Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about news that former FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton for her email offenses before the investigation was complete.
Fitton described this as a troubling development, uncovered only because “Senator [Chuck] Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham over at the Judiciary Committee asked questions about what was going on at the FBI in terms of Mr. Comey’s behavior during the election season.”
“The office of the special counsel I believe interviewed some of his aides, including his then-chief of staff and one of his top lawyers,” Fitton added. “Under questioning, they admitted he began drafting the statement that he famously, or infamously, read in early July exonerating Hillary Clinton in terms of a criminal prosecution back in April or May.”
“This is before Mrs. Clinton was interviewed. This is before one of her top IT aides was interviewed, Bryan Pagliano, who later went on to take the Fifth Amendment I believe. And then you’ve got, I think, 15 other witnesses who hadn’t been interviewed, including her chief of staff,” he noted.
“So this wasn’t something where they had done all the work and it was just a matter of putting all the paperwork together. They hadn’t done the core aspects of the investigation, and Comey evidently had it wired,” he charged.
“As Andy McCarthy pointed out over the weekend, his statements echoed President Obama’s statements back in April of last year saying that she hadn’t done anything wrong, it was a snafu or an innocent mistake, it was careless but not criminal. It shows you that the FBI investigation was wired, it was incomplete, it was certainly not an honest investigation,” Fitton argued.
“It explains why Mr. Comey was handing out, or his FBI and Justice Department were handing out, immunity like candy to the various witnesses, because there was never any intent to prosecute, because Mr. Comey had already decided not to, evidently,” he said.
“I can’t tell you how important it is as a result for President Trump and the Justice Department to re-initiate and re-open the Clinton investigations. What Comey did, and how the FBI behaved, everything that we’ve been learning shows that the investigation was ham-handed at the least and dishonest at the most. It needs to be restarted,” he urged.
Fitton said it was long past time for Congress to begin a formal investigation, above and beyond routine oversight, adding that Clinton should be a part of any investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“You can’t separate the two because Clinton is embroiled in Russian connections as well,” he contended.
“The way the FBI handled and the Justice Department handled the Clinton investigations, and a comparison to what it was doing against President Trump and his team at the time – they were targeting him, and going out of its way to go after him, and surveil him, and then subsequently there were illicit leaks about the results of that targeting,” Fitton noted. “Compare and contrast with how it handled Hillary Clinton, and how it handled the pay-for-play allegations tied to the Russians.”
“This has to be all part of a piece,” he said. “Certainly the Justice Department needs to finally get on the ball, but Congress has yet to hold, if I’m correct, one hearing on the Uranium One issue.”
“Money was flowing into Mrs. Clinton’s personal coffers through her husband’s speaking fees. Mrs. Clinton was getting money directly. It wasn’t through her foundation. There was money, obviously, through the foundation but the dirty little secret that everyone in Washington knows about is that she was making money directly through her husband’s speaking fees from the Russians and virtually every other foreign interest,” Fitton said, agreeing with Boyle’s point that Clinton’s dealings had more ominous implications for national security and government corruption than anything President Trump has been nebulously accused of.
“Why is this still relevant? Because, like I said, it’s a matter of disparate treatment between the FBI / Justice Department investigations of Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump at the time. There has got to be accountability for the abuse of the Justice Department and the FBI to spy, target, and leak with Mr. Trump and protect Hillary Clinton contrary to law,” he declared.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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