Bill Maher Rails Against James Comey Over IG Report: ‘The FBI Helped Trump’

Bill Maher was in a particularly happy mood on Friday’s edition of Real Time. And for good reason. “Finally, somebody…who was treasonous to this country is actually in jail: Paul Manafort,” announced Maher to the feverish delight of his studio audience.

President Trump, of course, has repeatedly lied about the level of Manafort’s involvement in his campaign, even claiming “he had nothing to do with the campaign” when Manafort served as the campaign’s chairman.

But the comedian devoted the majority of his attention to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 500-page report released this week on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 presidential election.

“Finally, after 18 months working on this, the Justice Department’s inspector general released his report on the FBI’s actions in the 2016 election,” said Maher. “Trump said he wanted to read the whole thing before commenting—I’m joking, of course. It’s 500 pages, he gets bored halfway through a fortune cookie.”

Trump, of course, made a number of false claims—lies—about the IG report during a bizarre interview on the State News program Fox & Friends.

“They were plotting against my election,” Trump alleged, when the IG report concluded the opposite: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed,” read the report.

The president also said, “I did nothing wrong, there was no collusion, there was no obstruction. The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that. I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited.” Again, false—the IG report had to do with the FBI’s actions during the election and did not explore or make any conclusions about potential Trump-Russia ties.

Rather, the IG report concluded that the FBI did considerable damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign—or “the exact opposite of what [Trump] said.”

“The upshot of it is the FBI helped Trump, as we all knew, and Trump made such a big deal out of Hillary’s emails that Comey didn’t want anyone to think that the FBI was helping Hillary and was on her side, so they ratfucked her campaign,” said Maher. “You know, it’s like when the ref needs to show that he’s fair, he shoots the hometown quarterback in the mouth.”

“He can just say anything,” the host added of Trump’s IG report lies. “In the post-truth world, it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a cult…It’s a cult when you can say anything, and they drink the Kool-Aid.”