For two years, the president of the United States and his followers have loudly declared that the FBI acted unlawfully in conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Now the truth is out.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has shown us a third possible answer to the bureaucrat’s dilemma: Limit the damage Trump does while you’re in office, resign over policy disagreements when they get too wide – but refrain from overt, public condemnation of the commander in chief during or after your service.

The report released Thursday by the Justice Department inspector general on events leading up to the 2016 presidential election distributes blame across many quarters for improper conduct by the department and the FBI. Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found much to criticize in the actions of both the most senior officials – notably then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch – as well as line investigators working the criminal probe of Hillary Clinton. Horowitz blasted Comey for departing “clearly and dramatically” from FBI and department norms in Comey’s public announcements concerning the Clinton email probe. While Horowitz, importantly, found that Comey’s improprieties were not the result of political bias, he nevertheless concluded that “the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the Department as fair administrators of justice.”

That President Donald Trump knew about hush money paid to a porn star isn’t the only shocking thing his new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, acknowledged Wednesday. Giuliani also said that the reason Trump fired James Comey as FBI director was essentially because Comey wouldn’t do his bidding in the Russia investigation. “He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.