Classified Report on Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey Finally Released

After a long wait, a classified annex to Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 2018 report on the FBI, Loretta Lynch, and Hillary Clinton comes out, with bizarre details

DECLASSIFIED ALL-STARS: Clockwise from top left, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Hillary Clinton

The hits keep coming. Amid controversies surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Tulsi Gabbard’s Trump-Russia investigation, an odd new window was thrown open Monday into the FBI’s ill-fated “Midyear Exam” investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced the declassification of a classified appendix to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2018 report into the FBI’s handling of the email probe.

It’s a long-awaited release of 35 pages of curious-to-alarming classified details from the Clinton email investigation.* There will be groans that this is another rehash of “But her emails!”, but the IG annex is a significant new angle, and about a lot of things, not just Hilary Clinton.

The report focuses on a previously-undisclosed inquiry into eight thumb drives of material from a source called “T1.” This source delivered reams of correspondence from American officials purloined by a foreign (likely Russian) intelligence service, as well as analytical documents in Russian. Horowitz was circumspect about their provenance:

Beginning in [redacted], the FBI obtained [redacted] thumb drives from a source known as T1… These thumb drives primarily contain data exfiltrated by [redacted] from various U.S. victims, including the Executive Office of the President (EoP), the State Department, the U.S. House of Representatives, other federal agencies, and private sector and federal institutions…

The FBI’s apparent failure to investigate a serious breach of official correspondence, all the way up to the President’s office, seems the most important revelation. Former Grassley aide and chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee Jason Foster, now of Empower Oversight, said these releases compared the FBI’s handling of Midyear Exam to a foundering ship.

“They’re not just ignoring the hole in the hull,” Foster said. “They’re on purpose looking in the other direction, not even investigating how much water is coming in.”

One element to the T1 documents whose relevance Horowitz did explain had to do with a Russian-language document summarizing, as he put it, “purported communications between Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz… and two different individuals from the Open Society Foundation” of George Soros.

This document, which Comey and the FBI said they deemed not credible, nonetheless contained analysis of the stolen American correspondence with an eyebrow-raising piece of gossip: that “the political director of the Hillary Clinton staff, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives information from Loretta Lynch of the Department of Justice, on the plans and intentions of the FBI”:

Whether or not the rumors were true is immaterial. They were still important, as their existence apparently motivated Comey to issue his much-ballyhooed July 5th, 2016 announcement wrapping up the Clinton investigation.

“Not that I believe in them,” Comey said, referencing the documents, but “I could picture emails rocketing around the Internet of… someone at the Atlantic Council saying, ‘I just had lunch with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She told me Loretta Lynch is controlling Jim Comey’”:

Much of the material in this new declassified annex describes the IG’s efforts to understand how the FBI investigated the Lynch angle. It shows even officials now considered fanatical Democratic Party partisans, like Andrew McCabe, speaking in exasperated or puzzled tones about Lynch, and includes other exchanges involving other officials that are head-scratching or comical. To wit: