Thursday, June 8, 2017

Senior Democrat Nadler called for Comey firing in 2016 for interfering in the election. In significant publicity blow to Comey and FBI, Obama DOJ appointed Inspector Gen. in Jan. 2017 to review all Comey actions-Guardian UK, 1/12/17

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Jan. 12, 2017, "Justice department to review FBI's conduct in Clinton email inquiry," Guardian UK, Oliver Laughland 

"The justice department’s Office of the Inspector General announced on Thursday that it would conduct a review of the handling of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server during her time as secretary of state.

The independent auditor said the sprawling review would include an examination of whether the FBI director, James Comey, violated policy or procedure when he sent Congress notification about new evidence his department had discovered, 11 days before the presidential election....

Three days before the election, Comey publicly conceded that none of the new material was pertinent to the investigation, which concluded Clinton was not criminally responsible for the use of the personal server but had been “extremely careless” in her handling of sensitive information. 

The justice department review, a significant publicity blow to the FBI, will examine this statement as well as a public announcement made by Comey in July during which the findings of the investigation were made public....

(Inspector General) Horowitz, an Obama appointee, said the review would also examine whether justice department officials and FBI employees had “improperly disclosed non-public information” during the investigation.

The review had been opened “in response to requests from numerous chairmen and ranking members of congressional oversight committees, various organizations, and members of the public”.

Jerry Nadler, a senior Democratic member of the House judiciary committee and one of the most prominent voices calling for an independent investigation of Comey’s conduct, welcomed the announcement.

You can’t have the FBI or a prosecuting agency interfering with the election and he [Comey] most certainly did. He should have been fired for that on the spot,” Nadler told the Guardian in an interview.

“What’s important is that we firm up how government agencies, police agencies behave before an election so that we can make sure that this type of thing doesn’t happen again, so we don’t have future elections whose legitimacy is called into question.” 

Clinton’s former press spokesman Brian Fallon told MSNBC the review was “entirely appropriate and very necessary but also not surprising because the deviations from the FBI and the justice department were so glaring and egregious”....

The sweeping nature of the review means it is also set to examine whether the justice department’s assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, Peter Kadzik, “should have been recused from participating in certain matters” in the investigation of Clinton’s emails. 

Hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks showed Kadzik had contacted Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, to alert him to a forthcoming congressional hearing that would likely involve questions about the candidate. 

Although the inspector general has the ability to recommend a criminal investigation into Comey’s conduct, such a conclusion would be highly unlikely, with the probe examining whether the director breached departmental policy on discussing investigations publicly."...



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