From the moment the EmailGate scandal went public more than a year
ago, it was obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation never had
much enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton or her friends. Under
President Obama, the FBI grew so politicized that it became impossible
for the Bureau to do its job – at least where high-ranking Democrats are
concerned.
As
I observed in early July,
when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking
prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had
turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan
politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending
to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans,
regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a
healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets
tarnished by politics.
Just how much Comey and his Bureau punted on EmailGate has become painfully obvious since then. Redacted
FBI documents from that investigation,
dumped on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend,
revealed that Hillary Clinton either willfully lied to the Bureau,
repeatedly, about her email habits as secretary of state, or she is far
too dumb to be our commander-in-chief.
Worse, the FBI completely
ignored the appearance of highly classified signals intelligence in
Hillary’s email, including information
lifted verbatim from above-Top Secret NSA reports
back in 2011. This crime, representing the worst compromise of
classified information in EmailGate – that the public knows of, at least
– was somehow deemed so uninteresting that nobody at the FBI bothered
to ask anybody on Team Clinton about it.
This stunning omission appears highly curious to anybody versed in
counterintelligence matters, not least since during Obama’s presidency,
the FBI has prosecuted Americans for compromising information far less
classified than what Clinton and her staff exposed on Hillary
“unclassified” email server of bathroom infamy.
This
week, however, we learned that there is actually no mystery at all
here. The FBI was never able to get enough traction in its investigation
of EmailGate to prosecute anybody since the Bureau had already granted
immunity to key players in that scandal.
Granting immunity is a
standard practice in investigations, and is sometimes unavoidable.
Giving a pass to Bryan Pagliano, Hillary’s IT guru who set up her email
and server, made some sense since he understands what happened here,
technically speaking, and otherwise is a small fish. The wisdom of
giving him a pass now seems debatable, though, since Pagliano has twice
refused to testify before Congress about his part in EmailGate, blowing
off subpoenas. Just this week the House Oversight Committee
recommended
that Pagliano be cited for contempt of Congress for his repeated
no-shows. That vote was on strictly partisan lines, with not a single
Democrat on the committee finding Pagliano’s ignoring of Congressional
subpoenas to be worthy of censure.
Now it turns out the
FBI granted immunity to much bigger fish in the Clinton political tank.
Three more people got a pass from the Bureau in exchange for their
cooperation: Hillary lawyer Heather Samuelson, State Department IT boss
John Bental, and – by far the most consequential – Cheryl Mills, who has
been a Clinton flunky-cum-factotum for decades.
http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/
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