By Brad Heath and Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – 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.
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.
Bill Barr, who was attorney general at the time and was not accused of any wrongdoing in the report, could not be reached for comment.
President-elect Trump, who will return to the White House on Jan. 20, is a frequent critic of what he has described as the politicization of U.S. law enforcement.
Without providing evidence, Trump has accused the Justice Department of unfairly targeting him in two different criminal probes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents after leaving office in January 2021.
The Justice Department has since dropped both cases, citing its long-standing policy that prohibits prosecuting a sitting president.
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.
A Trump transition spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.
NURSING HOME PROBE
Federal prosecutors began looking at deaths in nursing homes in the middle of 2020, as the pandemic was cutting a deadly path through some facilities. The review focused on facilities in New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of which had Democratic governors who had issued orders requiring the homes to accept COVID patients.
The Inspector General concluded that Trump administration officials instructed attorneys to “focus specifically on New Jersey and New York despite having been provided data indicating that the nursing homes with the most significant quality of care issues were in other states.”
In October 2020, department officials sent letters to the governors of New York and New Jersey seeking more information about nursing home deaths. The inspector general said the officials provided the letters to the New York Post before they reached the governors, and that another official spoke anonymously to the newspaper. That, the report said, violated the department’s policies limiting contacts with the press.
An official also leaked details to the Wall Street Journal, the report said.
The report concluded that “the upcoming 2020 election may have been a factor in the timing and manner” of how prosecutors conducted the nursing home investigation and officials’ decision to make those steps public.
The Office of Special Counsel, which polices rules that generally bar federal workers from participating in partisan politics in their official capacity, is reviewing the report, a spokesman said.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Nia Williams)
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