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Gohmert told The Epoch Times that contradictions in the accounts of Mills, Combetta, and Samuelson mean that at least one of them risks having their immunity deal voided if it is found they have lied to investigators.
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The Origin
Neither Mills nor Samuelson were aware that Combetta had created an archive mailbox on the Clinton email server run by Platte River Networks.
Combetta created the mailbox using "carterheavyindustries@gmail.com" upon a request from Monica Hanley, an aide to Clinton. Combetta said Hanley contacted him in February 2014 and asked him to transfer an archive of Clinton's emails from 2009 to 2013 in her possession to the Platte River Networks server.
After attempting to perform the transfer remotely and failing due to a poor network connection, Combetta had Hanley ship him the Apple Mac laptop on which the emails resided. Combetta then used the Gmail account to transfer the emails to the email server. He told the FBI he used the Gmail address because he could not take emails from the Mac's email application directly to the server.
Combetta claims to have shipped the laptop back to the Clinton Foundation, but the device was never received and the FBI could not track it down. Hanley also had a copy of all of Clinton's emails on a thumb drive, but told the FBI that she does not recall where it is.
Hanley transferred four years of Clinton's emails onto the Mac laptop in the spring of 2013, when it was revealed that the email account of Clinton associate Sydney Blumenthal was hacked. The Blumenthal hacking prompted Platte River Networks to advise Clinton to change her email address. Clinton wanted to keep her old emails, so Justin Cooper, a Clinton aide, gave Hanley a spare laptop from the New York office of former president Bill Clinton.
Hanley told the FBI that the transfer took four days to complete. She said the laptop stayed in her possession for months before she remembered, in early 2014, that she still had it. Hanley then contacted Platte River Networks to transfer the archive to the email server.
By the time Hanley contacted Platte River Networks, Combetta had already transferred all of the emails from Clinton's old server to the new server in Secaucus. As a result, he imported the emails from the Mac laptop into an archive mailbox on the server.
aggiehawg said:
IG Report is out!!
Being reported on FNC.blindey said:
link???????
blindey said:
link???????
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As described in this report, we conclude that Comey's retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.4
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We conclude that the Memos were official FBI records, rather than Comey's personal documents. Accordingly, after his removal as FBI Director, Comey violated applicable policies and his Employment Agreement by failing to either surrender his copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 to the FBI or seek authorization to retain them; by releasing official FBI information and records to third parties without authorization; and by failing to immediately alert the FBI about his disclosures to his personal attorneys once he became aware in June 2017 that Memo 2 contained six words (four of which were names of foreign countries mentioned by the President) that the FBI had determined were classified at the "CONFIDENTIAL" level.
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Comey violated Department and FBI policies, and the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement, by retaining copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 after he was removed as Director, regardless of each Memo's classification level. As a departing FBI employee, Comey was required to relinquish any official documents in his possession and to seek specific authorization from the FBI in order to personally retain any FBI documents. Comey failed to comply with these requirements.
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Comey violated these Department and FBI policies by failing to surrender his copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 upon being removed as FBI Director and by failing to seek authorization to retain them. Comey's explanation for his conduct was that he considered the Memos to be personal records, but for the reasons previously described, this assertion is without any legal basis. In view of the clarity of relevant provisions of law, policies, and Comey's Employment Agreement, the assertion that the Memos were personal records was not reasonable. We found it particularly concerning that Comey did not tell anyone from the FBI that he had retained copies of the Memos in his personal safe at home, even when his Chief of Staff, the FBI's Associate Deputy Director, and three SSAs came to Comey's house on May 12, 2017, to inventory and remove all FBI property.
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Comey violated FBI policy and the requirements of his FBI Employment Agreement when he chose this path. By disclosing the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to The New York Times, Comey made public sensitive investigative information related to an ongoing FBI investigation, information he had properly declined to disclose while still FBI Director during his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey was not authorized to disclose the statements he attributed to President Trump in Memo 4, which Comey viewed as evidence of an alleged attempt to obstruct the Flynn investigation and which were relevant to the ongoing Flynn investigation.92 Comey clearly considered the contents of Memo 4 highly sensitivein fact, as he stated in his June 8, 2017 congressional testimony, Comey and other senior leaders of the FBI had decided not to report the President's statements to the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General, and to keep the President's statements "very closely held," so that the FBI leadership could "figure out what to do with it down the road as our investigation progressed." Comey placed in the public domain evidence relevant to the investigation of Flynn, and what he clearly viewed as evidence of an attempt to obstruct justice by President Trump. Rather than continuing to safeguard such evidence, Comey unilaterally and without authorization disclosed it to all. By his own admission, Comey disclosed the contents of Memo 4 in an attempt to force the Department to take official investigative actionsto appoint a Special Counsel and preserve any tapes as evidence.
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Comey told the OIG that he made the decision to provide the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to The New York Times so that the President's request of Comey to "let[] Flynn go" would be in "the public square." At the time, as Comey knew from his work as FBI Director, the FBI had an ongoing investigation of Flynn that included examining Flynn's contacts with the Russian Ambassador.91 Comey said he believed disclosing the President's statement would "change the game" by creating "extraordinary pressure on the leadership of the Department of Justice, which [Comey did] not trust," to appoint a Special Counsel, who would preserve any potential tapes of his conversations with the President. Comey said his view at the time was that "if the world knew there might be tapes of Donald Trump asking me to drop an investigation, there would be tremendous pressure for [the Deputy Attorney General] to hand it to an independent prosecutor." Comey also said he believed that this was something he was "uniquely situated to do" as a private citizen, but that he chose to do this through an intermediary because he did not want to respond to questions from reporters. Comey violated FBI policy and the requirements of his FBI Employment Agreement when he chose this path.
By disclosing the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to The New York Times, Comey made public sensitive investigative information related to an ongoing FBI investigation, information he had properly declined to disclose while still FBI Director during his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony.
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Members of Comey's senior leadership team used the adjectives "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning that Comey acted on his own to provide the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to a reporter. The unauthorized disclosure of this informationinformation that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Directorviolated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI's Prepublication Review Policy.94
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On June 7, 2017, Comey learned of the FBI's classification decision regarding Memo 2 when the FBI allowed him to review copies of all seven Memos, with classification banners and markings, in preparation for his June 8, 2017 congressional testimony. Once he knew that the FBI had classified portions of Memo 2, Comey failed to immediately notify the FBI that he had previously given Memo 2 to his attorneys.101 The FBI's Safeguarding Classified National Security Information Policy Guide clearly states that "[a]ny person who has knowledge that classified information has been or may have been lost, compromised, or disclosed to an unauthorized person must immediately report the circumstances to his or her security office." 102 Comey violated this requirement by failing to immediately inform the FBI that he provided Memo 2 to his attorneys.
That's going to leave a mark!Quote:
VI. Conclusion Congress has provided the FBI with substantial powers and authorities to gather evidence as part of the FBI's criminal and counterintelligence mission. The FBI uses these authorities every day in its many investigations into allegations of drug trafficking, terrorism, fraud, organized crime, public corruption, espionage, 101 As for the other three Memos that Comey provided to his attorneys, there was no classified information in Memos 4 and 6, and Comey redacted the entire paragraph of Memo 7 that contained classified information before he sent Memo 7 to his attorneys. Compare the version of Memo 7 in Appendix A with Comey's redacted version of Memo 7 in Appendix B. 102 Safeguarding Classified NSI PG, 3.7. 59 and a host of other threats to national security and public safety. In the process, the FBI lawfully gains access to a significant amount of sensitive information about individuals, many of whom have not been charged, may never be charged, or may not even be a subject of the investigation. For this reason, the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI's investigative authorities depend on the FBI's ability to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.
As Comey himself explained in his March 20, 2017 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he was unable to provide details about the nature or scope of the FBI's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election because
"the FBI is very careful in how we handle information about our cases and about the people we are investigating. Our ability to share details with the Congress and the American people is limited when those investigations are still open, which I hope makes sense. We need to protect people's privacy. We just cannot do our work well or fairly if we start talking about it while we're doing it."
However, after his removal as FBI Director two months later, Comey provided a copy of Memo 4, which Comey had kept without authorization, to Richman with instructions to share the contents with a reporter for The New York Times. Memo 4 included information that was related to both the FBI's ongoing investigation of Flynn and, by Comey's own account, information that he believed and alleged constituted evidence of an attempt to obstruct the ongoing Flynn investigation; later that same day, The New York Times published an article about Memo 4 entitled, "Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation."
The responsibility to protect sensitive law enforcement information falls in large part to the employees of the FBI who have access to it through their daily duties. On occasion, some of these employees may disagree with decisions by prosecutors, judges, or higher ranking FBI and Department officials about the actions to take or not take in criminal and counterintelligence matters. They may even, in some situations, distrust the legitimacy of those supervisory, prosecutorial, or judicial decisions. But even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information.
Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employeesand the many thousands more former FBI employeeswho similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions "if I love this countryand I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI." However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director's example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement 60 duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey expressed a similar concern to President Trump, according to Memo 4, in discussing leaks of FBI information, telling Trump that the FBI's ability to conduct its work is compromised "if people run around telling the press what we do." This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey's closest advisors used the words "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.
We have previously faulted Comey for acting unilaterally and inconsistent with Department policy.103 Comey's unauthorized disclosure of sensitive law enforcement information about the Flynn investigation merits similar criticism. In a country built on the rule of law, it is of utmost importance that all FBI employees adhere to Department and FBI policies, particularly when confronted by what appear to be extraordinary circumstances or compelling personal convictions. Comey had several other lawful options available to him to advocate for the appointment of a Special Counsel, which he told us was his goal in making the disclosure. What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.
The OIG has provided this report to the FBI and to the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility for action they deem appropriate.
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The responsibility to protect sensitive law enforcement information falls in large part to the employees of the FBI who have access to it through their daily duties. On occasion, some of these employees may disagree with decisions by prosecutors, judges, or higher ranking FBI and Department officials about the actions to take or not take in criminal and counterintelligence matters. They may even, in some situations, distrust the legitimacy of those supervisory, prosecutorial, or judicial decisions. But even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information. Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employeesand the many thousands more former FBI employeeswho similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions "if I love this countryand I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI."
However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director's example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey expressed a similar concern to President Trump, according to Memo 4, in discussing leaks of FBI information, telling Trump that the FBI's ability to conduct its work is compromised "if people run around telling the press what we do." This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey's closest advisors used the words "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.
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What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.
Actually, he broke multiple laws, multiple times but under the current Hillary Clinton standard of elites never pay for their crimes, he's not going to prison.PearlJammin said:
He broke FBI rules. Slap on the wrist.
This is a nothingburger.
