Reports: Multiple Officials had previous ties to Clintons
WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley today is requesting the Department of Justice’s independent inspector general to explore whether the histories of high ranking department and FBI officials compromised the public trust in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server as Secretary of State and potential mishandling of classified material.
“The American people deserve to know whether political considerations have improperly affected the handling of this inquiry and understand why key officials failed to recuse themselves to protect the public’s confidence in a fair and impartial inquiry based on merits and the evidence rather than on politics,” Grassley said in a letter today to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Grassley is asking the inspector general to review whether Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s involvement in the investigation creates the appearance of a conflict given that she was appointed to the role of U.S. Attorney by President Bill Clinton and she was a partner at a law firm that represented both President and Secretary Clinton. News reports around the same time of her rendezvous with President Clinton at a Phoenix airport just days before the FBI announced its initial findings in the server investigation also revealed that, if elected president, Secretary Clinton was considering keeping Lynch in the Attorney General position. Grassley previously raised concerns about Lynch’s potential conflicts and whether they necessitated a special counsel to oversee the investigation.
Grassley is asking whether any appearance of conflicts stemmed from the histories of Peter Kadzik, the most senior official in the department’s Office of Legislative Affairs, or Andrew McCabe, the second-highest ranking official at the FBI. Kadzik, the department’s liaison to Congress, reportedly has close ties to John Podesta, the chairman of Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign. McCabe led the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, which provided personnel and resources to the server investigation around the same time Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee and the Virginia Democratic Party donated more than $675,000 to McCabe’s wife’s political campaign for the state senate. McAuliffe previously fundraised for President Clinton and is under investigation for allegedly taking campaign contributions from foreign entities, a review that McCabe was recused from during his wife’s political campaign.
Finally, Grassley is reiterating concern that in the context of potential conflicts, the department signed off on unusual immunity agreements with many of Secretary Clinton’s closest associates, which suggest that the department did not approve the use of tools such as search warrants or grand jury subpoenas to compel cooperation with FBI’s investigation until very recently, after Director Comey’s Oct. 28, letter to Congress. The Justice Department’s reported approval of a search warrant on the weekend of October 30, 2016, appears to be the first time in the investigation that such an investigative tool was approved, potentially limiting FBI’s ability to fully investigate the server arrangement.
Full text of Grassley’s letter.
