Long-rumored dissent in the FBI ranks over Director James Comey’s refusal to refer indictments against Hillary Clinton to Attorney General Loretta Lynch is finally boiling over, according to a Fox News report.
The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.
The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General’s office that the former secretary of state be charged left members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ’s National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.
“No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute — it was a top-down decision,” said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.
A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, “It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton’s] security clearance yanked.”
“It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,” the senior FBI official told Fox News. “We were floored while listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said ‘but we are doing nothing,’ which made no sense to us.”
The FBI’s official response was to refer Fox News to “multiple public statements Comey has made in which he has thrown water on the idea that politics played a role in the agency’s decision not to recommend charges” — which is no answer at all. The very point these disgruntled officials are making is that Comey ignored the evidence, and legal precedent, to quash the Clinton indictments. Comey can’t refute that argument by merely quoting himself.
“It is well known that the FBI agents on the ground, the human beings who did the investigative work, had built an extremely strong case against Hillary Clinton and were furious when the case did not move forward. They believe the decision not to prosecute came from the White House,” said Fox News legal analyst and former judge Andrew Napolitano.
Fox loops in similar grumbles from FBI agents to the New York Post, which described them as “ready to revolt” over what one called the “cowardly” whitewash of Clinton’s server scandal:
“In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer investigations unit.
Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.”
The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design.” He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly.”
“Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration,” for mishandling such material, he pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.”
Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fundraisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage.
“FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton.”
“I have no doubt resourceful prosecutors and FBI agents could have come up with some charge that she would have been subject to prosecution,” the 25-year veteran added. “What she did is absolutely abhorrent for anyone who has access to classified information.”
Smith said Congress should subpoena the case’s agents to testify about the direction they received from Comey and their supervisors: “It would be interesting to see what the results would be if those involved with the investigation were questioned under oath.”
Comey made the 25 agents who worked on the case sign nondisclosure agreements. But others say morale has sunk inside the bureau.
“The director is giving the bureau a bad rap with all the gaps in the investigation,” one agent in the Washington field office said. “There’s a perception that the FBI has been politicized and let down the country.”
The New York Post was back on the case Wednesday, reporting that congressional leaders are wondering if Comey made misleading statements to them, or even perjured himself, to protect Clinton:
In his July 7 testimony, Comey assured Congress that he examined all the evidence of Clinton’s lawyers and aides deleting her emails, and concluded they weren’t trying to hide anything. “We did not find evidence to indicate that they did the erasure to conceal things of any sort,” he swore. “We didn’t find evidence of evil intent to obstruct justice there.”
“In his statements before Congress, Director Comey repeatedly assured us that the FBI investigated whether charges of obstruction of justice and intentional destruction of records were merited,” the chairmen of three House committees and a Senate committee complained last week in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The facts of this investigation call those assertions into question.”
Congress has now obtained letters detailing unprecedented immunity agreements and side deals with multiple witnesses in the case — including one in which Comey agreed to prevent his investigators from reviewing any emails from Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills to Clinton’s server administrator Paul Combetta generated in late 2014 and early 2015. The off-limits correspondence, the chairmen point out, could reveal information “directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”
Astonishingly, before Comey agreed to the June side deal with Mills’ attorney, he “already knew of the conference calls between Secretary Clinton’s attorneys and Mr. Combetta, his use of BleachBit, and the resulting deletions, further casting doubt on why the FBI would enter into such a limited evidentiary scope of review.”
The letter noted that Comey somehow failed to mention he gave key subjects of the investigation bizarre pre-emptive immunity deals, despite testifying for four and a half hours before Congress.
Committee chairmen also noted that heavily-redacted documents have been submitted by Lynch and Comey, with other access to other documents sharply restricted. “These onerous restrictions are not consistent with the high degree of transparency you and director Comey promised to Congress,” they wrote.
The strange thing is that anyone quoted in these stories thinks any of it will matter if Hillary Clinton wins the election in a few weeks. Those disgruntled investigators probably should have launched their revolt right after Comey announced there would be no indictments, or really even sooner than that when they realized the fix was in. Now they’re on the edge of rebellion just as the Clinton Death Star prepares to become fully operational, and since the Constitution is long gone, it doesn’t have any unshielded exhaust ports.
This, of course, could be why the disgusted DOJ personnel didn’t revolt. The essence of Clinton/Obama corruption is that all restraints on power are gone, and there is no “controlling legal authority” (to quote an earlier pioneer of White House corruption) to hold the elite accountable.