The FBI is reportedly working two separate investigations linked to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but the Obama Justice Department is regularly throwing up roadblocks to impede the work.
On Wednesday, Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel reported several explosive revelations gleaned from two unnamed FBI sources. The report noted the twin investigations, that the FBI is vigorously pursuing a pay-to-play case involving the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, that experts believe Clinton’s private server was almost certainly hacked by as many as five foreign governments, and that indictments could be coming in the Clinton Foundation case as well as the renewed investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information.
But in closely following the reports at Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy sees two major takeaways.
“(It’s) the fact that the investigation into the Clinton Foundation is so far along and regarded as so serious within the walls of the FBI. Coupled with that, the fact that the Justice Department seems to have made it very difficult for the FBI to conduct that investigation,” said McCarthy, who led the federal prosecution of the World Trade Center bombers following the 1993 attack.
Some of the most frustrating information for McCarthy centers on the thwarted efforts of FBI special agents to procure emails and devices from top Clinton personnel such as Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.
“The agents were thwarted in the attempt to get access to these emails by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, which is in Brooklyn,” said McCarthy.
Why is that significant?
“The reason I think that’s so interesting is that the Eastern District of New York is the former U.S. Attorney’s office that was headed by Loretta Lynch before she was elevated to attorney general by President Obama,” said McCarthy.
“As someone who really doesn’t believe in coincidences, it’s very interesting that that investigation and that call ended up with prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, even though it’s not clear to me why the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office there would have venue over either the Clinton emails aspect of the investigation or the Clinton Foundation aspect of it,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy says top FBI officials actually stopped agents from bringing their evidence to a different federal prosecutor. And he says the man who made the call is already under a cloud of suspicion.
“Reporting indicates they were told no by FBI brass. In particular, the FBI official who refused to allow them to go, as he put it, ‘prosecutor shopping,’ was the top official whose wife received $675,000 in campaign cash and in-kind contributions from political action committees controlled by (Virginia Gov.) Terry McAuliffe, who of course is a longtime Clinton aide and actually was at one time a board member of the Clinton Foundation,” said McCarthy.
The contributions were for the failed Virginia State Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, wife of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
While the FBI continues to gather evidence in both cases, it can only take the matter so far. For any charges to be brought against anyone, McCarthy says the Justice Department will have to give its blessing.
“I think all of the U.S. Attorneys in the country have been appointed by President Obama. I don’t think anyone is going to haul off and indict the Clinton Foundation and anyone connected with the Clinton Foundation without getting a green light from the Justice Department,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy is also frustrated that latest bombshell in the classified information investigation didn’t come a long time ago. Specifically, he wants to know why the FBI didn’t already have Anthony Weiner’s laptop, by which agents have discovered some 650,000 emails that “may be pertinent” to the probe.
He says that blame belongs with the Justice Department as well.
“The Justice Department made it very difficult for the FBI to do the investigation, particularly by not using the grand jury. It’s by the grand jury’s power to compel evidence by subpoena that the FBI is usually able to get people to be cooperative,” said McCarthy.
He also says the FBI could easily get trigger-shy in pursuing evidence from a large numbers of lawyers with various levels of connection to the Clintons, especially with the Justice Department providing no assistance.
“The FBI’s always concerned, when you’re dealing with lawyers’ computers, that there could be attorney-client privilege and it’s a big hassle for them, so if it’s clear that the Justice Department is not supportive of the fact they’re trying to gather this evidence in the first place, there’s going to be a natural innervating kind of ethos that takes hold and dissuades people from doing things that are difficult, like trying to fight over whether they can examine the computers of lawyers,” said McCarthy.
