A State Department official who discussed a “quid pro quo” with FBI agents in an attempt to suppress a classified email from Hillary Clinton’s private server could face a stand-alone investigation from the Justice Department, if a top Republican gets his way.
Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, is portrayed in FBI notes as a Clinton defender who wanted the FBI to conceal that the Democratic presidential candidate had kept classified information on her private email server. The notes suggest that Kennedy discussed raising the caps on FBI personnel in Iraq in exchange for the investigators not revealing that a certain email had classified information.
“Undersecretary Kennedy’s attempt to barter away American national security interests for plainly political purposes is appalling, and may rise to the level of a federal crime,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote in a Tuesday letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Decisions about how or where FBI agents should be stationed in foreign countries to help combat terrorism cannot and should not be made on the basis of anything except national security concerns.”
Goodlatte asked Lynch to initiate a new investigation of Kennedy’s actions, apart from the FBI probe of Clinton’s email practices. “[I]t is imperative that this matter be investigated and that the investigation be done in a political way with agents who were not involved in the initial Clinton Investigation,” he wrote.
The State Department defended Kennedy after the FBI notes were released, saying that the agent who prepared the forms got the facts wrong. “I can’t speak to what his or her intentions were saying these kinds of things, but clearly expressing a personal opinion about what happened,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday. “Any real assertion that this was somehow a tit-for-tat, quid pro quo exchange in that manner frankly is insulting.”
