Department of Justice IG Report
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Finally, there is the IG report. Tomorrow, the inspector general of the Justice Department will release a report about the Department's handling of an investigation of Secretary Clinton in 2016. We look forward to the report and learning what it has to say.
Now, we hope our Republican colleagues don't take the cynical track of trying to spin the report's contents to somehow sully the completely separate and ongoing investigation into Putin's meddling in the 2016 election. The DOJ IG report is likely to focus on the conduct of the Justice Department and the FBI in handling the Clinton email investigation in the runup to the 2016 election. Mueller was not appointed at that point. He wasn't a gleam in anyone's eye. So what he is doing is totally independent of what happened here.
Furthermore, when the President says ``witch hunt'' and somehow blames Democrats for this, well, whatever Comey did hurt Hillary Clinton, and he didn't do the same thing to President Trump, which would have hurt him. He released the details of Hillary's investigation--many of us thought he did that wrongly--but didn't release any details of the investigation into possible collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russians.
So this idea that somehow what Comey did and what Mueller is doing was designed to hurt President Trump and Republicans at Democrats' behest is like ``Alice in Wonderland''--it is the opposite of the facts. The investigation into Putin's meddling in our elections and any potential associations between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign is an entirely separate investigation from what happened with Hillary Clinton.
It would be erroneous to try to use the information in the IG report to discredit the special counsel, but we hear rumblings that some of these very partisan Republicans, led by Chairman Nunes, may try to go down that road. We hope they won't be so cynical or so willing to twist the facts inside out and turn truth on its head, all for political gain.
It is crucial--critical--that Special Counsel Mueller's investigation get to the bottom of what happened and who was involved in Russia's efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
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