A front-page article in today’s Washington Post discusses the report the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued yesterday on the special favors that DHS political appointee Alejandro Mayorkas accorded to prominent Democrats, including Terry McAuliffe (now governor of Virginia), Anthony Rodham (brother of Hillary Clinton), Harry Reid, and Ed Rendell (former DNC chair).

The article asserts that the inspector general’s report “found no evidence of law-breaking.” But that assertion is mystifying.

As he states at the outset of his report, the inspector general defined the scope of his investigation narrowly: “to determine whether Mr. Mayorkas engaged in conduct that would lead a reasonable person to believe that specific individuals or groups were given special access or consideration in the EB-5 program.” (The EB-5 program enables foreign investors to obtain lawful permanent residency in the United States for themselves and their families “by making a certain level of capital investment and associated job creation or preservation.”) The report resoundingly concludes that Mayorkas did engage in such conduct.

Given the narrow question that the inspector general presented himself, the report refrains from offering any specific conclusion that Mayorkas broke the law. But contrary to what the Post article asserts, the report contains lots of evidence that he did so. As the report states, USCIS (the DHS entity) “was obligated by law to follow the procedures set forth in the regulations.” But:

In three matters pending before USCIS, however, Mr. Mayorkas communicated with stakeholders on substantive issues, outside of the normal adjudicatory process, and intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that benefited the stakeholders. In each of these three instances, but for Mr. Mayorkas’s intervention, the matter would have been decided differently.

How is it possible to understand Mayorkas’s politicization of the adjudicatory process as anything other than a violation of USCIS regulations?