The FBI’s Clinton Probe Gets Curiouser New evidence of a conflict of interest and a double standard.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-clinton-probe-gets-curiouser-1477352522
Hillary Clinton may win the election in two weeks, but the manner of her victory will bedevil her in the White House. Specifically, evidence keeps turning up suggesting that the FBI probe into her emails was influenced by political favoritism and double standards.
The latest news is the Journal’s report Monday that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Hillary and Bill, steered money to the campaign of the wife of a top FBI official. Political organizations under Mr. McAuliffe’s control gave more than $675,000 to the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe, director James Comey’s right-hand man, helped oversee the probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information on her server.
Some $467,500 of the money came directly from Mr. McAuliffe’s political action committee, Common Good VA, while $207,788 came from the Virginia Democratic Party, which the Governor essentially controls. The funds amounted to more than one-third of all the money Mrs. McCabe raised.
Mrs. McCabe announced her candidacy the same month (March 2015) as the news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington field office at the time, and he was promoted to the No. 3 FBI slot not long after the formal FBI investigation began in July 2015.
The FBI said in a statement that none of this is an issue because Mr. McCabe wasn’t promoted to the No. 2 position until February 2016, months after his wife lost her race, and only then did he assume “for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”
All of this asks voters to believe that Mr. McCabe as the No. 3 official at the FBI had nothing to do with the biggest, most sensitive case at that agency. This strains credulity. Before he became No. 3 at the FBI Mr. McCabe ran the bureau’s Washington, D.C. field office that provided resources to the Clinton probe. Campaign-finance records show that 98% of the McAuliffe donations to Mrs. McCabe came after the FBI launched its Clinton probe.
Director Comey, the self-styled Boy Scout, somehow didn’t think any of this would look suspicious? Add this to the list of special treatment for Mrs. Clinton: no grand jury, grants of immunity to her aides, no interview until the last minute, a special exonerating public declaration, and a pre-Labor Day dump of damaging FBI notes.
The contrast couldn’t be greater with the FBI and Justice Department determination to convict retired Gen. James Cartwright—former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—of a felony for lying to the FBI. The general told a federal court last week he regretted he didn’t tell the bureau the truth about conversations he’d had with reporters about a secret cyberattack disrupting Iran’s nuclear program. He could serve up five years in prison.
“People who gain access to classified information after promising not to disclose it must be held accountable when they willfully violate that promise,” said U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein in a press release.
“We conducted a thorough and independent investigation included [sic] collecting tens of thousands of documents through subpoenas, search warrants and document requests, and interviewing scores of current and former government employees. The evidence showed that General Cartwright disclosed classified information without authorization to two reporters and lied to federal investigators. As a result, he stands convicted of a federal felony offense and faces a potential prison sentence.”
This is comical coming from the same folks who gave away immunity deals like candy in their probe of Mrs. Clinton. Gen. Cartwright wasn’t even the original source of the Iran leaks. The general says he confirmed details the reporters already had in an effort to prevent them from publishing information that could harm America’s national security.
Though Mrs. Clinton didn’t leak to reporters, her personal server exposed national secrets to potential hackers, and she gave a number of people (including some of her attorneys) without proper clearances access to that information. When Gen. Cartwright became the subject of an investigation, he was stripped of his security clearance—which never happened to Mrs. Clinton.
Maybe the general should have run for the Democratic nomination. Enough red flags have been raised about the McCabe-Comey investigation of Mrs. Clinton that it deserves to be the subject of an investigation by Congress. Let’s get some of the FBI agents under oath and see what they think of the Comey procedures. If it’s all on the up and up, they have nothing to fear from public transparency.
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