Two top Republicans in the House and Senate have asked the FBI to review â for potential declassification â eight thumb drives that contain documents pertaining to the investigation into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server for official business and handling classified information.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford of Arkansas asked FBI Director Kash Patel to review the materials. This is according to a social media post that Grassley wrote Tuesday.
The thumb drives have been stored at an âFBI offshoot officeâ since 2018, Grassley said. This office is likely the Washington Field Office Northern Virginia Resident Agency, about an hourâs drive outside of Washington, D.C., according to recently declassified documents.
The thumb drives contain droves of emails apparently obtained by Russian intelligence from Clinton, former President Barack Obama and members of Congress, recently declassified documents indicate.
The existence of the thumb drives was revealed in a document tranche declassified last week. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard â in collaboration with Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe â have revealed through a set of declassified materials an apparent conspiracy by Obama and his top spy agency chiefs to pin President Donald Trump to Russia.
One of the three files released in recent days is the classified annex of a Department of Justice Inspector Generalâs (DOJ OIGâs) report. The DOJ IG report examined the integrity of the 2015-2016 FBI investigation into Clintonâs use of a private email server for official work as secretary of state â an investigation codenamed Midyear Exam. The FBI closed the investigation without any indictments. According to the recently declassified annex, the FBI obtained eight thumb drives of documents from a source codenamed âT1â with potential relevance to the Midyear investigation, but it never reviewed them, in part because Obamaâs White House asserted executive privilege. Foreign intelligence services, likely Russian, had obtained the emails through cyber espionage. T1 had returned them to the American intelligence community, the report states.
The first five thumb drives included documents obtained through cyber intrusions into the State Department and could have shed light on whether Clintonâs use of a private server put national security at risk. They included emails with the terms âClintonâ and âclintonemail.comâ but the FBI never searched them in-depth.
The thumb drives also included emails from President Barack Obama. On Obamaâs last full day in office, Jan. 19, 2017, then-White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston penned a letter to the FBI asserting a continuing right of the presidentâs representatives to âprotect potentially privileged informationâ on the thumb drives, the report states.
Details about the other three thumb drives are sparse. They could include information about Obamaâs White House, Congress and the State Department.
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service obtained emails from the U.S. government, political groups and think tanks, according to another file released by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in recent days: A House Intelligence Committee investigation. The investigation delved into the paucity of evidence supporting the idea that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. It had been confined to a lockbox at CIA headquarters for years.  The emails allegedly revealed concerns within the Democratic Party about Clintonâs physical and mental health, including daily use of âheavy tranquilizersâ during the 2016 campaign. Obama was among the people with concerns, the report states.
(Featured Image Media Credit:Â Screenshot/MSNBC)
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