Thanks to Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General and the Freedom of Information Act we now know the shocking reason former FBI Director James Comey refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton before the 2016 presidential election. He and his closest FBI associates were guilty of the same thing he had been tasked to investigate her for.
In June of this year, IG Michael Horowitz revealed that top Bureau agents like Peter Strzok—who famously texted his FBI colleague and lover Lisa Page, “we’ll stop” Trump from being elected—also used their personal email accounts for official business.
Now we learn that the IG’s report on the Justice Department probe of Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that FBI director James Comey’s “personal email accounts for official government business” blatantly violated bureau protocol.
In June, The Washington Post reported that Horowitz discovered five instances when Comey either drafted official messages or forwarded emails to his personal account. Public records show that Comey used his private Gmail account hundreds of times to conduct business.
The former Director has repeatedly claimed he only used his private account for “incidental” purposes but “never for anything that was classified.” The recently unpredicted IG notes show that at least seven of those illegally transmitted messages were considered so sensitive by the Justice Department it declined to release them.
While the FBI was investigating Clinton’s own use of a private email account on a personal server while she was secretary of state, Comey was doing the very thing for which he refused to seek an indictment against Clinton.
While the IG report was a scathing denouncement of such shoddy government practices and was critical of Carter Page, Strzok and Comey, it concluded that Strzok’s personal views did not affect his performance in his role investigating Russia and Clinton and Comey did not act out of political bias.
What crystal ball did the IG used to make that determination?
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the IG showed he found Comey and his chief of staff discussed government business on about 1,200 pages of Gmail messages.
It took a lawsuit filed by the Cause of Action Institute, a conservative watchdog group, to produce Comey’s Gmail correspondence.
Cause of Action’s CEO, John Vecchione slammed the former Director for minimizing the work he did using his private account saying, “Using private email to conduct official government business endangers transparency and accountability, and that is why we sued the Department of Justice.”
He added, “We’re deeply concerned that the FBI withheld numerous emails citing FOIA’s law enforcement exemption. This runs counter to Comey’s statements that his use of email was incidental and never involved any sensitive matters.”
In one email from Oct. 7, 2015, Comey appeared to recognize the hypocrisy of the FBI investigating Hillary Clinton’s email practices while exchanging FBI info on his own private account due to his government account being down. Comey asked an aide that the testimony he was to deliver to the Senate be sent on his private account — calling it an “embarrassing” situation.
The Executive Director of Open the Government, Lisa Rosenberg, said Comey’s practice of using personal email while investigating Clinton “reeks of a double.” “It’s just so transparently hypocritical,” said Rosenberg, “to have one standard for a person you are investigating and an entirely different standard for yourself when you are the one who’s enforcing the law.”
More shocking is that, if the Justice Department withheld some of Comey’s emails for the legal reasons cited, he would have been talking about active law enforcement matters.
“He can’t have it both ways,” said Rosenberg. “Either he used his personal email for things that were public or would be in the public domain, or he used it to discuss internal policies, investigations, etc. that might or might not be appropriately withheld under FOIA.”
156 of the heavily redacted email pages obtained by The Post span from 2013 to 2017 and assuredly mark a coming wave of revelations to follow.
This small sample of emails show that Comey used his personal Gmail account throughout his investigation into Clinton.
Shortly before President Trump fired Comey, Deputy Director Rod Rosenstein wrote in a memo: “I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”
It seems we now know why.
