But it lands at a particularly sensitive moment: Trump faces an impeachment inquiry whose elements involve the mistreatment of career diplomats, in particular those dealing with Ukraine. On Wednesday, two senior State Department officials testified in the first public hearing of the House's impeachment inquiry about the "irregular" foreign policy channel to Kyiv led by the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Friday, former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch is due to testify; her sudden recall last spring has angered many State Department diplomats, who feel Pompeo should have backed her in the face of a smear campaign orchestrated by Giuliani.

POLITICO was able to obtain the executive summary of the inspector general's report and several additional pages on Wednesday.

The report focuses largely on events in 2017, under former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and covers five distinct cases of individuals alleged to have been subject to unfair personnel decisions due to "politicized and other improper" practices.

According to the executive summary, in two cases, the inspector general said he found "no evidence that impermissible factors influenced the personnel decisions." In the other two cases, the inspector general said the findings were inconclusive because he was unable to obtain the necessary information from key players.

The report was fueled in large part by Democrats’ demands after a whistleblower shared with Congress emails in which Trump political appointees and outside conservative figures appeared to plot to sideline Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a career civil servant of Iranian descent.

Nowrouzzadeh, a U.S.-born staffer who joined government during the George W. Bush administration, was abruptly taken out of the Policy Planning division of the State Department in the wake of these conversations. One of the officials involved in curtailing her detail was Brian Hook, who led the Policy Planning division at the time and is now a top Iran aide to Pompeo. Policy Planning is a sort of in-house think tank at the department.

Career government staffers like Nowrouzzadeh are sworn to serve the public in a non-partisan manner, no matter which party controls the executive branch. But the Trump team took office suspicious of the career staffers, with some believing they comprised a “deep state” disloyal to Trump. The suspicions were especially pronounced at the State Department, which many Trump aides view as a Democratic stronghold.

Under Tillerson, career staffers found themselves locked out of policymaking; many were vilified by name in the conservative media, which referred to them as “Obama holdovers,” even though some had been in government for decades.

Nowrouzzadeh had worked on the Iran nuclear deal under former President Barack Obama. In early 2017, she was the target of several articles on conservative websites that claimed she'd "burrowed" into the Trump administration and questioned whether she was an agent of Iran's Islamist regime.

As POLITICO has previously reported and as the inspector general documented, the articles were shared by several Trump administration political appointees as well as some career staffers.

Amid the many email exchanges, including some that included Hook, the various officials questioned whether they could remove Nowrouzzadeh from Policy Planning, where she dealt with Middle East issues.

One official, Julia Haller, claimed falsely in an email that Nowrouzzadeh was born in Iran; she also alleged that Nowrouzzadeh had cried when Trump won the presidency.

Haller, who later joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development, told the inspector general's office that she made the comment about Nowrouzzadeh's national origin because she thought it could raise conflict of interest questions and that it might make her ineligible for a security clearance.

Haller said she'd likely heard the claim about Nowrouzzadeh's reaction to Trump's election via office gossip, but that she shared the information because it raised questions about Nowrouzzadeh's "loyalty to the United States."

Nowrouzzadeh has long had a security clearance and is widely respected among U.S. foreign policy professionals in Washington.

As the emails about her were being exchanged, and the conservative media outlets going after her, Nowrouzzadeh reached out to Hook, her supervisor, to ask for help. She told him she was worried about her safety, that the media accounts about her were incorrect, and that she always adapted her work to the policy priorities of whichever administration was in charge.

Hook did not respond to her at the time, the inspector general's report says. Later on, he met with her, but, according to her account, he said "virtually nothing" in response to her concerns.

Hook later told the inspector general's office that he agreed when pushed by others to cut short Nowrouzzadeh's one-year detail to the Policy Planning office because he was about to hire another person for her slot, and because he considered himself an expert on Iran. Hook also said he didn't consider Nowrouzzadeh a "go-getter."

An aide to Hook, Edward Lacey, told Nowrouzzadeh in April 2017 that her detail was ending immediately, three months early. Lacey said Hook was about to bring in his "own Iran person" as early as the next week. That person, Matthew McInnis, didn't start till September 2017.

After being pushed out of Policy Planning, Nowrouzzadeh went on a fellowship at Harvard University and is also in a doctoral program at Boston University. With permission from the State Department, which technically still employs her, she has in recent years written articles defending the Iran nuclear deal, including one Foreign Affairs essay titled "Trump's Dangerous Shift on Iran." Trump quit the deal in spring 2018.

The inspector general’s report is the second of two on the topic of political retaliation against career staff at the State Department. The first, released in August, found that political appointees in State’s international organizations bureau engaged in political retaliation against career staffers, especially in 2018.

That report led to some controversy because Pompeo did not fire Kevin Moley, the assistant secretary who ran that bureau; his aides claimed the secretary couldn't fire Moley because he was in a Senate-confirmed position. Moley has announced he will retire later this year, but U.S. diplomats have been livid that Pompeo didn't do more in that case.

Many suspect that Pompeo will also do little to react to the latest report, not least because the findings are mixed. Several of the officials mentioned in the report no longer work at State, so there's little Pompeo can do in their cases. However, Hook remains at his side, and State Department employees will be watching to see if Pompeo takes the inspector general's advice and disciplines him.

Because of the impeachment proceeding's revelations and the earlier inspector general's report, morale is unusually low at the State Department, according to numerous diplomats who have spoken to POLITICO.

Pompeo, however, has downplayed such accounts. In an interview released Wednesday, he called it “more Washington insidery stuff, a long history of the press reporting about unhappiness at the State Department, and especially, frankly, in Republican administrations.”

A separate investigation on the issue of political retaliation at the State Department is still underway by the Office of Special Counsel, another federal watchdog.

The inspector general's report says it is based on a review of thousands of emails sent and received by aides to the secretary of state, as well as other relevant documents. More than 20 people were interviewed. Elements of the inspector general's findings were first reported by The Daily Beast in September.

The State Department did not immediately offer comment on Wednesday.

Abbey Marshall contributed.