Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, rebuffed the FBI after it issued a denial in response to a report that said an unidentified Chinese company hacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server.
In a report published earlier this week, the Daily Caller News Foundation cited sources that said a Chinese-state owned firm located in the Washington, D.C., area had access to Clinton’s emails in real time courtesy of a code embedded in the New York-based server which then made copies of the emails, some of which contained classified information.
In response, an agency spokesman said: “The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.”
But Gohmert, who told Fox News on Tuesday that a foreign entity had obtained Clinton’s emails but did not identify from which country, put out a statement that emphasized it was not the FBI but rather the intelligence community inspector general that discovered the hack.
“It’s not surprising that the FBI ‘has not found any evidence’ regarding Clinton’s servers being breached,” Gohmert said. “Like I stated to Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok in the House Judiciary Hearing, it was the Obama-appointed Intelligence Community Inspector General that discovered the breach. It was not the FBI that found it, so their statement was technically correct, but very deceptive in its omission.”
In that hearing last month, where former FBI agent Peter Strzok had been testifying, Gohmert said intelligence community inspector general officials had informed Strzok and other top bureau officials of an “anomaly” found in Clinton’s server. But Strzok, who led the FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails, did not act on that information, Gohmert asserted.
Strzok acknowledged the meeting took place, but did not recall what was said. He was fired from the FBI earlier this month for anti-Trump text messages he exchanged with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he as having an affair.
In his statement Wednesday evening, Gohmert suggested that Strzok and his colleagues decided not to pursue the hacked emails tip because “they knew this would devastate Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected and they were not about to let that happen.”
“Fortunately, progress is currently being made at the FBI, and there are good people there who are making a difference,” he continued. “Unfortunately, the FBI’s deceptive omission in its statement reveals that the FBI has not been completely cleansed of the partisanship that so pervasively corrupted it in Washington, D.C.”
The Daily Caller’s ex-intelligence officer source said the inspector general of the intelligence community “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.”
The report has elicited a response from President Trump.
“Report just out: ‘China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.’ Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information!” Trump posted to Twitter Tuesday night.
