Bombshell: DOJ Shaped FBI's Hillary Investigation, Walled Off Some Crimes from Prosecution: Epoch Times Exclusive Report
The 2016 election may be long behind us, but Hillary Clinton is still being haunted by the scandal that rocked her candidacy: “Emailgate.”
Conservatives have long suspected that the FBI, led by then-Director James Comey, gave Clinton preferential treatment after she was found to be using an unsecured private server for sensitive messages, putting national security at risk.
Those fears were only confirmed after numerous top officials were revealed to strongly oppose Donald Trump, possibly colluding to keep him out of the White House.
But a bombshell new report from The Epoch Times, a New York-based news outlet, is shedding new light on the scandal. An exclusive exposé claims that it wasn’t just the FBI that tried to protect the Democratic candidate.
In an eye-opening move, the Obama-era Department of Justice apparently told the Bureau that it wouldn’t prosecute Clinton, even before all the facts had emerged.
“The Justice Department (DOJ), under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, decided to set an unusually high threshold for prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged,” Epoch Times explained, citing congressional testimony that it said had previously not been publicized.
“In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent—even though the gross negligence statute explicitly does not require this,” the report continued.
That last part is very important. Basically, there is a statute of the law that makes it a serious crime for an official like Clinton to act as she did when she should have known better.
As Epoch Times pointed out, nowhere in that statute does it say that “intent” must be present for a crime to exist — and indeed, the entire point of this law is that it applies even if a person was acting recklessly. After all, that’s the definition of negligence.
“Intent is a requirement of several statutes the FBI was looking into. But intent is specifically not a factor under the charge of gross negligence — contained within 18 U.S. Code § 793(f),” Epoch Times explained.
Suspiciously, Comey seemed to whitewash Clinton’s negligence on her handling of the email server, even though nearly everyone involved in the investigation knew she had blundered.
“Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term ‘gross negligence’ to describe Clinton’s actions from his prepared statement by, among others, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, FBI agent Peter Strzok, senior legal counsel Trisha Anderson, and FBI analyst Jonathan Moffa,” the report explained.
Many of those names are connected to a wider scandal, in which there is strong evidence that FBI and DOJ officials actively worried about Trump taking the White House and may have schemed to undermine him.
As reported by the Epoch Times, Page’s July 2018 testimony before Congress is particularly damning for the establishment. A portion of her testimony in front of Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican, seems to verify that she and the entire FBI received marching orders from Obama’s DOJ to stop going after Clinton, because they wouldn’t have support from Justice.
“I think, when you talk about intent, that’s certainly true under part of 18 793(f), but it sounds like you all just blew over gross negligence,” Ratcliffe said to Page in congressional testimony reviewed by The Epoch Times.
“We did not blow over gross negligence,” Page replied. “We, in fact … it did seem like, well, maybe there’s a potential here for this to be the charge. And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence.”
So why wasn’t that the charge the FBI pursued against Clinton? That’s exactly what the congressman wanted to know.
“(Y)ou’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —” began Ratcliffe.
“That is correct,” Page replied.
“— bring a case based on that,” finished the congressman.
At another point in her testimony, Page made the situation even more clear.
“Let’s assume things are going swimmingly and, in fact, all 17 of those witnesses admit, ‘We did it, it was on purpose, we totally wanted to mishandle classified information,’ gross negligence would still have been off the table because of the department’s assessment that it was vaguem” she said, according to Epoch Times. “We would have other crimes to now charge, but gross negligence would not have been among them.”
That appeared to have the effect of walling off some potential crimes from being prosecuted.
Other testimony seems to back this up. Jarringly, the FBI never even pursued the possibility of investigating the crime of “gross negligence” against Clinton because the DOJ explicitly said it wouldn’t prosecute it.
“So there was no review as to whether there was negligence in this case?” House Majority Counsel Ryan Breitenbach asked during testimony.
“It was legally irrelevant because the Department of Justice would not have brought a prosecution in a circumstance in which there was simply negligence,” admitted Trisha Anderson, a top lawyer for the FBI.
All of this adds up to one disturbing conclusion: Both the DOJ under Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the FBI under James Comey handed Hillary Clinton a “get out of jail free” card.
If federal law enforcement agencies were indeed playing politics instead of even-handedly doing their jobs, every American should be outraged.
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