James Comey’s Clinton Immunity

T

Tom B

James Comey’s Clinton Immunity
More questions about the FBI’s special handling of the email case.

Sept. 27, 2016 6:58 p.m. ET

FBI Director James Comey appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where he’ll get another chance to explain his agency’s double standard regarding Hillary Clinton. His probe of the former Secretary of State’s private email server is looking more like a kid-glove exercise with each new revelation.

House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Friday disclosed that the FBI granted immunity to Mrs. Clinton’s top aides as part of its probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information. According to Mr. Chaffetz, this “limited” immunity was extended to former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and senior adviser Heather Samuelson, in order to get them to surrender their laptops, which they’d used to sort through Mrs. Clinton’s work-versus-personal emails.

Why the courtesy? “If the FBI wanted any other Americans’ laptops, they would just go get them—they wouldn’t get an immunity deal,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told Politico. He’s right. The FBI merely had to seek a subpoena or search warrant. By offering immunity, the FBI exempted the laptops and their emails as potential evidence in a criminal case.

Beth Wilkinson, who represents Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, says the immunity deals were designed to protect her clients against any related “classification” disputes. This is an admission that both women knew their unsecure laptops had been holding sensitive information for more than a year. Meanwhile, Mr. Comey also allowed Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to serve as lawyers for Mrs. Clinton at her FBI interview—despite having been interviewed as witnesses and offered immunity.

The FBI also offered immunity to John Bentel, who directed the State Department’s Office of Information Resources Management; to Bryan Pagliano, Mrs. Clinton’s IT guru; and to an employee of Platte River Networks (PRN), which housed the Clinton server. Usually, the FBI only “proffers” immunity deals in return for genuine information. In this case the FBI seemed not to make any such demands. The deals also did not include—as they often do—requirements that the recipients cooperate with other investigating bodies, such as Congress.

Meantime, the FBI waited until late Friday to dump another 189 pages of documents from its investigation, including notes from interviews with Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, Mr. Pagliano, Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, and Platte River Network employees. They raise even more questions.

Was the FBI concerned that Ms. Mills in the fall of 2013 (after Congress began investigating the Benghazi attacks) called Mr. Pagliano to ask about software that could be used for “wiping computer data”? Or that a Platte River Networks employee, after getting instructions from Ms. Mills to begin deleting Clinton emails more than 60 days old, entitled the resulting work ticket the “Hillary coverup operation”? Or that a PRN employee was instructed by the company’s lawyer “not to answer any [FBI] questions related to conversations with” David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer?

The FBI documents also disclose that Mr. Pagliano admitted to having, at the beginning of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, several conversations with unnamed State Department official(s) who expressed concern that her private server posed “a federal records retention issue,” and that it was likely transmitting classified information. When Mr. Pagliano relayed these concerns to Ms. Mills, she ignored them.

We’d also love to hear what the FBI made of the news that Mrs. Clinton maintained a Gmail account. The Democratic presidential nominee has never disclosed this detail. Speaking of revealing, President Obama has publicly said he found out about Mrs. Clinton’s server through “news reports.” Yet the FBI notes reveal that he emailed Mrs. Clinton on her private server under a pseudonym. Ms. Abedin told the FBI that the White House was notified when Mrs. Clinton changed her email address so the President’s secure server wouldn’t exclude her emails. Was Mr. Obama fibbing too?

These columns have long opposed the appointment of special prosecutors, but that depends on the ability of established legal officers to do their jobs without political favor. Mr. Comey’s handling of the Clinton case understandably makes Americans wonder if their government can be trusted to perform this duty. On the evidence of the FBI’s special treat for Mrs. Clinton and her aides, they are right to wonder.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comeys-clinton-immunity-1475017121
 
Devastating article.

Lester Holt was more concerned with what trump said 20 year ago in a dispute with an overweight Miss Universe. Now that's important. Or the birther issue.

Comey basically conducted what we suspected all along would happen, a fake investigation designed to shield wrongdoers from any possible consequences and give Hillary the ability to say she was exonerated. Comey has managed to tarnish the FBI's last remaining shreds of credibility. Republicans should demand his resignation but of course the cuck republicans fell all over themselves saying how ethical and independent he was. Morons.
 
Nothing James Comey Says About The Hillary Clinton Investigation Makes Any Sense
By protecting her inner circle, the Department of Justice gave Hillary immunity.

Rather than striking immunity deals with virtually every person who had intimate knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server and emails, the Justice Department would have saved everyone some time by offering Hillary protection instead.

FBI Director James Comey, who testified in front of two congressional committees this week, still maintains he was unable to recommend that the Justice Department charge Clinton with mishandling classified documents because of insufficient evidence proving “intent” — although the actions themselves are irrefutably illegal.

Well, how exactly did he anticipate gathering this proof when the Justice Department had proactively shielded the five people tasked with setting up the private system and then destroying it? Was he hoping to extract a confession directly from Hillary?

Why would, for instance, a Clinton functionary like Cheryl Mills help prosecutors once she’d already secured safeguards against any criminal prosecution? While testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Comey claimed Mills was already “cooperative” and the Justice Department had assured the FBI she had done nothing wrong. Hence the deal.

If she was accommodating and completely innocent, why would she seek, and be given, immunity? A lawyer for Mills and Heather Samuelson had already admitted the deal was struck to protect her clients from potential prosecution arising from “classification” on their laptops. Apparently, the Justice Department was more convinced of their innocence than their lawyer was.

In the FBI’s summary statement, Mills alleged she didn’t know about Hillary’s email server until after the secretary of State’s tenure was over. Emails since uncovered, however, show this to be untrue. Remember also that President Obama claimed he first learned about Clinton’s illegal server through “news reports?” If that’s true, why did he email Clinton on her private server under a pseudonym?

Comey admitted Wednesday that one of Hillary’s lawyers — “it might have been Cheryl Mills” — told Paul Combetta to delete e-mail files from Clinton’s secret server only days after Congress ordered them to be preserved. The FBI director assures us that none of this is obstruction of justice. (Rep. Darrell Issa, incidentally, also revealed that one of the deals — he did not mention which — included immunity, not only for a transaction, but for “destruction” of material.)

Then, at another point, Comey told the committee that the Justice Department agreed to immunity because the FBI didn’t feel like wrangling with lawyers for years. “The FBI judgment was we need to get to that laptop. We need to see what it is,” he explained. “This investigation’s been going on for a year.” So I guess Mills was less than cooperative, yes?

And why is Comey, who doesn’t “give a hoot about politics,” concerned about timetables rather than making the best case? If the laptop was important enough to hasten a deal that protected a potential witness from prosecution, why wasn’t it important enough for the FBI to subpoena? If Mills’ lawyer is worried about potential criminality, why take a plea bargain off the table? Is this how it works for everyone?

It was rather amazing to hear Comey concede that the Justice Department’s immunity spree was “unusual.” More unusual, perhaps, was that three of the people with those deals still ended up taking the Fifth, and another didn’t even bother showing up when Congress called him. It’s also unusual that a high-profile case featuring numerous immunity deals resulted in no charges.

It was also “very unusual,” according to Comey, that the FBI would conduct an interview with the target of an investigation — where wholly innocent Hillary Clinton was surrounded by nine lawyers — with two of the immunized witnesses in the case present. That’s something Comey admitted had never happened in his career.

As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and who first defended the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary, recently put it:

Of all of the individuals who would warrant immunity, most would view Mills as the very last on any list. If one assumes that there may have been criminal conduct, it is equivalent to immunizing H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman in the investigation of Watergate.
Comey claimed it was not his purview to decide who people use as their lawyers. That is true. What he failed to mention was that he determined the parameters of the interview. He could have pressured Clinton to leave Mills home by impelling the target of the investigation to appear rather than allowing it to be voluntary interview. In a deposition about the email scandal, Mills claimed client-attorney privilege, though she wasn’t Hillary’s lawyer but chief of staff during her tenure at the State Debarment.

Comey attempted to distance himself from the immunity deals by pointing out that he had not personally struck them. “It’s a decision made by the Department of Justice, I don’t know at what level inside,” Comey said in House panel. “In our investigations, any kind of immunity comes from the prosecutors, not the investigators.”

Surely the Justice Department doesn’t offer witnesses protection from prosecution in high-profile cases without asking FBI investigators. If they did, then it would suggest a politicized process — something this case reeks of already.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/28...says-about-hillary-investigation-makes-sense/
 
Great article.

Not trying to reduce it to a sentence but Comey is giving Hillary Clinton cover and it is really shameful but then the FBI has become a circus hasn't it?

I remember them accusing the wrong guy of bombing the Olympics in Atlanta then accusing the wrong guy of sending anthrax in the mail after 9/11. Their mistakes and buffoonery ruin and destroy lives but they are unaccountable.

The first thing Trump should do as President is to fire this political hack and put a Law Enforcement type in charge of the FBI.
 
comey needs to go to jail with mills and the justice department and hillary.

I don't know what is more sickening.
this or the internet give away

That the republicans don't stop this...
 
This thing reeks. Any first year law student knows you don't give immunity deals without a proffer of testimony. You don't need to bribe people to turn over their computers, particularly when there is a national security element involved. Ever hear of the Patriot Act?

Either the investigation was the most incompetent ever conducted or there was a coverup, aided and abetted by the Justice Department. President Trump should get AG Chris Christie to unravel it and send people to jail. Immunity deals are invalidated by subsequent lying or failure to cooperate, which seems obvious here.
 
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