The Atlantic

How Trumpworld Is Spinning the FBI Report

The president and his allies have seized on newly revealed text messages between two agents to justify their war on federal investigators.
Source: Yuri Gripas / Reuters

In a long-awaited report, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation was not influenced by political bias, and that any hostility certain officials may have felt toward then-candidate Donald Trump didn’t affect their handling of that probe.

But for Trump and his allies, that may not matter: While the overarching report undercut key parts of their conspiracy theories around the email probe, they’ve seized on one finding to fuel unfounded suspicions of a “deep state” scheme to undermine Trump’s candidacy. By focusing on this one aspect of the report, they’re able to keep arguing that the FBI has had it in for Trump from the start—no matter

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