A stunning report from former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy details exactly how former President Barack Obama made sure that Hillary Clinton would never face an indictment for her criminal use of a private email server.
Published in National Review, McCarthy notes that Obama exchanged about 20 emails using a pseudonym with Hillary on the email server while she served as secretary of state. One of those emails is from Hillary while she was in Russia. The FBI concluded it was very likely that “hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account” during this secretive exchange.
Obama and his administration didn’t want anyone to know of his involvement in the email scandal, which is why he once claimed he first learned of the email scandal by watching the news.
Now, we’re learning extra details that show those exchanges contained classified information. This means that if Clinton illegally mishandled this information, it was also mishandled on the other end by Obama. Without an indictment, Obama assumed those exchanges would never surface.
These points made by McCarthy are reinforced by newly released text messages from anti-Trump FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. Now we know the rest of the story. Obama was cleaning up the mess:
Obama had his email communications with Clinton sealed. He did this by invoking a dubious presidential-records privilege. The White House insisted that the matter had nothing to do with the contents of the emails, of course; rather, it was intended to vindicate the principle of confidentiality in presidential communications with close advisers. With the media content to play along, this had a twofold benefit: Obama was able (1) to sidestep disclosure without acknowledging that the emails contained classified information, and (2) to avoid using the term “executive privilege” — with all its dark Watergate connotations — even though that was precisely what he was invoking.
Note that claims of executive privilege must yield to demands for disclosure of relevant evidence in criminal prosecutions. But of course, that’s not a problem if there will be no prosecution.
Then, on a Fox News interview, Obama made it clear again that he didn’t want to have Hillary Clinton indicted under any circumstance:
His rationale was a legally frivolous straw man: Clinton had not intended to harm national security.
No matter: Obama’s analysis was the stated view of the chief executive. If, as was sure to happen, his subordinates in the executive law-enforcement agencies conformed their decisions to his stated view, there would be no prosecution.
A few weeks later, long before the investigation was over, FBI Director James Comey started writing the infamous exoneration of Clinton.
At the time, then-Attoreny General Loretta Lynch instructed Comey to call the situation a “matter” instead of an “investigation” and wanted to downplay the seriousness of the accusations. McCarthy explained this is how the White House could stand with the Hillary Clinton campaign messaging that there would be no prosecution because there was no “investigation.”
A few weeks later is when Lynch had the infamous airplane meeting with Bill Clinton. As McCarthy explains:
On July 1, amid intense public criticism of her meeting with Bill Clinton, Attorney General Lynch piously announced that she would accept whatever recommendation the FBI director and career prosecutors made about charging Clinton.
Now, as we know through Page’s text to Strzok on the same day of that meeting, “This is a purposeful leak following the airplane snafu” because Lynch already “knows no charges will be brought.”
https://twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/937780198916866048
As McCarthy adds, the statement from Comey originally pointed fingers at Obama:
On the same day, according to a Strzok–Page text, a revised draft of Comey’s remarks was circulated by his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki. It replaced “the President” with “another senior government official.” This effort to obscure Obama’s involvement had an obvious flaw: It would practically have begged congressional investigators and enterprising journalists to press for the identification of the “senior government official” with whom Clinton had exchanged emails. That was not going to work. Consequently, by the time Comey delivered his remarks on July 5, the decision had been made to avoid even a veiled allusion to Obama.
This scheme worked exactly as planned since there was no indictment and no release of the Clinton-Obama emails.
And we never would have known any of this… except Donald Trump became president.
This is a breaking news story. We will have more updates as they become available.
