The Clinton family never seems to fade from politics. But there are no doubts they’re finished now.
Because the Clintons were blindsided by this career-ending revelation.
Bill and Hillary Clinton cemented themselves as political paragons for decades.
Even when they weren’t running for president, their influence over the Democratic choice of candidates and policies was enormous.
But details emerging from the 2016 election could shut down any of Hillary’s hopes of another presidential run in the future.
According to Special Counsel John Durham’s final report on the investigation into alleged election collusion between Trump and Russia, the FBI and Justice Department jumped to investigate former President Trump’s campaign despite a lack of solid evidence, a “notable departure” from how it resisted efforts to investigate claims against Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Durham’s long-awaited report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was submitted to Congress on Monday, revealing that the FBI and DOJ “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” when they initiated the Trump-Russia investigation.
Durham’s assessment also stated that the government’s interest in Clinton’s campaign was “markedly different” from the Trump inquiry.
According to Durham’s report, the FBI briefed Clinton campaign staffers on potential threats to the Clinton campaign, but ignored intelligence from “a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin in order to divert attention away from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”
“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign,” according to the report.
“[I]n the eighteen months leading up to the 2016 election, the FBI was required to deal with a number of proposed investigations that had the potential of affecting the election,” according to the study. In each of those cases, including those involving Clinton, the FBI used “considerable caution.”
“In one such matter… FBI Headquarters and Department officials required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference,” the report said.
“In another, the FBI elected to end an investigation after one of its longtime and valuable CHSs [confidential human sources] went beyond what was authorized and made an improper and possibly illegal financial contribution to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign entity as a precursor to a much larger donation being contemplated,” it said.
“And in a third, the Clinton Foundation matter, both senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how those matters were to be handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election,” the report said.
“Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” it found.
“This lack of action was despite the fact that the significance of the Clinton plan intelligence was such as to have prompted the Director of the CIA to brief the President, Vice President, Attorney General, Director of the FBI, and other senior government officials about its content within days of its receipt,” the report said.
The FBI reacted to the report Monday in a statement: “The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.”
Of course, the FBI is going to say it made missteps or mistakes.
You never admit you’re guilty when you’re caught in the act.
But the American people can see through that paper thin defense.
Stay tuned to Prudent Politics.
