One of the stunning revelations to came out of the FBI’s Labor Day weekend document dump on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email investigation was the fact that the emails on her private server were deleted only three weeks after the New York Times revealed the server’s existence. A staffer from Clinton’s IT management company, Platte River Networks, admitted that he deleted the Clinton archive mailbox and used software called BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files.
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Tuesday sent a letter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia “requesting a review of evidence that may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence by Secretary Clinton and her employees and contractors.” He also sent a letter to Platte River Networks for information related to potential evidence destruction.
During his appearance on Fox News with Megyn Kelly Tuesday evening, Judge Andrew Napolitano discussed the latest developments in the Clinton email saga, and expressed his amazement that FBI Director James Comey let Clinton off the hook despite overwhelming evidence of obstruction of justice.
“The FBI knew that servers were wiped clean, BlackBerrys were smashed and destroyed, and a laptop was lost in the U.S. mail,” Napolitano argued. “The FBI ought to have pursued Mrs. Clinton and the people around her for obstruction of justice and it did not do so. That is exceptionally distressing. The case against her for failure to keep state secrets is overwhelming…and the FBI has done nothing. Someone, somewhere — it must be the White House — has restrained the FBI from doing its job.”
“How could this not have been intentional with the regular, consistent, systematic destruction of evidence?” Napolitano asked. “And I’m sorry to tell you, her lawyers may have been involved with this — which adds another, entirely different level of culpability here.”
Judge Napolitano continued, “She swore under oath to a federal judge, and she swore under oath to two congressional committees she returned all her work-related emails. The FBI found 17,800 work-related emails that she failed to return. Not all of them were readable because some of them had been destroyed. You tell me that’s not a prima facie case of obstruction of justice? And the FBI has done nothing about it!”
He added, “I don’t know how far Congressman Chaffetz is going to go. Election day is 63 days from now. I don’t know if he can get to first base between now and election day.”
Napolitano also pointed out that the FBI violated its own policy in how it interviewed Clinton on July 2.
“Her lawyers told the DOJ, she will not show up for an interview if [they] record it. It is the policy of the DOJ to record every interview. There is no record of what she said other than the summaries written by the FBI agents who were in the room and who listened to her. In this digital age, there is no recording. There’s a verbatim recording of very single one of the other witnesses interrogated in this case, except for Mrs. Clinton!” he concluded.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member