The Wall Street Journal reports that the Department of Justice is investigating how James Comey’s FBI handled serious allegations of sexual abuse against Larry Nassar, the former doctor for the women’s U.S. gymnastics team. The DOJ’s Inspector General will review why Comey’s FBI delayed for months an active investigation into Nassar, who now is in federal prison for various child pornography and sexual abuse convictions. According to the Journal, “the Justice Department is scrutinizing how multiple FBI field offices acted on—or failed to act on—gymnasts’ claims against Nassar, starting in late July 2015, when USA Gymnastics leadership reported the athletes’ concerns to the FBI’s Indianapolis field office. The FBI didn’t open a formal investigation into Nassar until the spring of 2016, in Los Angeles.”
I wrote about this infuriating case in April. But let’s pause for a moment and contrast the FBI’s foot-dragging on the Nassar case versus the investigation into Trump campaign aides. In the spring of 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Comey and other top Obama officials to discuss the dire national security threat posed by Carter Page, who was a foreign policy volunteer for Trump. By the end of July, the FBI opened up a counterintelligence probe against Page and three other campaign associates. And in October, with the Steele dossier and Yahoo News article in hand, Comey went to a secret court to gain approval for the federal government to spy on Page.
At the same time, despite credible allegations of serious sexual abuse, Larry Nassar was ignored by officials in two FBI field offices before his case finally got some attention. But Nassar wasn’t arrested by the FBI until December 2016. In other words, the FBI had time to meet with a British paid political operative (Christopher Steele) but didn’t find time to interrogate a sexual predator who was molesting hundreds of American girls. The FBI jumped into action when George Papadopoulos allegedly made some drunken comments about Hillary Clinton’s emails, but the agency took its sweet time looking at Nassar’s computer, which contained 37,000 videos and images of child pornography at the same time he was tending to female athletes as young as 12-years-old.
Between the time the allegations were first brought to the FBI in July 2015 and the time Nassar was arrested in late 2016, the New York Times estimates at least 40 girls were molested.
There are plenty of victims of the Justice Department’s sham Trump-Russia investigation – not the least of whom is the American public that has been forced to endure this farce for two years – but no group has suffered more than the innocent and abused girls who were ignored by James Comey’s FBI while he did the political dirty work of the Democrats in 2015 and 2016. We know where Comey’s “higher loyalty” lies and it isn’t with our defenseless children.