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“Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.“
The day the original story about Hillary Clinton’s private email server broke, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta wrote to another top Clinton aide that the campaign was “going to have to dump all those emails,” CBS News reports.
The Clinton campaign has said that by “dump,” Podesta meant release to the public—like in a document dump—and not deleting or getting rid of them.
“Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, Anthony Weiner,” the New York Times reports.
“The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.”
“The FBI will re-open its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, bureau director James Comey said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday,” NBC News reports.
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.
I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
“The FBI language in the letter to Congress makes clear that new evidence has been discovered and thus will be reviewed — meaning FBI agents will read these emails. It is unusual for the FBI to tell Congress it is looking over newly discovered evidence in a criminal inquiry that was otherwise closed.”
Washington Post: “The announcement appears to restart the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s server, less than two weeks before the presidential election, an explosive development that could shape the campaign’s final days.”
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Rick Klein: “John Podesta’s hacked emails have provided enough raw material to fill a bookshelf with campaign retrospectives. We now have a picture of fierce internal debates over how to handle Hillary Clinton’s paid-speech transcripts, emerging primary challenges from the left, and of course how to handle the matter of her email server. (‘There Is Just No Good Answer,’ Philippe Reines wrote to Podesta and several other top aides, with dramatic spacing for effect.)”
“But the peek behind the curtain is perhaps nowhere more revealing than in the warfare revealed between Chelsea Clinton and top Bill Clinton aide Doug Band over the Clinton Foundation and the web of personal and business connections that grew around it. A memo out this week via Wikileaks has Band describing what he labeled ‘Bill Clinton Inc.,’ describing his work to secure ‘in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,’ in addition to highly paid speeches to private enterprises.”
“This is the kind of operation the Clintons’ critics have long warned about – with revolving doors, intersecting public and private interests, and opportunities for lined pockets all around. Donald Trump this week was criticized for taking a break from his campaign to attend to and hype business matters. Inside Clinton Inc., that doesn’t look so out of the ordinary.”
“Two chief fundraisers for the Clinton Foundation pressed corporate donors to steer business opportunities to former President Bill Clinton as well, according to a hacked memo published Wednesday by WikiLeaks,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The memo, part of a cache of emails stolen from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, resurfaces an issue that she has had a hard time shaking: questions over the relationship between the Clintons’ charity work and their personal business.”
“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by the New York Times, saying he’s trying to unsettle Hillary Clinton by talking about her husband’s infidelities.
Eric Trump says it took “a lot of courage” for his father not to attack former President Bill Clinton on his extramarital affairs, NBC News reports.
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Trump showed “presidential virtue” by not talking about the Clinton scandals.
“The scandals, of course, have been successfully revived by Trump and his allies this week — including in this article — by pretending not to talk about them.”
Top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills given immunity deal in FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server, the AP reports.
Todd Purdum: “For all the public grind of this campaign, for all her public presence on the world stage over the past two decades, Clinton herself has increasingly spent her days in a kind of purdah, suppressing spontaneous utterances and surrounded by loyalists whose chief role is her care and feeding. She communicates only through a veil of unyielding self-protection, surrounded by a curtain of defensiveness.”
“So nowadays, almost no one outside Clinton’s innermost circle ever sees the tender side that loyal aides and friends insist is such a palpable part of her personality, but I can attest that it is there.”
Out next month: Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History by Russell L. Riley.
Drawn from over 400 hours of candid conversations with members of President Clinton’s cabinet and other close colleagues.
A Washington Post editorial says it’s time to stop fixating on Hillary Clinton’s emails now that the FBI said there wasn’t evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
“Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.”
This newly-released email from Colin Powell to Hillary Clinton advising her about avoiding “systems that captured the data” is extraordinary.
Newly-disclosed emails show that former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton at the start of her tenure at the State Department that he used a personal computer to conduct government business, and took steps to avoid “going through the State Department servers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The new emails appear to show Mr. Powell suggesting he intentionally conducted work-related emails with foreign leaders and State Department officials using a personal computer or the personal accounts of government staffers.”
In a memo to employees, FBI Director James Comey said the decision to not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton wasn’t a close call.
Said Comey: “At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case.”
He concluded: “Those suggesting that we are ‘political’ or part of some ‘fix’ either don’t know us, or they are full of baloney (and maybe some of both).”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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