Newly released internal FBI emails showed the agency's highest-ranking officials scrambling to answer to
Hillary Clinton's lawyer in the days prior the 2016 presidential election, on the same day then-FBI Director
James Comey sent a
bombshell letter to Congress announcing a new review of hundreds of thousands of potentially classified emails found on former Rep.
Anthony Weiner's laptop.
The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also
included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page
concerning a potential quid-pro-quo between the State Department and
the FBI -- in which the FBI would agree to downgrade the classification
level of a Clinton email in exchange for more legal attache positions
that would benefit the agency abroad. There was no indication such a
quid-pro-quo ever took place.
And, in the face of mounting criticism aimed at the FBI, the documents revealed that Comey
quoted the 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by assuring his subordinates, "To be great is to be misunderstood."
The FBI did not respond to Fox News' request for comment on the released emails.
On
Oct. 28, 2016, Comey upended the presidential campaign by informing
Congress that the FBI would quickly review the Weiner laptop. The
Justice Department's internal watchdog
later faulted the FBI
for failing to review the Weiner laptop through much of the fall of
2016, and suggested it was possible that now-fired FBI Agent Peter
Strzok may have slow-walked the laptop analysis until other federal
prosecutors pressured the FBI to review its contents.
On the
afternoon of Oct. 28, Clinton lawyer David Kendall demanded answers from
the FBI -- and the agency jumped into action, the emails showed.
Many
of the emails found on the computer were between Clinton and her senior
adviser Huma Abedin, Weiner's now-estranged wife. Despite claims by top
FBI officials, including Strzok, several of those emails were
determined to
contain classified information.
"I
received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back,"
then-FBI General Counsel James Baker wrote to the agency's top brass,
including Comey, Page and Strzok,
in an email. "Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that."
Page and Strzok eventually were revealed to be having an extramarital affair, and Strzok
was terminated after a
slew of text messages surfaced
in which he and Page derided Trump and his supporters using their
government-issued phones. Republicans, citing some of those text
messages, have accused Strzok and Page of
orchestrating a coordinated leak strategy aimed at harming the president.
Although
Kendall's email was redacted, Baker continued: "He said that our letter
was 'tantalizingly ambiguous' and made statements that were 'inchoate
and highly ominous' such that what we had done was worse than
transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out to
make out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton. ... I told
him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I
would discuss it with others and get back to him.
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
— Fired FBI Director James Comey, quoting Emerson
"I
suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with
this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and
probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours,"
Baker concluded. "Sound reasonable?"
In a partially redacted response, Strzok
agreed to spearhead a conference call among the FBI's top officials the next day.
Comey sent a letter to Congress in November 2016 stating agents
had concluded their review of "all of the communications" to or from
Clinton while she was secretary of state that appeared on the laptop,
and that the review did not change his assessment that Clinton should
not be prosecuted. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
On Nov. 6 -- just two days before Election Day --
Comey sent another letter
to Congress stating that agents had concluded their review of "all of
the communications" to or from Clinton while she was secretary of state
that appeared on the laptop, and that the review did not change his
assessment that Clinton should not be prosecuted.
In an
email also sent Nov. 6 and unearthed by Judicial Watch,
Strzok wrote to the FBI's leadership: "[Redacted], Jon and I completed
our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony
Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified
emails on the media.”
Strzok added that a team was coming in to "triple-check" his methodology and conclusions.
However, at least
18 classified emails sent from Abedin's account were found by the FBI on the Weiner laptop. And, despite Strzok's apparent claim, FBI officials
later conceded
they had not manually screened all of the nearly 700,000 emails on the
laptop, but instead used computer technology to prioritize which emails
to screen as Election Day rapidly approached.
“It
is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary
Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the
infamous Weiner laptop emails,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said
in a statement. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in
for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally
do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”
An email from Lisa Page discussed an apparent attempt by the State
Department to pressure the FBI to downgrade the classification level of
a Clinton email. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
Separately, another
email from Page, apparently
sent in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, discussed an apparent
attempt by the State Department to pressure the FBI to downgrade the
classification level of a Clinton email.
"Jason Herring will be
providing you with three 302s [witness reports] of current and former
FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton
investigation," Page wrote. "These 302s are scheduled to be released to
Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced
(with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week.
Page
continued: "As you will see, they describe a discussion about
potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy
assistant director in International Operations Division] and an
Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT
[legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA
withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else."
Through it all, the trove of documents suggested that top to bottom, FBI brass were convinced they were acting appropriately.
In
response to a press release from Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley
that criticized the FBI for failing to provide unclassified information
on its Clinton probe in a timely and thorough matter to Congress, Comey
quoted Emerson's 1841 essay "Self Reliance."
"Outstanding. ... I
should have added that I'm proud of the way we have handled this release
[of unclassified information]," Comey wrote to his subordinates,
including Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016. "Thanks for the work on it. Just
another reminder that Emerson was right when he said, 'To be great is to
be misunderstood.' Have a great and quiet weekend."
Page forwarded the email along to her colleagues, including Strzok, and added a smiley face.
Trump
fired Comey in 2017, leading to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation after Comey
leaked a series of memos he recorded while speaking with Trump privately.
Comey
acknowledged in closed-door testimony in December
that as of July 2016, investigators "didn't know whether we had
anything" implicating Trump in improper Russia collusion, and that "in
fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn't know
whether there was anything to it."
