Recall that, of some 13 unsecured devices like Blackberries and iPads that Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used, along with her unsecured private email server, to conduct official and classified official State Department business, none of those 13 devices can be found. Not a single one of them. Two of those cell phones were “destroyed” with a hammer or by being broken into two pieces.
In addition to those…disappearances…a computer specialist employed by Platte River Networks, which was itself employed by Clinton to manage her email network, deleted emails that all the players involved, from Clinton and her immediate staff—Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills—on down through Platte River to and including the computer specialist, knew were under Congressional subpoena and order to preserve. Now this:
The Department of Justice reportedly gave immunity to a computer expert who deleted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails during its investigation into her private email server despite being ordered by Congress to keep them.
Understand that granting immunity, even by the Obama/Lynch DoJ, isn’t by itself a bad thing: immunity often is granted to an individual who might otherwise come under criminal investigation himself in order to get the immunized person to talk freely in the capacity of a witness to larger wrong-doing. I’ll come back to this point.
The New York Times has identified the immunized person of interest here as Paul Combetta. The NYT went on to say
Republicans have called for the department to investigate the deletions, but the immunity deal with the specialist, Paul Combetta, makes it unlikely that the request will go far.
The NYT, sadly, is probably right, but for reasons wholly unrelated to immunity. Such immunity also is occasionally granted in order to be able to compel the immunized person to answer investigator questions. Voluntarily, or involuntarily, Combetta certainly can answer investigator questions, even can give testimony at open trial. The immunization only protects him from prosecution based on what he says; it does not seal his lips.
That the FBI has at least many of those emails that had been deleted (unsuccessfully, as is beginning to be apparent) is clear from many of the FBI’s lately releases. That the FBI is as aware of the Congressional order as everyone else involved also is obvious.
Comey’s decision to not proceed on his own initiative is a whitewash. It’s every law enforcement officer’s duty to investigate criminal activity when he sees it; he doesn’t have to await a complaint from outside the agency to start, as Comey ludicrously told Senator Jason Chaffetz (R, UT).
But this is part and parcel of the Obama/Lynch DoJ’s and the Comey FBI’s whitewash of the whole Clinton email security failure. In the one case, they’re protecting one of their own, and in the other case, he’s protecting one of their own.
And so the NYT likely is right.
Comey’s crocodile tears in his internal, ‘twarn’t me” memo to his agents notwithstanding.
