National Review: This Is Why Hillary Wasn't Indicted for 'Emailgate' Scandal
The reason why Hillary Clinton was not indicted in the email scandal has been revealed.
The Obama administration refused to disclose any emails between former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton over her private, non-secure email account because they didn’t want to put Obama under public scrutiny.
“If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges,” the National Review wrote in their column.
The author went on to say that Clinton wasn’t indicted in the email scandal because the emails between Obama and Clinton would have been the focal point of any prosecution, and “they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.”
The recent text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page show more evidence of this, even though the FBI lost five months worth of the texts, which “has been chalked up to a technological mishap.”
The original draft of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement announcing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not be prosecuted for her use of a private, unsecured email server was released to the public earlier in January.
Among the numerous edits to the document — written on May 2, 2016 — was the removal of five references describing her actions as “grossly negligent,” which legal experts have noted is significant because that is the legal standard found in the relevant statute regarding the mishandling of classified material.
Sen. Ron Johnson wrote a letter to the FBI last weekend addressing the missing text messages and referenced one of the revisions of Comey’s statement, which said that Clinton’s use of her personal email was “both known by a large number of people and readily apparent.”
“She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary,” the original statement read.
According to a text message between Strzok and Page, Comey’s chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, circulated a revised version of the statement replacing “the President” with “another senior government official.”
In Comey’s final statement, he made no reference to Clinton’s email exchange so that journalists and congressional investigators wouldn’t ask who the “senior government official” was, according to the National Review.
When Clinton’s use of a private, non-secure server was revealed in March 2015, the Obama administration began to panic about the former president’s involvement.
Top Obama adviser John Podesta and top aide in the Obama State Department Cheryl Mills sent an email, later published by WikiLeaks, suggesting that Obama’s emails should be held because “That’s the heart of his exec privilege.”
Obama told CBS News that he found out about the emails, “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.” According to National Review, he was probably confident that his involvement would stay undiscovered because he used an alias when communicating with her.
Mills emailed Podesta follwing Obama’s statement: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”
This clean up took place by sealing Obama’s email communications with Clinton and striking any reference to Obama from Comey’s statement. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch also “ordered Comey to use the word ‘matter’ rather than ‘investigation’ to describe the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s email practices,” the National Review reported.
Lynch also reportedly met with Bill Clinton on “an out-of-the-way Arizona tarmac, where their secruity details arranged for both their planes to be parked” and announced a few days later on July 1 that “she would accept whatever recommendation the FBI director and career prosecutors made about charging Clinton.”
In a text message to Strzok that day, Page said that “This is a purposeful leak following the airplane snafu” that was being publicly criticized, and the attorney general “knows no charges will be brought.”
Two subjects of the investigation, Mills and Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, were also allowed to be in Clinton’s interview with the FBI “as lawyers representing Clinton.”
“All cleaned up: no indictment, meaning no prosecution, meaning no disclosure of Clinton-Obama emails. It all worked like a charm … except the part where Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency and the problem is never spoken of again,” the National Review concluded.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
