The Daily Caller: Hillary Clinton to Be Interviewed by FBI Today
News that Hillary will be sitting down with the FBI comes hours after U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that she will accept the recommendation of "career prosecutors and the FBI director" when determining whether to prosecute Clinton.
While most Americans will be enjoying barbecue and fireworks this 4th of July weekend, Hillary Clinton will be fielding questions from the FBI.
Clinton is scheduled to meet Saturday with agents investigating her use of a private email server while secretary of state, The Daily Caller is reporting. Their source believes the interview will take place at Clinton’s Washington, D.C., home, and was scheduled for the holiday weekend to attract minimal attention. The presumptive Democratic nominee has no campaign activities scheduled for Saturday.
Interviewing the former secretary of state is believed to be the final step in the probe into whether Clinton mishandled classified information. “This is most likely the last piece because you don’t interview the principle subject until you have everything,” a former top ranking FBI official told The New York Post.
Some of Clinton’s closest aides, including confidante and deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin, have already sat down with the Feds, while the technology professional who helped set up the private server, Bryan Pagliano, has testified under an immunity agreement. CNN has reported Pagliano also turned over documents and other materials.
News that the FBI will be interviewing Hillary comes hours after U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that she will accept the recommendation of “career prosecutors and the FBI director” when determining whether to prosecute Clinton. While some have suggested a criminal indictment is unlikely, putting Clinton’s fate in the hands of FBI director James Comey could spell trouble for the scandal-plagued candidate. Twenty years ago, as Time magazine profiled in March, Comey was part of the Whitewater investigation team looking into her and her then-President husband:
In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement. Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté,” Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”
Clinton was not indicted back then. But once again, Comey is investigating mishandled documents, blocked investigators, patterns of concealment and the destruction of documents on the part of Hillary. And this time the call whether to push for prosecution is his.
Lynch Concedes Her Private Meeting With Bill Clinton “Cast a Shadow”
Both Hillary’s pending interview and Lynch’s statement that she’ll stick with the FBI recommendation regarding Hillary time curiously with the growing uproar over Lynch’s mysterious meeting Monday with Bill Clinton. On Friday Lynch said herself of that earlier meeting, “I certainly wouldn’t do it again because I think it has cast a shadow over how this case will be perceived.” But even as the Attorney General sought to put out the fire over the conversation, further details sent the flames wider.
Christopher Sign, an anchor for the Phoenix station that broke the story, said Thursday night that FBI officials didn’t want any record of the supposedly social visit. He set the scene for Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, “She arrives, some people step off of her plane, the former president steps into her plane. They then speak for 30 minutes privately, the FBI there on the tarmac instructing everybody around, ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.'”
Meanwhile, Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported Friday that FBI agents involved in the Clinton investigation are “livid” over the meeting. The agents are not just angry over the optics. They say that because the Bureau is concurrently investigating corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation, that Bill Clinton himself is a potential witness.