“Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of
Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department's internal watchdog concluded in a new report.
Reuters obtained the December report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz through a public records request. The report found the officials improperly shared details with two media outlets about the department's plans to collect data on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes located in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, four states with Democratic governors who had come under fire for their handling of the pandemic.
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The leak “will be our last play on them before the election but it’s a big one,” one of the officials wrote in a text obtained by investigators.
The report did not identify the employees, though one of them worked in the Justice Department's public affairs office. They no longer work at the department, according to the inspector general's office.
"The conduct of these senior officials raised serious questions about the partisan political motivation for their actions in proximity to the 2020 election," Horowitz wrote.
… Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said the politically motivated behavior described in the report represents the same type of conduct that Trump and his allies have alleged the Justice Department under President Joe Biden engaged in.
"They accused those prosecuting the former president for his crimes around election denialism and the insurrection as partisan, and simultaneously, they were doing things like this," she said. …”