Committee chairs issue just a letter rather than final report after inquiry that was condemned as ploy to undermine Robert Mueller

Republicans have quietly and unceremoniously ended their congressional investigation of whether the FBI and Justice Department were biased in their handling of inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

House judiciary chairman Robert Goodlatte and oversight chairman Trey Gowdy, who are retiring next week, sent a letter rather than a full report to the Justice Department and the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. It wraps up an inquiry that was conducted mostly behind closed doors but also in public as Republican lawmakers often criticised interview subjects later and suggested they were conspiring against Trump.

Democrats have blasted the GOP-led congressional inquiry, saying it was merely meant as a distraction from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Its termination comes less than a week before Republicans cede the House majority to Democrats.

Mueller closes in: what will the Trump-Russia inquiry deliver in 2019? Read more

Goodlatte and Gowdy say in their letter that they reviewed thousands of documents and conducted interviews that “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns”. They call on the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate further. A separate report issued this year by the Justice Department’s own internal watchdog found there was no evidence that the then FBI chief James Comey or the department were motivated by political bias toward either candidate.

Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, and Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the oversight panel, are expected to formally end the investigation when they take power in January. Nadler has called it “nonsense”.

California’s Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said on Friday evening that the Republican investigation was ending “not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door”.

With Associated Press