James Comey biggest loser from report

The US Justice Department report delivers a long overdue slap against James Comey for his very poor leadership of the FBI.

Hillary Clinton and James Comey.

The bombshell report of the Justice Department’s inspector-general into the FBI will only fuel divisions between Donald Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller.

There is ample information in the 500-page report to support Trump’s claims that some people in the FBI were out to get him and that former FBI chief James Comey was lousy at his job.

But the report also debunks the key allegation made by Trump, that the FBI’s investigations were politically motivated or were ­affected by political bias, including Mueller’s Russia probe.

As such, both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps will ­cherrypick the findings to bolster their arguments and the divisions between the President and the Mueller camp will only widen.

The report delivers a long-overdue slap against Comey for his very poor leadership of the FBI.

Comey has been travelling the US on his book tour telling Americans that he did the right thing when he interfered twice in the 2016 US election.

His first intervention in mid-2016 helped Hillary Clinton when Comey foolishly broke with protocol by holding a press conference to reveal that there would be no charges against her.

Then he hugely assisted Trump by reopening that investigation only nine days before the election.

From that day onwards, Clinton’s lead over Trump narrowed sharply. Clinton says it cost her the election. In both cases it was an extraordinary and clumsy intervention by an FBI chief and the report rightly slams him for it.

Trump will use the report to argue he was justified in sacking Comey. The official reason why Comey was sacked was because of his mishandling of the Clinton email scandal, although Trump later said that the Russia probe was on his mind when he sacked him.

But the report clears the FBI of Trump’s central allegation that it conducted politically motivated investigations, such as the Russia “witch-hunt’’, or that political bias tainted its decisions, such as the decision to publicly exonerate Clinton in mid-2016.

What it shows is that Comey was a man of poor judgment. He was so intent on trying to make the FBI transparent that he lost sight of common sense.

He even sent work emails on his private server at the same time the bureau was investigation Clinton for doing the same thing.

The report also shows that a handful of senior FBI officers were overly hostile towards Trump, ­especially Peter Strzok, a senior agent in both the Clinton and ­Russia probes. Strzok’s message to his girlfriend that “we’ll stop’’ Trump becoming president was stunningly unprofessional, even if the report found no evidence that he did actually seek to undermine the investigations.

Either way, Trump will use ­selected parts of the report to bolster his campaign to discredit the FBI and those FBI agents working with Mueller in the sprawling ­Russia probe.

The Democrats will use it to show that Trump’s claims about the FBI conducting politically ­motivated investigations are bunkum. Rather than settle one of Washington’s biggest political ­debates, this report will only pour fuel on the fire.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.