Why the IG Report Is Lame

If Kim Strassel is one of the two indispensable voices on the FBI-weirdness story, the other is former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review. McCarthy writes to react to the DOJ IG's report on the handling of the Clinton email matter. See his conclusion.

How do you best evaluate the FBI’s approach to the Clinton case? Well, if I may invoke that term again, common sense says you look at how the same agents handled another case which bore on the same event that informed their every decision, the 2016 election. The question is not whether every Clinton-case decision was defensible considered in isolation; it is whether the quality of justice afforded to two sides of the same continuum by the same agents at the same time was . . . the same.

It wasn’t. One was kid gloves, the other was scorched earth. The candidate they hoped would win got the former; the candidate they needed to “stop” got the latter. The candidate they were almost certain would win got the case dropped; the candidate they needed an “insurance policy” against . . . well, whaddya know — the case against him is still going . . . and going . . . and going.

Did bias have anything to do with that? In 568 pages that leave out the Trump half of the story, we’re told the answer is, “Who really knows?”

I think we know.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz had a chance to flush out the Augean stables at DOJ. Instead he appears to have done his level best to downplay the wrong-doing his own report documents, scrupulously avoiding consideration of the disparate treatment afforded the Clinton and Trump organizations.