The Justice Department's internal watchdog will issue its long-awaited report on the FBI and DOJ's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails during the 2016 presidential campaign on June 14, Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a letter to Congress on Thursday.
Horowitz, in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, also said he would accept an invitation to testify before that committee on Monday, June 18.
The DOJ's Office of the Inspector General first announced its investigation of matters related to Clinton's use of a private email server in January 2017, days before President Donald Trump's inauguration.
The watchdog is specifically investigating former FBI Director James Comey's disclosure of public information about the email probe before the November 2016 election, and "whether certain underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations."
The full report will be nearly 500 pages long, sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. Comey's public comments — such as when he said "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against Clinton for handling classified information on a private server — are expected to be the subject of harsh criticism in the report, according to the Post.
The report is already past due in the eyes of some Republicans.
In a letter sent on April 13 to Grassley, Horowitz said he expected "that we will issue our report in May, absent any additional new developments."
Grassley responded accordingly, scheduling a hearing for Horowitz to testify about the report before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 5.
But May came and went without Horowitz's report seeing the light of day, and Grassley rescheduled the meeting for June 11 — which has now been pushed back again, apparently for the last time.
Trump asked in a tweet on Tuesday, "What is taking so long with the Inspector General's Report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey," and suggested that the continued wait could be affecting the report.
"Hope Report is not being changed and made weaker!" he said in the tweet.
Two days earlier, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had expressed a similar frustration with the wait.
"We're a little disappointed in that this has been delayed another week, and my experience with this is a lot of time the lawyers get a hold of it and they start to water down the report," Nunes said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. "So we were supposed to receive it this week, now it's been pushed to next week."
Horowitz's letter on Thursday indicated that the last remaining steps before its release involve the completion of "ordinary processes for the review and classification of such reports" described in a previous letter to various congressional leaders.
In that letter, sent May 16, Horowitz said his office would release the report after allowing the DOJ and FBI to review it, provide comments and submit a formal letter to be attached to the final document.
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