A former top FBI official has admitted under oath that a repository of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email records was obtained by the Obama White House and housed in the Executive Office of the President.
This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people. https://t.co/0Hv5fMdmQQ
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) April 23, 2019
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently coaxed the admission out of the former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap, as part of a court-ordered discovery regarding Clinton’s unauthorized email server.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled earlier this year that discovery could commence examining Clinton’s use of the server and ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The court said that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”
Judicial Watch asked Priestap to identify representatives of Clinton, her former staff, and government agencies from which “email repositories were obtained” by the FBI.
In addition to the Executive Office of the President, Priestap also named “Clinton aides Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, Jacob Sullivan, and Justin Cooper; former Clinton information technology staffer Bryan Pagliano, the State Department, Secret Service, and Washington-based law firm Williams and Connolly.”
According to the watchdog group, Priestap also testified that nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as a result of a search warrant for her material on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner was then the wayward husband of Huma Abedin, the vice chair of Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president.
While he was the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Priestap helped oversee both the Clinton email and the FBI’s 2016 Crossfire Hurricane investigations.
However, in closed-door testimony before congressional lawmakers in June of 2018, Priestap acknowledged it was mostly FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI analyst Jonathan Moffa who drove those investigations.
He testified in a separate lawsuit in 2017 that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation in 2016 related to her BlackBerry email accounts.
A complete copy of Priestap’s responses is available here.
“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated – Barack Obama is implicated in her email scheme.”
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