FBI taking steps to keep Clinton email files from leaking

Clinton was able to avoid accountability in the aftermath of the Benghazi scandal, although the truthfulness of her testimony is now very much in doubt. However, this doesn’t mean that the FBI will forget about the investigation.

The report to the Congress, among others, includes notes from the interviews of Clinton, 68, and other witnesses in the investigation.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of “MSNBC Live”, host Stephanie Ruhle played a montage of FBI Director James Comey contradicting Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statements before the Benghazi Select Committee and asked Representative Matt Cartwright (D-PA), “How is that not perjury?”.

Republican committee members plan to bring up the perjury issue at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in September that will focus on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a Republican committee aide who was not authorized to speak on the record. Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, demanded Comey turn over notes from the interview and promised to take the steps to request the Department of Justice consider investigating Clinton for perjury.

“And make no mistake, if these statements are released to Congress, they will be released”, said Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement on Monday.

Any Republican who leaks classified information from the FBI’s notes could face criminal prosecution. “Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton.still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013”.

It’s the latest development in the controversy over Clinton’s private email server, which she used during her tenure as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. The businessman also asked Russian hackers publicly to start searching these emails, in order to be “rewarded mightily” by the USA press. Those allegations gained new legs recently when new emails showed State Department employees seemingly doing favors on behalf of the Clinton Foundation.

Some Republicans are urging that the unclassified documents be released publicly.

“In each of these instances, the secretary did not originate the information; instead, the emails were forwarded to her by staff members, with the portion-marked information located within the email chains and without header and footer markings indicating the presence of classified information”, the letter reads.

House Republicans claim Clinton may have broken the law and lied under oath when testifying before Congress.

FBI case files are typically kept confidential after an investigation is closed without a recommendation for charges, and the Clinton documents were sent to Congress accompanied by written warnings not to leak the information. Clinton has said that she severed her role from the foundation after she became secretary of state.

“This is an extraordinarily rare step that was sought exclusively by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI”, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement.

The announcement comes as the conservative group Judicial Watch announced they would receive copies of thousands of previously undisclosed work-related emails sent or received by Clinton.