Hillary Clinton was mysteriously exempted from prosecution despite evidence of deleted and maybe manipulated subpoenaed records. In spite of evidence that a computer contractor working for Clinton’s legal team had tampered with emails saved on her personal server in New York, Loretta Lynch, who was Attorney General at the time, never brought any charges. It is still unknown why these offenses went unpunished.
In stark contrast to the indulgence shown to Clinton, Attorney General Merrick Garland is apparently taking a tougher approach with investigations targeting former President Trump and his attorneys. While some legal experts think this could be a strong defense plan on behalf of Trump’s team, it raises concerns about possible unfair comparisons in the court systems of these two well-known people.
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The FBI made a deal with Clinton’s legal team that hampered their own investigation in exchange for an unusual favor in how they handled her case. In spite of the fact that they belonged to lawyers who had previously worked for Clinton at the State Department and were themselves under investigation, they also destroyed the hard drives from two laptops that had been subpoenaed, all while congressional investigators continued to look for this information.
Federal authorities were suspicious of Clinton’s counsels’ motives from the beginning; were they deliberately hiding relevant evidence? This only serves to heighten the surprise at their final consent to the FBI’s demands.
The political world was rocked on March 2, 2015, when it came to light that Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, had set up a secret email server in her Chappaqua residence. She carried out official government business for five years without keeping any records, including communications containing secret information. This sparked a backlash from transparency advocates and added to the controversy surrounding her presidential campaign.
In addition to issuing a formal subpoena for documents relating to the deadly terrorist attack in Libya, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a stern warning to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, telling him not to delete any emails from her private server going back to 2009. There was no doubt that this issue required immediate action.
After three weeks, Kendall and Cheryl Mills, a former Clinton aide who is now serving as her personal lawyer, met with a Platte River Networks computer contractor. Thanks to Paul Combetta’s employment of the file-erasure program BleachBit, the email archive unexpectedly disappeared a week later.
A shocking 31,830 emails from her server and backup files were destroyed by an agent employed by the Clinton campaign. Even more troubling was the fact that copies of these emails were permanently deleted from laptops owned by Mills and Samuelson, two people in her close circle, despite the fact that they were aware they had been subpoenaed.
A bombshell was revealed in the summer of 2015 when the FBI said that it was looking into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server. It was known as the “Midyear Exam,” and it was brought on by worrying rumors that potentially harmful individuals may have obtained access to confidential government data. Surprisingly, it turned out that this was accurate — emails with sensitive compartmented information were discovered on her home computer.
The case was given top priority by a few very talented FBI agents who believed they had strong justifications to bring charges against those responsible for the improper handling of secret information. They only wanted Combetta to sit down so they could intimidate him into accusing Clinton’s high-level proxies of directing what should be done with private records.
Several investigators believed “that Combetta’s truthful testimony was essential for assessing criminal intent for Clinton and other individuals, because he would be able to tell them whether Clinton’s attorneys — Mills, Samuelson or Kendall — had instructed him to delete emails,” according to a 2018 report by the DOJ’s inspector general.
Paul Combetta lied to the FBI during voluntary interviews by saying he had nothing to do with deleting Hillary Clinton’s emails from the server and backups, even though he was aware he had been requested to do so.
Investigators and prosecutors had little choice but to offer Combetta immunity as a result of his failure to cooperate with them in learning more about a significant development in the Clinton investigation. Even with this admission, Combetta’s account of the conference call remained elusive: it was not mentioned in the FBI’s summary of his interrogation, leaving questions unanswered about a crucial aspect of their investigation.
FBI officials found an email that Combetta sent to a coworker during their inquiry in which he made cryptic references to being a member of a “coverup operation” for Hillary. When pressed about it afterwards, Combetta said the remark was just a jest; nonetheless, detectives made no attempt to find out more about what was said at the enigmatic party indicated in the email.
According to the FBI’s investigation, Combetta had used the alias “stonetear” to look for assistance online in order to hide an email address linked to a VIP customer. Unfortunately for him, internet sleuths figured out who was behind stonetear, and in retaliation, he quickly took down all of his posts from the internet.
Prosecutors declined to file charges against the suspect despite obtaining multiple false statements from him and discovering obvious proof of crime. Authorities nonetheless chose not to take any action regarding potential obstruction despite the FBI’s discovery of forensic material showing that he had made damaging alterations on a server.
James Comey approved a moderate agreement for Combetta, abstaining from the custom of interrogating liars in front of a grand jury in order to discover their truth.
James Comey, a former FBI director, found himself in a difficult position when he attempted to defend the contentious immunity agreement given to a Hillary Clinton-connected IT employee. Even though he had already decided not to press charges against her, he felt obligated to uphold some kind of accountability by justifying their “softly-softly” strategy, which had been received with suspicion by agents who thought it was too lenient for such a potentially important witness. Comey claimed they wanted merely to “massage him for information” rather than utilizing more traditional strategies like threatening criminal prosecution.
“With respect to Combetta, we found his actions in deleting Clinton’s emails in violation of a congressional subpoena and preservation order and then lying about it to the FBI to be particularly serious,” DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in his report. “We asked the prosecutors why they chose to grant him immunity instead of charging him with obstruction of justice.”
Combetta was considered a little fish in the inquiry, therefore the DOJ decided against pressing for his prosecution in the hopes that he would willingly cooperate, delaying the investigation’s conclusion. They desired outcomes, in other words, before Americans went to the polls in November 2016.
Former DOJ counterespionage official David Laufman played a critical role in the widely panned Russiagate investigation. He issued wiretap orders on one of Trump’s aides and allowed investigations into some of the president’s top advisers while knowing that they were based on a dubious dossier supported by the Clinton campaign.
Some FBI agents wanted to subpoena Hillary Clinton’s staff members before a grand jury, but prosecutors instead offered them immunity bargains. Many in the political world were surprised by this sudden action, which made them pay attention. They were puzzled as to why these people would be accorded such leniency.
Despite several agents’ requests for a search warrant, prosecutors chose to use an atypical consent agreement to gain access to the laptops containing significant emails from Clinton’s server. As a result, they were unable to look into possible pre- and post-tenure interactions between Combetta and them because they were legally compelled to delete all hard drives after performing only limited searches on preset files and dates.
James Comey talked about a difficult balance between prosecutors and defense attorneys at the FBI conference in order to prevent attorney-client privileged information from being exposed by a thorough search of Trump data. 520 pages of information were found during the agents’ raid at Mar-a-Lago, endangering these safeguards and necessitating a thorough search for secret information by an impartial inspector.
In the midst of a turbulent investigation involving Hillary Clinton, Mills and Samuelson found themselves involved. They were given extraordinary access as witnesses during her own FBI interrogation after first being sworn to just respond to certain questions. However, in an unexpected turn of events, Director Comey stated that “no evidence” had been discovered showing any deliberate effort on the part of Secretary Clinton to conceal emails from investigators, effectively ending one line of inquiry into this historic case.
The investigation team used very intrusive techniques to thoroughly study and inspect Trump’s claimed ties to the handling of sensitive information as well as his attempts to withhold papers that had been subpoenaed in order to assure correctness.
Authorities have handled the Trump probe in a much bolder manner than they did the Clinton inquiry. Investigators made off with an enormous haul after using federal grand juries and warrants to search his Palm Beach estate for evidence. They found over 11,000 documents as well as 1,800 personal belongings, including clothing, photo albums, and passports.
Senator Clinton expressed her relief at being spared from the onerous measures imposed on many others along with her team.
“Even though Secretary Clinton and her attorneys did not hand over classified records in their possession, they were not subject to a raid similar to what occurred at Mar-a-Lago,” Grassley said.
It was discovered that Clinton’s unclassified personal server contained an astounding 81 classified email chains, ranging in classification from CONFIDENTIAL to the incredibly rare TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM. This information was discovered through the meticulous work of computer-forensics investigators and intelligence analysts. Additionally, during a raid on Trump’s home, additional 100 documents with varying levels of CLASSIFIED designations, all the way up to TOP SECRET, were recovered.
“Did Hillary Clinton break 18 USC 1519 when she deleted emails from her own email server during an inquiry by the government? Perhaps, absolutely,” said Donald Skupsky, a lawyer with expertise in government record-retention policies.
“In December 2014, she did instruct her team to destroy the remaining emails after 60 days. And ultimately, she never halted nor protested again any records destruction,” he added. “Under 18 USC 1519, Clinton may have concealed and covered up the destruction of records.”
