The New York office immediately advised Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, that many classified documents were among them. The Clinton case would have to be reexamined. Instead of taking prompt action to reopen the case based on the new evidence, the Washington headquarters of the FBI ignored it entirely and did nothing. In his self-serving book The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, McCabe said he assumed that others in the Bureau’s counterintelligence unit would take control of the laptop and examine the emails.85 Right. In his subsequent report, the inspector general seemed baffled as to why no immediate action had been taken. Under questioning, agents and officials offered both conflicting and nonsensical explanations. It appears that senior leadership tried to bury the problem, hoping it would somehow disappear. A month later, and only under repeated pressure from the New York office, Comey belatedly and reluctantly reopened the Clinton investigation.86
The IG concluded that Strzok and others at FBI headquarters no longer cared about the Clinton case they’d dismissed because pursuing Trump was their main priority.87 Having been forced to reopen the investigation of Clinton’s emails, Comey moved at breakneck speed to close it. Naturally, Strzok was the point man. He cut off all contact with the New York FBI and took control.
According to an in-depth investigation by journalist Paul Sperry, the FBI never actually examined the vast majority of the emails found on Weiner’s laptop.88 This despite the assurance Comey gave in writing to Congress that the Bureau had “reviewed all of the communications.”89 That was untrue. Sperry found that “Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.”90 Among those, classified documents were discovered. Once again, Comey and Strzok shuttered the case against Clinton, nine days after reopening it. The director claimed that no new evidence had emerged. In truth, Comey could not possibly have known that because only a fraction of the newly discovered material had been studied. Abedin, of course, was never charged.
It was fatuous for Strzok to adamantly deny bias in the face of such graphic and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In the conclusion of his five-hundred-page report, the inspector general stated that the Strzok-Page communications “are not only indicative of a biased state of mind but imply a willingness to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral process.”91 Although Horowitz said he could find no direct or testimonial evidence that such pervasively severe bias had affected investigation decisions, that seems to have been a deflection of responsibility. No one puts into writing a smoking-gun admission such as “Let’s clear Clinton for political reasons even though she committed crimes” or “We should contrive a false case against Trump to influence voters.” The proof was self-evident.
The Botched Clinton Investigation
The totality of evidence and the disparate handling of the Clinton and Trump cases provides more than sufficient evidence that unconstrained bias drove Comey and his cadre of aides to treat Clinton with extraordinary deference but to target Trump with a vengeance. Consider the titles they chose for their respective probes. Clinton’s was innocuously called “Midyear Exam.” Trump’s was labeled with the ominous-sounding “Crossfire Hurricane.”92 One outcome was predetermined; the other was preconceived.
Other notable departures from normal procedures served up glaring red flags of selective prosecution and unequal justice. Five people close to Clinton were given immunity agreements in exchange for nothing of any value. They seemed to have been given a free pass from any legal jeopardy for crimes that some, if not all, of them certainly appeared to have committed.93 In return, those individuals provided no incriminating evidence that resulted in anyone else being prosecuted, which is the customary practice when granting immunity.
Two of the immunized fact witnesses, Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and senior adviser, Heather Samuelson, were even allowed to accompany Clinton during her remarkably brief July 2, 2016, interview with the FBI. That was not only irregular but highly improper, unethical, and probably illegal.94 Clinton’s interview lasted all of three and a half hours, during which time the former secretary of state replied, “I do not recall” or “I don’t remember” some thirty-nine times.95 She was not placed under oath and was cleared by Comey three days later, solidifying the charade. Strzok participated in the softball questioning.
Juxtapose with that the treatment of Trump associates. Several were prosecuted for relatively minor “process crimes.” Instead of immunity deals, they were threatened with prison unless they said something incriminating about Trump. Teams of FBI agents swarmed their homes with guns drawn, seized their property, arrested them on the spot, and charged them with making false statements. Some were charged with more serious offenses unrelated to Trump or his campaign.
Clinton associates who were suspected of lying were treated with favor. Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, two of Clinton’s closest advisers, told FBI agents that they had never known their boss was using a private, unsecured server until after she had left office.96 That was demonstrably untrue. Emails show that they certainly knew and even discussed her unauthorized computer system at the time it was in use.97 Justin Cooper, Clinton’s technology expert who set up her secret server, testified that Abedin had approached him to do the work and helped him create the system.98 Additionally, in her FBI interview, Abedin denied knowing anything about hacking attempts on her boss’s server.99 Yet emails show her reacting with alarm when Cooper informed her of such attempts, writing the response “omg” (shorthand for “Oh, my God!”).100 Without a doubt, Abedin knew about the multiple hacking efforts; there were simply too many emails that belied her claims. Her statements to the FBI were untrue. She had also “dawdled” for twelve hours before notifying Mills and other staff members not to use the compromised server for sensitive communications.101 Naturally, neither Abedin nor Mills was ever charged with making materially false statements, unlike Trump associates.
Federal judge Royce C. Lamberth, presiding over a lawsuit involving Clinton’s server, offered this scathing critique of Mills:
I was actually dumbfounded when I found out, in reading the I-G report, that Cheryl Mills had been given immunity because . . . I had myself found that Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity by the Justice Department.102
In a different email case involving Mills, Judge Lamberth described her conduct as “loathsome.”103
Why were no charges brought against Abedin, Mills, and three other Clinton aides who appear to have committed crimes? When asked that question by Congress, Comey chalked it up to failed recollections that should be forgiven.104 No one ever extended such benefit of the doubt or forgiveness to a Trump associate. Indeed, it appears that the FBI elected to help those close to HRC by “agreeing to destroy records and laptops of Clinton associates after reviewing them.”105 Since when does the FBI engage in the business of destroying evidence in a case that was subject to review by the Justice Department and was, at the same time, being investigated by Congress? In essence, the Bureau became an active participant in a conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruct Congress. All of that happened under the toxic stewardship of James Comey.
It can be no coincidence that it was the very same small set of agents and officials that investigated both the Clinton and Trump cases. The normal practice of having field offices handle the probes was subverted. FBI headquarters, under Comey’s direction, commandeered all of the investigations. Was that because he knew that most of the FBI was incorruptible—that the vast majority of agents were good and honorable people who would have processed the cases impartially and without favor?
Had field office agents been given the chance to gather the evidence and interview the witnesses in the Clinton case, she would surely have been referred for criminal prosecution, given the abundance of evidence. Co
nversely, given the paucity of credible evidence that Trump or anyone in his orbit had “colluded” with Russia, it is likely that any preliminary investigation by a field office would have crumbled and vanished for lack of probable cause or, as FBI regulations require, an “articulable factual basis for the investigation.”106 Regular agents would never have launched a formal investigation in search of a crime, reversing and bastardizing the legal process.
In exonerating Clinton, the FBI abandoned traditional investigative practices and misconstrued the law. FBI general counsel James Baker, the Bureau’s top lawyer who worked closely with Comey, admitted during his closed-door testimony before House investigators that he had originally believed that Clinton should have been criminally charged. Rather than adhering to his legally correct conviction, he allowed Comey’s confederates to talk him out of it when they argued erroneously that Clinton had not had the “intent necessary to violate [the law].”107
Baker likely knew that “intent” was not required. Still, he eventually relented under pressure “pretty late in the process, because we were arguing about it, I think, up until the end.”108 He acquiesced even though it appears that he was convinced that Clinton had broken the law by repeatedly mishandling classified documents. “I thought that it was alarming, appalling, whatever words I said, and argued with others about why they thought she shouldn’t be charged,” he recounted.109
Baker’s legal instincts were correct. But the fix was in. Comey and others were hell bent on clearing Clinton. Joseph diGenova, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia who also served as an independent counsel, called it a fake criminal investigation of Clinton:
This story is about a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony. [The FBI] followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, with no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrants. That’s not an investigation. That’s a Potemkin village. It’s a farce.110
DiGenova’s reference to Clinton’s destruction of documents is another aspect of how the FBI ignored or overlooked criminal behavior that would have subjected anyone else, especially Trump associates, to a charge of obstruction of justice. Under the Federal Records Act and the Foreign Affairs Manual, all of Clinton’s emails were required to be captured and preserved by the State Department.111 While serving as secretary of state, Clinton refused to comply. Those records were not her personal property. Every single one of her work-related emails was owned by the US government as an official federal record.112 In fundamental terms, Clinton was stealing government documents. Converting such records for personal use is a felony under 18 U.S.C. § 641.113 It’s called theft.
More than a year after she left office, Congress learned that Clinton’s State Department email account was empty. Only under legal pressure did she relent and return some, but not all, of her emails to the department over which she had once presided. Tens of thousands of her emails were destroyed while her server was wiped clean by using file-deleting software.114 Although Clinton claimed that only personal emails had been made to disappear, the FBI discovered that that was not true. Thousands of relevant work documents were never turned over and had been destroyed. Her mobile devices had been broken in half or demolished with hammers. A special computer program called “BleachBit” was used to wipe clean any trace of the deleted files.115 All of that violated another statute making it unlawful to willfully destroy government documents, 18 U.S.C. § 2071(b).116
Clinton had been instructed by Congress to preserve all of her documents.117 In response, she promised to cooperate fully in its demand to protect and produce the records. A follow-up subpoena was sent to her lawyers. By her own admission, she directed that all of her emails be deleted. Her lawyer, David Kendall, sent a letter to Congress confirming that both personal and business emails had been removed from his client’s server and backup systems.118
Destroying documents under those circumstances creates a convincing case of obstruction of justice, which makes it a crime to act “corruptly” by “withholding, concealing, altering, or destroying a document or other information” in a congressional investigation.119 There is no evidence to indicate that the FBI ever seriously considered charging Clinton on that basis. In his book, McCabe described how the FBI spent many months, significant manpower, and untold taxpayer money attempting to recover or reconstruct the emails that Clinton willfully destroyed.120 That recovery effort underscores the importance of such documents to both the congressional and FBI investigations. Yet McCabe never bothered to mention that that deliberate destruction of evidence almost surely constituted obstruction of justice. Had Trump destroyed emails and documents, he would have been accused of obstruction in an instant.
Nor did the Bureau contemplate bringing a criminal case against Clinton for conveying classified documents to people who did not have security clearance to receive them. Comey was asked during a House Oversight Committee hearing, “Did Hillary Clinton give non-cleared people access to classified information?” The director’s response was unequivocal, “Yes, yes.”121 Clinton gave “up to ten people” access to classified information, according to Comey.122 None of them was permitted under law to have such protected materials, and therefore it is a criminal act for those classified materials to have been conveyed to them. It is confounding and inexplicable that Clinton was never charged for such a blatant violation of the law.
Three years after Clinton and others were absolved by Comey, the US State Department was forced to divulge that there had been, at minimum, thirty separate security breaches of Clinton’s unauthorized email system.123 In a letter to Senator Charles Grassley, the department “assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents. DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions.”124 Another trove of documents released by the FBI revealed that “Clinton aides were shocked at apparent attempts to hack her private email servers.”125 Some hacks were successful. Chinese intelligence reportedly gained access to Clinton’s server housing classified documents and “inserted code that forwarded them a copy of virtually every email she sent or received” in real time.126 That was discovered in 2015 by the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG), who immediately drove over to the FBI Building in Washington to alert the FBI. Peter Strzok was the agent who was warned by the ICIG.127 Yet Strzok was an instrumental part of the FBI team that cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing the next year.
Consider what such a foreign intrusion meant. On a daily basis, our adversaries in Beijing were reading the United States’ national security secrets, courtesy of Clinton. If the Chinese could so easily hack the secretary of state’s unprotected system housed in her home, so could the Russians and many other enemy states. As noted earlier, the infamous hacker known as “Guccifer” was using a Russian server to penetrate Clinton’s system, which means that Moscow’s intelligence agents obtained everything he stole. During the secretary of state’s tenure, it is fair to assume that the United States had no national security secrets. So much for Obama’s claim that Clinton never jeopardized national security. Few people believed it at the time, although the FBI attempted to peddle the myth as part of its excuse for not prosecuting Clinton.
By contrast, the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller pursued with seeming vengeance many of the people connected, however tangentially, to Trump. Cases of false statements of the type that had been overlooked in the Clinton case were brought with intense vigor during the Trump investigation. Selective prosecution and unequal justice became the hallmarks of how both investigations were handled. It wasn’t just Comey who allowed personal animus and political bias to infect those cases. Representative Doug Collins, who released to the public many of the private interview transcripts, referred to what he called a “corrupt triumvirate of Page, McCabe and Strzok.”128 But it was the self-imagined “superagent” Strzok who seemed to drive the mal
ignant force that animated corrupt acts within the FBI, according to Collins:
Peter Strzok was a man who thought he was untouchable. He became a hero in his mind’s eye in thinking that he was going to be able to control and sometimes maybe showing off for his mistress at the time, Lisa Page. . . .
Peter Strzok was central, going back to the [Clinton] e-mail investigation, into the Russia investigation, into what became the Mueller investigation. . . .
The transcripts reveal the bias.129
The extramarital affair between Strzok and Page was a microcosm of the FBI dysfunction that was endemic in the upper echelons of the agency. As insipid as their pro-Clinton and anti-Trump text messages were, they illustrate how pervasive bias contaminated both the Clinton and Trump investigations. Strzok, Page, and others considered themselves above the law because they were the law. They could do as they pleased, even violate rules and regulations that warned against such intimate personal relationships because it could make them “susceptible or vulnerable to recruitment” or blackmail by a foreign adversary.130 At one point, Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the counterintelligence division, confronted them and warned that their relationship could compromise both them and the Bureau by creating a dangerous security risk.131 Unbelievably, Priestap did nothing to stop it because, he told Congress, “I’m not the morality police.”132 The FBI didn’t care that their conduct might jeopardize an important and sensitive counterintelligence case.
Instead of removing or demoting them from the case, they were promoted. After leading the FBI’s “collusion” investigation of Trump during the ten months before Mueller was appointed special counsel, Strzok was elevated to the newly commissioned probe in the role of lead investigator there, as well. Page was rewarded with an assignment to the special counsel team. Strzok told the House Judiciary Committee that he had carried over all of the information he had gathered while at the FBI.133 To the extent that the first probe was tainted by his anti-Trump prejudices, that taint was then incorporated into the second probe, infecting it with the same bias.
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