THE HILL: GOP chairmen slam ‘unusual restrictions’ on FBI Clinton probe.
Four Republican committee chairmen on Wednesday pressed Attorney General Loretta Lynch on what they termed “the unusual restrictions” placed on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State.
In a letter to Lynch, they pointed to a pair of letters from Beth Wilkinson, an attorney for two of Clinton’s lawyers, that laid out a limited immunity agreement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to in exchange for cooperation with the investigation.
“The Wilkinson letters raise serious questions about why DOJ would consent to such substantial limitations on the scope of its investigation, and how [FBI Director James] Comey’s statements on the scope of the investigation comport with the reality of what the FBI was permitted to investigate,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wrote.
Members of a few committees and “one or two staff members” were allowed to review the letters last week but could not take notes or make any record of them, according to lawmakers.
According to members who saw the documents, Wilkinson and the DOJ negotiated a deal for Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, who sorted Clinton’s personal emails from her work-related ones before turning over 30,000 to the State Department in 2014.
Mills and Samuelson, who were acting as Clinton’s attorneys throughout the proceedings, turned over their computers to the FBI as part of the investigation.
The immunity deal promised that the Justice Department would not prosecute Mills or Samuelson based on information obtained from the laptops.
It also limited the emails that the FBI was allowed to review to those sent between June 1, 2014, and Feb. 1, 2015, and promised that the DOJ would destroy the laptops at the close of the probe.
Wilkinson has said that she advised Mills and Samuelson to take the deal “because of the confusion surrounding the various agencies’ positions on the after-the-fact classification decisions.”
The four lawmakers took issue with the restrictions on reviewing the letters, the timeframe limitations and the agreement to destroy the laptops.
The timeframe limitations, according to the Wednesday letter, “would necessarily have excluded, for example, any emails from Cheryl Mills to Paul Combetta in late 2014 or early 2015 directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”
Yeah, how about that.