It’s refreshing to see at least one Democratic member of Congress roundly address Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) apparent role pushing to restart the Clinton emails investigation in the final weeks of the 2016 election. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) called Nunes “the President’s fixer in Congress.” But I would be highly, highly skeptical of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s suggestion that the Rudy Giuliani/New York field office leaks are still under investigation. I’ve even seen some people speculating that he may be signaling the existence of a criminal probe that his office had to avoid interfering with. Again, be highly, highly skeptical.
My impression, based on the IG Report released last week as well as my own reporting is that the Inspector General plans to continue a series of follow-on probes dealing with specific leaks in a discrete and narrow fashion.
So, for instance, maybe there’s an agent in New York who fed information to Rudy Giuliani and perhaps he or she will be called out a future report. But this is not simply leaks. Leaks appear to have been part of a pattern of conduct aimed at forcing forward the Clinton probe, restarting it and forcing the announcement of that restarting of the probe in the weeks just before the election. It was a pattern of bias and biased behavior leading to a number of inappropriate actions which shaped the course of the investigation and the election. This is the overarching look at the situation that was wholly absent in last week’s IG Report. I do not expect any follow up report to do anything like that.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s some big criminal investigation going on we don’t know about. I doubt it. I think these questions are inconvenient and not being asked.
