US President Donald Trump says he "did a great service" in firing former FBI Director James Comey, following Thursday's report by the Justice Department's inspector general on the agency's handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a long-awaited, 500-page report that Comey made a "serious error of judgment" in announcing he was reopening the email server probe just before the 2016 US presidential election.
But he also found that Comey did not exhibit political bias or try to influence the election, nor did Horowitz contest the decision not to charge Clinton with a crime.
While the report was embarrassing for the FBI, it appeared to lack the kind of bombshell revelation that would significantly boost an effort by Trump and his allies to paint the FBI as corrupt and discredit the Russia investigation.
"The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI," Trump said in a post on Twitter. "I did a great service to the people in firing him."
Both sides of the partisan divide found something to trumpet in the report.
Democrats said it confirmed political bias did not influence the Clinton investigation, while Republicans seized on a newly disclosed text by an FBI agent in mid-2016 expressing his apparent intention to "stop" the Trump campaign.
Comey defended his actions in an op-ed published in the New York Times after the report was released.
"In 2016, my team faced an extraordinary situation -- something I thought of as a 500-year flood -- offering no good choices and presenting some of the hardest decisions I ever had to make," Comey wrote.
A long-serving law enforcement official, Comey became a controversial figure during the 2016 presidential election, drawing accusations from both Republicans and Democrats that his handling of the probe into Clinton's emails influenced the campaign.
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