A senior FBI official has admitted under oath the bureau found emails sent from Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server in President Obama’s executive office in the White House.
E.W. Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue, the Washington watchdog said Tuesday.
“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement Tuesday.
“No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated – Barack Obama is implicated in her email scheme,” he said.
Fitton was referring to the more than 30,000 emails under subpoena that were thoroughly deleted through an application called BleachBit by order of Clinton’s State Department team.
When James Comey announced in July 2016 that the FBI had decided not to refer criminal charges in the case, the then-FBI director, nevertheless, said Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information.
More than 100 emails on her server contained classified information, including 65 emails deemed “Secret” and 22 “Top Secret.” Another 2,093 emails were retroactively marked classified by the State Department.
Judicial Watch is trying to find out whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act by using a non-government email system.
Priestap helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations.
Judicial Watch said Priestap also disclosed that nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner. The former congressman, who is serving a federal prison sentence for transferring obscene material to a minor, was married to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth has ordered Priestap, along with Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides, to be deposed or answer written questions under oath.
The court ruled the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”
‘Cover-up’ discussions
Earlier this month, Judicial Watch released 422 pages of FBI documents showing evidence of “cover-up” discussions related to Clinton’s unauthorized email system within the company that managed it.
A Platte River Networks email sent in December 2014 says: “Its [sic] all part of the Hillary coverup operation I’ll have to tell you about it at the party.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch also show Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough forwarding “concerns” about classified information contained in the Clinton emails.
Judicial Watch also obtained Clinton’s 2009 classified information Non-Disclosure Agreement bearing her signature.
And documents show Platte River Networks’ use of BleachBit on the Clinton server to delete files. The program was downloaded on March 31, 2015, according to a computer event log. Over the next half hour it was used to delete the files on the server at a time when they were under subpoena.
The October 2016 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed after the Justice Department failed to comply with a July 2016 FOIA request.
