FBI Director James Comey, left, holds a press conference in Washington D.C. Former Secretary Hillary Clinton, right, works from a desk inside a C-17 military plane following her departure from Malta, in the Mediterranean Sea, bound for Tripoli, Libya, Oct.18, 2011. Former Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gaddafi, right. (Photos: Kevin Lamarque – Associated Press)
The Justice Department (DOJ) granted immunity to the IT specialist who deleted emails under a preservation order, the New York Times reported Friday. Paul Combetta, who worked for a Colorado company called Platte River Networks, is one of at least two people we know were given immunity by the Justice Department as part of the FBI probe into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official State Department business.
The other was Bryan Pagliano, a former campaign staff member for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, who was granted immunity in exchange for answering questions about how he set up a server in Mrs. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York.
The report comes after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released several internal documents from their probe into Hillary Clinton and they show she claimed ignorance on classified material. The heavily redacted files released Friday, which also revealing large missing gaps of time and information, showed the FBI could not find some 13 Clinton mobile devices that were used to send emails from her personal email address.
In the Friday before Labor Day document dump, an unidentified witness admitted to having an “oh shit” moment after a March 2, 2015 report by the New York Times first brought to light Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official State Department business. “Sometime between March 25-31, 2015” they “deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton’s e-mails.”
“Investigation found evidence of these deletions,” the FBI report reads (available here [HRC 1] and here [HRC 2]).
At that point, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had been stonewalled on their May, 2014 request for some of these documents for nearly a year. FBI Director James Comey, after rattling off a litany of criminal offenses during a press conference, claimed he made the decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton because they didn’t find an element of intent.
Of course, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, intent is not the standard to prosecute under the law. Gross negligence, which is legally defined as “extreme carelessness,” the very term used by the director, is the standard.
Nevertheless, a look at the timeline makes the idea Clinton was lacking an intent even more difficult to believe.
“As the F.B.I.’s report notes,” Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign spokesman said, “neither Hillary Clinton nor her attorneys had knowledge of the Platte River Network employee’s actions. It appears he acted on his own and against guidance given by both Clinton’s and Platte River’s attorneys to retain all data in compliance with a congressional preservation request.”
In truth, that’s not actually accurate, either. What the FBI report(s) claim is that Mrs. Clinton claimed she didn’t know. But then again, she also claimed not to know what the (C) meant, either. Further, Mr. Combetta said in his first interview with the FBI in February that he did not remember being aware of the preservation order from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, Cheryl D. Mills, had sent to Platte River.
However, in his first interview in May, he said that at the time he deleted and “wiped” the server “he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s email data.”
Rep. Trey, R-S.C., the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, was outraged to hear the latest report, which he said he has no reason to doubt.
“If the FBI and Justice Department gave this witness transactional immunity, it’s tantamount to to giving immunity to the trigger man in a robbery,” Rep. Gowdy said. “They blew it.”
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No, Rep. Gowdy, the FBI didn't "blow it". This was the plan and it was executed. And you and your colleagues are complicit. If and hopefully, when the torches and pitchforks come out, you won't be spared.