House Democrats want the FBI agents who have leaked information about the Hillary Clinton investigation to be found and punished, according to a letter sent to an independent investigator.
“These unauthorized and inaccurate leaks from within the FBI, particularly so close to a presidential election, are unprecedented,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and top Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers wrote in a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general. “For these reasons, we are calling on your office to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the sources of these and other leaks from the FBI and to recommend appropriate action.”
The lawmakers, two of the senior congressional investigators among House Democrats, lamented Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani’s statement that he knew agents had found new Clinton emails before FBI Director James Comey made it public.
“Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents,” Giuliani said Friday morning on Fox and Friends. “I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends.”
Conyers and Cummings said that’s no defense of the leaks. “It is absolutely unacceptable for the FBI to leak unsubstantiated — and in some cases false —information about one presidential candidate to benefit the other candidate,” they wrote to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “Leaking this information to former FBI officials as a conduit to the Trump campaign is equally intolerable.”
