Joe Scarborough Claims FBI Is ‘Politicized On Both Sides’

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough claimed Thursday that the FBI was “politicized on both sides,” citing former FBI Director James Comey’s actions during the 2016 election and the early months of the first Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated Kash Patel, who has a history of criticizing the agency over its probes into Trump, to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed after firing Comey in 2017. Scarborough pointed to Comey’s handling of the investigation into a server set up in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua home during the 2016 campaign to bolster his claim.

“This was a thing I was explaining to politicians, especially politicians going into the White House or people going into the White House, the intel community is going to get you coming and they are going to get you going,” Scarborough claimed. “You can talk to George W. Bush about that during the Iraq war, you know what … it was split. Half of the CIA agents were against it. This yellowcake stuff, that is bullshit, and it will be leaked to The New York Times. You know? Barack Obama is targeting people, like himself personally? That gets leaked to The New York Times. There is a split.”

“The 2016 campaign, and this is what is so wild about the whole idea. It’s politicized, it’s for the side. No, the New York office, you know, they were against Hillary Clinton. They didn’t like Hillary Clinton. We knew that during the 2016 campaign,” Scarborough continued. “The D.C. office didn’t like Donald Trump, and Donald Trump got elected the first time because James Comey, after not indicting Hillary Clinton, decides he’s going to hold a press conference and say, for the first time, by the way, yeah she’s not guilty, but she is politically guilty, which is just an outrageous norm. And then, 10 days before the election, we know exactly what happened.”