suspicions? i assume there is a bunch of mixed emotions. have you had a chance to talk hillary clinton? i didn t talk to hillary but it confirmed what i believed about jim comey which was is that he wasn t rating out of a political bias but he had a dangerous corrupting belief that because he wasn t motivated bipartisanship that he could use his own judgment to decide what actions were right to take. and that led him to act well beyond his role as the fbi factor. and that he did so with devastating consequences. and there is a real hubris there to think just because you are not a political person that you can go above and beyond what your role is supposed to be. you know, i think his original sin was the press conference that he had, where he was hillary clinton s investigator and judge, jury, all at once. and you know, as he once famously said, it s right this in our name, investigations.
perfectly reasonable for supporters of the president the hook at fbi agents who are exchanging hate texts about their guy and say i have a problem with that. and it makes me worried about the fairness of the investigation. that s why bob mueller removed peter strzok from the investigation. i m curious, jennifer palmieri, this report says that james comey was insub ordinate. right. that s a word that would qualify as a fireable offense. in some ways does it justify president trump are s decision to fire comey? no, because we all know why the president fired jim comey. he you told us on this very network. he fired jim comey because he was being too aggressive on the russia investigation. but it is you know, why jim comey didn t think that lynch and yates could handle the fall ow from the right. from their investigation, i
ability to cherry pick and actually make the bureau and justice look worse is where this is headed. what do you think? that s probably right. the look, the bureau and the justice department do look bad in this. i think you have to look at the inspector general report in two ways. one is about the underlying investigative and prosecutorial decision has the fbi and justice department made, and were they sound, made without bias and made with integrity. i think there is a resounding conclusion in the report that the answer to that is yes. the other thing you have to look at is the way they handled the announcement of those decisions, the way they handled communicating to congress, the way jim comey handled communicating to congress about the reopening of the investigation and was that sound. the conclusion in that regard is no. you have to take the two apart. what will happen, you will see people, especially the president try to conflate the two and argue that because the fbi made bad d
think that s worthy of more consideration. this report, strip out the russia investigation, strip out president trump. let me go to bep on this. this report, would it lead to the firing of james comey if he were still there? look, i think that if a new president had come in and said, as the ig has said, that i don t like the way jim comey handled himself in this investigation and i m going to remove him for it. right. and had done it actually for that reason in a reasonable period of time with explicit reference i would disagree with that judgment in a pretty profound way. but jim comey is accountable for the decisions that jim comey made. he s not pushing back against the idea. no, he is not. that he should be held accountable for it. if somebody prefoundly disagrees with those judgments that could be an outcome. that s not what happened here. very quickly, jennifer, are we going to hear from hillary clinton or not? i don t know. i can t i guess we will have to wai
they judge to be right even though they are not their role. what is really ironic is that the fbi was isolated, right, it was put into the department of justice, which is also somewhat isolated from the white house for the purpose of protecting it from political considerations. it was very much political considerations that led jim comey to write that letter. he wrote that letter because he thought hillary was going to win and he wants to make sure she wasn t considered i think he was concerned about protecting his reputation with congress. right. it proves in the end the report is important in that it shows you need to go back to a place where this is a institution that does not take into account political considerations. i am going to ask you both the same question. jennifer, why shouldn t then president trump have some suspicions about the fbi if they bungled the clinton e-mail case? because they did not reveal what would have been devastating news and i think would have