According to Fox News’ chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, her contacts in the FBI and DOJ are “super pissed off” at what White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said about Hillary Clinton’s email problems Friday. “That’s not something I’m worried about,” he told reporters at the daily briefing.
Earnest threw cold water on predictions that Hillary Clinton will face a Justice Department indictment for mishandling classified information on her private and unsecure email server while secretary of State..
“That will be a decision that will be made by the Department of Justice,” he said. “Some officials have said she is not the target of the investigation and it does not seem to be the direction in which it is trending.”
Pressed again on whether he believed Clinton could get indicted, Earnest said firmly: “It doesn’t seem to be headed in that direction.”
Catherine Herridge told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Friday evening that her sources in the FBI and Justice Department have “their backs up” over Earnest’s comments.
“That statement by Josh Earnest has got the back up of our contacts at the FBI and Justice Department for two reasons… They are super pissed off – to use a technical term. Number one, Josh Earnest has absolutely no clearance or visibility in the FBI investigation. Number two, they say it really seems part of a troubling pattern from the White House because the president earlier said he did not see any national security implications to the Clinton emails and then we found out he had never been briefed.”
Herridge said that by “weighing in and leaving the public with an impression that is not backed up by the evidence in the case,” the White House was making the situation even more political than it needed to be.
Via On the Record:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT1GWYHhji0]
When she mentioned the “troubling pattern from the White House,” Herridge was referring to the October 60 Minutes interview in which the president called Clinton’s use of a private server “a mistake,” but said it had not endangered national security. He said the issue was being “ginned up” into an attack by Republicans for political reasons.
FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December that the president does not receive briefings on the investigation, so he would have no way of knowing how serious it is.
Comey said, “anybody’s view about an investigation they’re not involved in is irrelevant. We care about finding out what is true and doing that in a competent, honest and independent way. I promise you that’s the way we conduct ourselves.”
By a strange coincidence, Friday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the panel discussed the latest scuttlebutt on the FBI investigation, and what the White House knows.
Halperin said though it is unclear to him whether White House officials know what is happening, “the body language among some Obama Administration official is, ‘This is more serious, and something’s gonna happen.’”
So, according to Washington insider Mark Halperin, the White House knows full well how serious the situation is for Hillary, yet Josh Earnest was sent out there to offer this Gruberesque nonsense: “Some officials have said she is not the target of the investigation and it does not seem to be the direction in which it is trending.”
Strange days.
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