FBI interview files reveal missing Clinton email 'boxes' and altered classified headings
FBI interview files reveal missing Clinton email 'boxes' and altered classified headings
By Rick Moran
More revelations of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton and her staff have emerged from FBI files detailing interviews with State Department employees. It appears that at least two boxes of Clinton emails have disappeared. The emails cover the crucial months of January-April, 2009 when Clinton began her tenure as secretary and was setting up her private email server.
There is also the allegation that one of Clinton's key aides, Patrick Kennedy, altered the classified headings on documents to make more of them unavailble for Freedom of Information Act requests.
Fox News:
The details about the boxes are contained in five pages of the FBI file – with a staggering 111 redactions – that summarize the statements of a State Department witness who worked in the “Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS)." The employee told the FBI that, “Initially, IPS officials were told there were 14 bankers boxes of former Secretary of State Hillary CLINTON’s emails at CLINTON’s Friendship Heights office.” Friendship Heights is a neighborhood that straddles the Northwest neighborhood of the District of Columbia and Maryland.
The State Department witness further explained to the FBI that “on or about December 5, 2014, IPS personnel picked up only 12 bankers boxes of CLINTON’s emails from Williams & Connolly.”
The officials were not sure if the boxes “were consolidated or what could have happened to the two other boxes. “
Clinton’s chief lawyer at Williams & Connolly, who leads all Clinton-related legal matters, is David Kendall. He has successfully represented Bill and Hillary Clinton together and separately throughout decades of their legal entanglements since the 1980’s, ranging from the former president’s sex scandals to missing billing records for Hillary Clinton’s work as a partner in The Rose Law Firm on behalf of the failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Capital Management Services.
In the documents provided by Kendall’s law firm, the witness told the FBI they were “unable to locate any of her emails from January-April 2009.” This timeframe is crucial as it covers the start of Clinton’s term as secretary of state and when she set up a private server for all government business, in turn skirting public records laws.
In the same Aug. 18, 2015, interview, on page 42, the State Department witness also told the FBI there was a deliberate effort to change sensitive Clinton emails bearing the “B(1)” code -- used in the Freedom of Information Act review process to identify classified information -- to the category of “B-5.” That category covers Executive Branch deliberations, “interagency or intra-agency communications including attorney client privileges,” and makes material exempt from public release.
Over five pages of the single-spaced summary notes, the witness, whose name is redacted, alleges Clinton’s team which included Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy played classification games to confuse and obfuscate the formal FOIA review process.
None of this interested the FBI enough for them to follow up and get to the bottom of who did what, who destroyed what, and who altered what.
I keep imagining an ordinary citizen pulling crap like this and wonder how many years in prison they'd get. Four months worth of crucial documents that could make or break a criminal case against Hillary Clinton and her aides disappears into thin air? A key aide orders subordinates to alter official government documents to try and hide them from FOIA requests?
I used to think that the Clintons were too smart to commit anything criminal to paper. I was wrong. But they probably counted on friendly investigators covering for them. In this, FBI Director Comey fulfilled his role brilliantly, simply ignoring evidence of wrongdoing to avoid prosecuting a prominent politician when lesser folk would have the book thrown at them.
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