The report lands at a sensitive time: The impeachment inquiry into Trump has unveiled alleged mistreatment of veteran U.S. diplomats, including the abrupt early recall of Marie Yovanovitch from her post as ambassador to Ukraine. Yovanovitch is set to testify publicly before Congress on Friday.

But of the five cases Inspector General Steve Linick examined, he was able to establish wrongdoing in just one case , that of Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a U.S.-born policy expert of Iranian descent who was pushed out of a top job at the State Department for reasons that Linick determined included her ethnicity.

In two other cases, Linick concluded that, based on the evidence he could find, there was no mistreatment of the staffers in question. In the remaining two cases, the inspector general did not come to a conclusion, saying he was unable to obtain necessary cooperation from key witnesses.

Democrats in Congress have been eagerly awaiting the report, which took more than a year to complete and whose findings were first reported by POLITICO on Wednesday.

The State Department must “take strong disciplinary action against all those who engaged in these abuses,” Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, acting chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a joint statement.

“Secretary Pompeo testified that anyone who engaged in this sort of bullying and harassment shouldn’t be working at the State Department,” they added. “But he’s done nothing in the face of a mountain of evidence to hold anyone accountable.”

Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stressed that lawmakers should forge ahead with their own related investigations. “If nothing else, this long-overdue report by the inspector general reiterates that Congress’ work to protect career personnel is more important than ever,” he said.

Thursday’s report from the State Department inspector general was the second in recent months to deal with the issue of political retaliation against career staffers. The new report did not name the employees in the five cases examined, but POLITICO was able to establish most of their identities through other means.

One case in which Linick found no fault was that of Ian Moss . Moss is a civil servant who had been detailed to the National Security Council, but upon returning to the State Department in 2017, he was assigned to what was essentially clerical work handling Freedom of Information Act requests.

Moss was one of numerous State Department staffers loaned to the FOIA office under an initiative by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to clear the backlog of open-records requests.

There are strong suspicions that Tillerson was trying to clear the backlog to hurry the release of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose use of private email servers stirred controversy in the 2016 presidential campaign she lost to Trump.

And many of the staffers lent to the “FOIA surge” had happened to work on projects during the presidency of Barack Obama that Trump opposed. Moss, for instance, had worked on efforts to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The inspector general described disputes over when Moss was formally told to report to the FOIA office and whether people outside his chain of command were communicating with him about his role. Some of those Trump appointees exchanged emails claiming he wasn’t showing up for work, but Moss had been at work — at the Guantanamo office, the inspector general found.

The inspector general also found that Margaret Peterlin, Tillerson’s chief of staff — who did not cooperate with the investigation — had exchanged emails about Moss with Kirstjen Nielsen, then the White House deputy chief of staff, among others, for unclear reasons.

But ultimately, Linick was unable to establish that Moss was given the FOIA role for improper reasons.

In a letter to the inspector general, Moss’ lawyer contended that his FOIA assignment had to be seen in the context of broader allegations of political retaliation by some of the same Trump appointees.

In a statement, Moss said the inspector general failed “to connect the obvious dots.”

“That it took almost two years to produce this report and then the transparent decision to delay its release until the middle of an epic news cycle, is telling,” Moss said.

The inspector general also found no evidence of improper actions in the case of another employee assigned to the FOIA office. But almost everything about that case was redacted because the staffer was facing threats. The inspector general, in a footnote, wrote that there were “specific, documented concerns regarding potential retaliation, including physical risk.”

During the early days of the Trump administration, such threats against career employees were not unusual , especially because conservative media outlets were publishing lists of such staffers who they claimed were disloyal to Trump because they’d served in government under President Barack Obama.

Career employees are sworn to implement the policies of the executive branch in a nonpartisan fashion; many serve for decades in government, offering continuity and expertise to political appointees who come and go depending on the administration in charge. There are federal rules that protect career staffers from political retaliation.

But the inspector general’s report suggests that many Trump appointees were unfamiliar with such rules and basics about career staffers. The political appointees were also especially sensitive to pressure from conservative media outlets. Articles published by those outlets were frequently traded among the political appointees as they sought to sideline career employees.

In two cases, the inspector general found himself unable to make a conclusion about whether the staffers were treated inappropriately. In large part, that was because Trump appointees declined interviews or offered evasive answers, Linick says in his report.

One of those cases has been well-reported in the past: that of Larry Bartlett, a senior State Department official who was pushed out of his job overseeing refugee programs.

Bartlett, who was given temporary assignments including in the FOIA office, drew the ire of Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the president who has tried to end the refugee program and reduce immigration to the U.S. in general. (In an odd twist, Bartlett eventually returned to his original role.)

The inspector general says his inability to make a conclusion in the Bartlett case is due in part to “evasive answers” from Christine Ciccone, a top aide to Tillerson who long resisted cooperating with the investigation. Ciccone disputes the characterization.

The fifth case involved a senior foreign service officer who was denied a deputy assistant secretary role and reassigned out of the State Department’s Middle East bureau.

Linick again finds the case inconclusive but notes that the employee didn’t contact his office about it. Rather, as the inspector general’s office perused other materials, including items related to Nowrouzzadeh’s case, they stumbled on his case and decided to investigate.

In March 2017, the employee drew the attention of Steve Bannon, the far-right provocateur who back then was serving as a chief strategist for Trump in the White House. “We r getting tremendous blowback on this guy. Is he permanent??” Bannon wrote to Peterlin.

The employee was also named in an emailed set of notes taken by Brian Hook, who at the time was Tillerson’s powerful head of the Policy Planning division.

Hook’s notes named a number of career government staffers who he said a then-staff member at the National Security Council had warned him about. The staffers were described in derogatory terms such as “troublemaker,” “leaker” and “turncoat.”

Hook is now Pompeo’s special envoy for Iran issues. The inspector general named him among those culpable in the mistreatment of Nowrouzzadeh.

According to the inspector general, Nowrouzzadeh’s detail to the Policy Planning section was cut short for reasons that included her ethnic background, her perceived political views and the fact that she was in government during prior administrations. She was the subject of numerous emails among Trump appointees, including Hook.

Linick acknowledges that his office “did not identify emails or other documents in which Mr. Hook suggested that he was personally motivated to end the detail because of [Nowrouzzadeh’s] perceived political opinions, perceived place of birth, or similar issues, and no witnesses made such statements.”

And Hook has put up a furious defense.

He has asserted, for instance, that he had other candidates in mind for Nowrouzzadeh’s role and that he had broad discretion in making the assignment. “My personnel decision was lawful, proper, and within the administrative standards for the Department of State,” he wrote in a rebuttal.

The inspector general devoted 3½ pages of his report to dismantling Hook’s assertions. For one thing, according to the inspector general, Hook first said he had one particular candidate in mind to replace Nowrouzzadeh. A year later, Hook said that actually he’d had another candidate in mind.

Hook also alleged that Nowrouzzadeh’s work performance was weak and that he did not see her as a “go-getter.” But Linick pointed out that Hook was her supervisor for only a month and a half and was traveling for “a large portion” of that time, and thus had little chance to observe her work.

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Furthermore, in her performance evaluations since 2015, Nowrouzzadeh “was consistently rated at the highest level, including in 2017 (when she worked under Mr. Hook),” the report noted.

Ultimately, Linick found that Hook essentially went along with pressure from other Trump appointees to push Nowrouzzadeh out based on unfair reasons. The inspector general added that he never found evidence Hook raised objections to others’ mischaracterizations of Nowrouzzadeh.

In a rare public statement , Nowrouzzadeh said she hoped that the report would “help prompt action that will guard against any further such misconduct by members of this or any future administration.”

The State Department’s leadership, however, appears unlikely to discipline Hook.

In a letter to the inspector general, T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, who serves as a counselor to Pompeo, said the secretary would “consider whether disciplinary action is appropriate” for Hook and other implicated employees who remain at the Department.

But Brechbuhl also insists that the department disagrees with Linick’s conclusions and defends Hook’s professionalism. He adds that the department is establishing a training course and other processes to help political appointees understand proper personnel practices.