Less than 24 hours after the FBI released documents confirming discussions of a bargain between the FBI and State Department over reclassification of at least one classified Hillary Clinton email, the spokesman for the State Department categorically denied that any such discussions ever happened.
“There was no quid pro quo even suggested or any kind of bargain laid on the table,” said John Kirby, in an interview Tuesday on Fox & Friends. “There was no bargain even suggested by these two individuals.”
This is false.
Here is how the proposed quid pro quo was described in the FBI summary of its interview with an individual who worked in the FBI’s International Operations Division [IOD]. “Not yet knowing the email’s content, [REDACTED] told Kennedy he would look into the matter if Kennedy would provide authority concerning the FBI’s request to increase its personnel in Iraq.”
And here is the proposed bargain described in an interview with a second FBI official, this one the chief of the FBI records management division. “Shortly thereafter, [redacted] received a call from [redacted] of the International Operations Division [IOD] of the FBI, who ‘pressured’ him to change the classified email to unclassified. [Redacted] said he had been contacted by Patrick Kennedy, Undersecretary of State, who had asked his assistance in altering the email’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo.'” This individual described the deal this way: “In exchange for making the email unclassified State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden.”
Contrary to the highly misleading spin from Kirby, there was, in fact, a bargain discussed by these individuals, though the agreement they considered was never executed.
On Tuesday, one of the individuals involved in the discussion, former FBI official Brian McCauley, confirmed the discussion in an interview with Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post. “In an hour-long interview with The Washington Post, his first public comments on the matter, McCauley acknowledged that he offered to do a favor in exchange for another favor, but before he had any inkling of what Kennedy wanted.”
McCauley told the Post that he had been trying to get ahold of Kennedy seeking approval of additional FBI slots overseas, confirming what he told FBI investigators last year. Weeks went by without a response from Kennedy. When the two men finally spoke, according to McCauley, Kennedy began by asking for a favor.
“He said, ‘Brian. Pat Kennedy. I need a favor,'” told the Post. “I said, ‘Good, I need a favor. I need our people back in Baghdad.'”
McCauley says he took Kennedy’s request to his colleagues who work on classification, but when he learned that the email was related to the Benghazi attacks, he called Kennedy to turn him down. “I said, ‘Absolutely not, I can’t help you,’ and he took that, and it was fine,” McCauley said.
All of which leaves one obvious question: Why did Kennedy call McCauley, who worked in IOD and had nothing whatsoever to do with classification issues, instead of calling records management, the FBI division that handles classification issues? If Kennedy had a good case for declassifying this Clinton email and his request was a proper one, as Kirby and Clinton defenders would have us believe, why not simply call directly to the FBI division that could make the perfunctory change?
Zapotosky asked McCauley, who speculated that it was simply their familiarity. “We got along, and I was always going to him,” McCauley said. “I was a regular name, regular face. Maybe he thought I was in a position where I could support him?”
And why would Kennedy think McCauley would support him on a matter totally unrelated to his responsibilities at the FBI? Because McCauley had been calling him for weeks seeking a favor and Kennedy hoped that he could turn that into a win on classification.
This is how Patrick Kennedy has operated for years. And although he is a career foreign service officer, he managed to earn the trust of Hillary Clinton and her inner circle, effectively serving them as an on-call scandal manager, as these investigations by Foreign Policy and the Washington Examiner make clear.
Despite his involvement in the fateful security decisions before the attacks in Benghazi, Kennedy helped coordinate the State Department pushback to internal and external inquiries about those attacks, both under Clinton and after she left. Kennedy helped chief of staff Cheryl Mills select Clinton-friendly members and staff of the State Department’s Administrative Review Board (ARB). Although Clinton would use the findings from the ARB as the key component of her defense on Benghazi, the in-house State Department investigation of those attacks was hardly independent. The chairmen acknowledged under congressional questioning that they had advised Clinton and her team about potentially problematic witnesses before congressional hearings, provided an advanced copy of their final report to several top Clinton staffers, allowed Mills to edit the report, and even briefed Clinton for two hours on their findings before they were made public. Not surprisingly, the ARB report largely exonerated Clinton and Kennedy.
Kennedy was the State Department official with ultimate responsibility for providing—or in many cases, withholding—information from Congress in its multiple investigations of Benghazi. Members of Congress and key staff involved with the Benghazi investigations tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that they interacted with Kennedy as often as any State Department official.
More recently, Kennedy served as a point man for Clinton as she mounted a defense of her email practices, putting his years fighting inside the national security and foreign policy bureaucracy to work on behalf of his old boss. It’s an odd role for Kennedy who, as Undersecretary of State for Management, oversees the department’s compliance with federal records laws. In a deposition last summer related to a Freedom of Information Act request from the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, Kennedy testified that while he exchanged dozens of emails with Secretary Clinton’s private email address, he never thought to ask whether her non-governmental email violated the US government federal records requirements. Kennedy testified that he did not know about Clinton’s private server until he read learned about it in news accounts. He made this claim despite the fact that he emailed with two different Clinton addresses: [email protected] and [email protected].
“It’s not — it’s not something that I ever focused on,” Kennedy testified, according to an account in the Washington Post. “It did not register as — it did not strike any bells in my mind, no…I was focused on responding to the query that I had received.”
To be clear, it was Kennedy’s job to be focused on whether Clinton’s email practices were consistent with federal law. He testified before Congress on the importance of federal records compliance and email security. “To heighten awareness of what is and is not permitted when working on the Department’s classified network and on classified systems, user awareness reminders are now available for Department employees on its classified network, in addition to the standard in-person briefings about handling classified material and a soon-to-be-released computer based course on identifying and marking classified and sensitive information.”
Either Kennedy was not doing his job or he was not being honest about his understanding of Clinton’s email set up. There are reasons to believe it’s the latter; chief among them, the role Kennedy played in the hiring of the Brian Pagliano, the man who set up Clinton’s private server and has repeatedly refused to testify before Congress about his involvement.
In an FBI interview conducted June 3, 2016, a State Department official whose name is redacted told investigators that Kennedy was the State Department official who recommended that State hire Pagliano. “Around the time of Clinton’s onboard transition, Patrick Kennedy, Undersecretary of State for Management, suggested [redacted] interview Brian Pagliano, who served on Clinton’s 2012 Presidential Campaign*. [Redacted] and [Redacted] interviewed Pagliano, who had an MBA form the University of Maryland. After interviewing Pagliano [Redacted] agreed he would be a good fit for [Redacted] team. Pagliano was subsequently hired on to DoS in a Schedule C position, and was tasked with assisting mainly with cost recovery planning and researching DoS technical enhancement opportunities.” *(Pagliano worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign.)
Kennedy testified in court that he believes he was given Pagliano’s name by the State Department’s White House Liaison office as the department was staffing up, but he could not recall who provided him with Pagliano’s name or resume.
That is just one of several remaining questions about Kennedy’s effort to hide potentially problematic emails on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Others: Kennedy was unsuccessful in his persistent efforts to persuade or coerce FBI officials into changing the classification of Clinton emails. Did he engage in a similar campaign with others? Did Kennedy pressure the CIA, DIA, NSA, NGA or other intelligence agencies to change classification on Clinton emails? Did they comply? Did he offer them bureaucratic favors in return? Did the FBI ask Kennedy about this?
We got an answer—sort of—to this last question. TWS asked the FBI whether the investigation looked at Kennedy’s interactions with other intelligence agencies. “We don’t have any additional information to provide,” wrote Carol Cratty, an FBI spokesman.
We are left, then, with this: Patrick Kennedy, the senior State Department official responsible for compliance with federal records law, denying any knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s private email despite the fact that he emailed her on those email addresses dozens of times and recommended the State Department the man who set it up for an IT position with the department. And Kennedy, calling in a “favor” with an FBI contact who needed something from, taking his request on declassification to a part of the Bureau that has nothing to do with classification decisions. Add to that John Kirby, the spokesman for the State Department, denying even a discussion of a quid pro quo between Kennedy and the FBI despite the fact that such a discussion is reported in two FBI interview summaries released to the public yesterday.
When President Obama was asked Tuesday about the “appearance of impropriety” revealed in the FBI interview summaries, he dismissed the concerns in a manner that was slightly more sophisticated but no less dishonest than the others spinning the controversy.
“With respect to the State Department and the FBI reports, I think you’ve heard directly from both the FBI and the State Department that the notion or the accounts that have been put out there are just not true,” Obama said, failing to identify the “notion” or “accounts” he was seeking to discredit. “And you can question them again, but based on what we have seen, heard, learned, some of the more sensational implications or appearances, as you stated them, aren’t based on actual events and based on what actually happened, and I think derive from sort of overly broad characterizations of interactions between the State Department and the FBI that happen a lot and happen between agencies.”
In a word: No.
And that’s [redacted].
