoc decisionmaking based on his own views,” and failed to contact the attorney general and deputy attorney general for counsel on how to handle the incident. “
We concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment.”
The report is scathing for Comey, however. In his recent best-selling memoir
A Higher Loyalty,
and in the press blitz around it, Comey has defended his decisions in a register ranging between plaintive and self-righteous. The IG report demolishes his version of the story.
Beyond the specifics of the investigation, the IG report finds extensive problems at the FBI, including use of personal email to do government business, use of government devices for personal communications, discussions with reporters that far exceeded FBI guidelines, and inappropriate political sentiments. Among other revelations, the inspector general reports that Comey frequently used a private Gmail address to conduct federal government business, an ironic echo of Clinton’s own sins. (There are differences, in both record-keeping and security, between Google’s mail service and a personal server.)
The report finds that Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who was fired in March 2018, was not legally required to recuse himself from an investigation of Clinton, despite his wife’s Democratic campaign for state Senate in Virginia at the time. Yet once McCabe did recuse himself, the report found, he “did not fully comply with this recusal in a few instances related to the Clinton Foundation investigation.” The IG also found that then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General Peter Kadzik should have recused himself sooner from Clinton-related issues.
Some of the harshest criticism is for Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who worked on both the Clinton investigation and the inquiry into Russian interference in the election. He worked for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team before being transferred when questions arose about texts he wrote to his colleague, Lisa Page.
