FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was dismissed from FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe for sending anti-Trump texts, conducted interviews with two top Hillary Clinton aides — who did not face consequences for reportedly making misleading statements during the interviews.
The Daily Caller reports that Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin were interviewed by Strzok and said they were not aware of Clinton’s use of a private email server until after Clinton left the State Department.
“Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure,” notes from Mills’ April 9, 2016 interview say, according to the Caller. “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”
Abedin also denied knowing about the server until 2013, but those denials were contradicted by email exchanges in which both aides discuss the Clinton server. In a 2010 email, Mills asks Abedin and another aide if the “server [is] ok?” after Clinton’s emails apparently went down. They were also included in an August 2011 email wherein a State Department official told them that Clinton’s “email server is down.”
But while former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was charged last week with making false statements to the FBI — an interview also reportedly conducted by Strzok — no such consequences were handed to the Clinton aides. As the Caller notes, former FBI Director James Comey even defended their false statements in September 2016 at a congressional hearing.
“Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral,” Comey said at the House Judiciary Committee hearing.
News outlets reported over the weekend that Strzok had been dismissed by Mueller after the discovery of the anti-Trump texts — texts which are yet to have been made public. Since that revelation, more information has surfaced about Strzok’s role in the Russian probe and also the Hillary Clinton email probe.
CNN reported Monday that Strzok not only led the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state but was also partly behind the change in Comey’s draft language in his July 2016 statement clearing Clinton.
Strzok was reportedly behind a crucial change in language describing Clinton’s behavior from “grossly negligent” to the less legally problematic “extremely careless.”
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.