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.”
WATCH:
Comey came under fire during the 2016 presidential campaign over the press conferences he held in the aftermath of the investigation into the server in the Clintons’ home during which he said Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” with classified material, but also said she shouldn’t face prosecution.
“The FBI screws up on both sides. They are politicized on both sides. You can look at James Comey, look at the mistakes he made. Ask the Clintons today about what he did and how he elected Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “If you look at what happened afterwards, the Steele Dossier, which we said from the very beginning, was nonsense. The Steele dossier, the Carter Page FISA apps. They screw up. They are human beings. But there are people who like Republicans in the FBI and who like Democrats in the FBI.”
“In Trump world, running around saying what they’re saying – it’s just absolutely ridiculous, Willie, because they have short-term or long- term memory loss,” Scarborough asserted. “They don’t know what it is now. It was the FBI. It was James Comey who gave Donald Trump basically a life raft to paddle to shore and win the election 10 days before. It was over until James Comey did what he did.”
The FBI was lambasted in recent years over the agency’s repeated contact with social media companies to potentially censor content, the targeting of parents protesting at school board meetings, the alleged presence of FBI sources at the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building, a memo published January 2023 warning about “radical traditionalist” Catholics and the Aug. 8, 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of a probe into allegations surrounding Trump’s handling of classified documents. The FBI also faced criticism for targeting nonviolent protesters who entered the Capitol building during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot and its handling and arrest of pro-life protesters who demonstrated near abortion facilities.
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