OK … so we are back with the Clinton cabal, emails, Wasserman Schultz … and AG Loretta Lynch???
How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe
The Russian document cited a supposed email describing how then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch had privately assured someone in the Clinton campaign that the email investigation would not push too deeply into the matter. If true, the revelation of such an understanding would have undermined the integrity of the FBI’s investigation.
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In the supposed email, Wasserman Schultz claimed Lynch had been in private communication with a senior Clinton campaign staffer named Amanda Renteria during the campaign. The document indicated Lynch had told Renteria that she would not let the FBI investigation into Clinton go too far, according to people familiar with it.Current and former officials have argued that the secret document gave Comey good reason to take the extraordinary step over the summer of announcing the findings of the Clinton investigation himself without Justice Department involvement.
Comey had little choice, these people have said, because he feared that if Lynch announced no charges against Clinton, and then the secret document leaked, the legitimacy of the entire case would be questioned.
From the moment the bureau received the document from a source in early March 2016, its veracity was the subject of an internal debate at the FBI. Several people familiar with the matter said the bureau’s doubts about the document hardened in August when officials became more certain that there was nothing to substantiate the claims in the Russian document. FBI officials knew the bureau never had the underlying email with the explosive allegation, if it ever existed.
Yet senior officials at the bureau continued to rely on the document before and after the election as part of their justification for how they handled the case.
Wasserman Schultz and Benardo said in separate interviews with The Washington Post that they do not know each other and have never communicated. Renteria, in an interview, and people familiar with Lynch’s account said the two also do not know each other and have never communicated. Lynch declined to comment for this article.
Moreover, Wasserman Schultz, Benardo and Renteria said they have never been interviewed by the FBI about the matter.
Loretta Lynch is getting dragged into Hillary’s e-mail nightmare | Vanity Fair |
It’s not just Donald Trump who is under scrutiny by Congress. On Friday, reports emerged that bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee are also looking into former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s handling of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, which became highly politicized in the months leading up to the 2016 election. According to ABC News, the committee is looking for details on Lynch’s communications with former Clinton campaign aide Amanda Renteria, as well as whether the F.B.I. itself ever investigated the reported communication.
The committee asked Lynch for information about an email, first reported by The New York Times, in which former D.N.C. chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz informed an official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations that Lynch had assured the Clinton campaign that the investigation into the presidential candidate “would not go too far.” It was this e-mail, many believe, that caused former F.B.I. director James Comey to leave Lynch out of the loop before he ended the investigation, because he was afraid such a letter would compromise the integrity of the investigation.
FBI boss Comey cited Bill Clinton’s June meeting aboard his aircraft with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch
on a Phoenix tarmac as one reason why he felt the need to strip the role from the Justice Department
Chance tarmac meeting with former ally and friend Bill Clinton | CBS News – July 3, 2016 |
As both former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch deal with the fallout from their tarmac meeting last week, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said it’s “regrettable” that the pair opted to meet face-to-face while Clinton’s wife is under investigation by the FBI.
Schiff said he believes Clinton and Lynch when they say it was a “chance encounter” and that they didn’t discuss the investigation at all, and that he trusts Lynch to take the FBI’s recommendations in the case of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
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A meeting that changed the course of the 2016 presidential election - law professor Jed Shugerman“This was a regrettable instance where they got together quite coincidentally, but at the same time the attorney general has said she’s going to let the career prosecutors and the FBI make the decision about how to handle the case,” he said. “I have … every confidence that they will make a completely apolitical decision and do what’s in the public interest here.”
Labor secretary Tom Perez: Clinton, Lynch just ‘ran into each other’ on airport tarmac
Labor Secretary Tom Perez on Friday defended Attorney General Loretta Lynch for meeting with former President Bill Clinton on his parked private plane at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport earlier this week.
Perez, a long-time friend to Lynch, insisted during his interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that the meeting was “not planned in advance” and was adamant the two parties ran into each other on the tarmac.
The lobby has gone into overdrive to summon its legislative allies in Congress. It has found obedience among likely parties like Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez (not to mention a newly elected water-carrier, Corey Booker). But some unlikely individuals are proving a harder sell. The Lobby is having a tough time with Rep. Deborah Wassserman-Schultz. She is the current chair of the Democratic National Committee and a devout supporter of the president. The Forwardnotes that Aipac has taken the highly unusual step not of taking Wasserman-Schultz to the woodshed, but of a semi-public flogging.
In a particularly ham-handed bit of mafiosi-style enforcement, it appears that Aipac or someone close to it leaked a story to the neocon pro-Israel Washington Free Beacon saying the Representative was playing a key role in torpedoing sanctions. That then allowed Aipac to issue a letter to its citizen lobbyists and supporters deriding Wasserman-Schultz’s alleged “betrayal.”
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Obama chained and Rouhani restrained from policy of nuclear detente
○ American Exceptionalism Good – Neocon Israel Policy Better by Oui on Sep. 2nd, 2015