New revelations about the security of Hillary Clinton’s private emails are undermining congressional confidence in FBI Director James Comey’s testimony from July, when he said Clinton’s server was never breached by the hacker known as Guccifer.
Over the weekend, a report broke that Clinton’s files were in fact stolen by the Romanian hacker, and then stolen by other hackers from Guccifer. That has some lawmakers openly worried that foreign nationals are about to receive Clinton’s data, if they haven’t already.
“I’ve always said I’m waiting for a foreign power to offer up all the Hillary emails we couldn’t get,” Texas Rep. Blake Farenthold commented to the Washington Examiner. “I suspect there may be more than one that has them.”
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Confirmation that Guccifer did break into Clinton’s server would be a hit to Comey’s credibility. Farenthold himself asked Comey in July if Guccifer ever accessed Clinton’s files.
“He did not. He admitted that was a lie,” Comey replied.
The prospect of diminishing credibility comes at a bad time for the FBI chief, who was already on tense terms with Congress. Adding to his plight was Monday’s discovery that Paul Combetta, an IT aide for Clinton tech firm Platte River Networks, may have sought help from users of the online “Reddit” discussion board in figuring out how to conceal data that might have been relevant to the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information.
Employees of the firm had already refused to testify or claimed their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress. The FBI failed to respond to a congressional request submitted on Sept. 9 for more information about its investigation.
The lack of answers, coupled with the rising number of questions, snowballed into even larger issues for Comey this week. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., announced on Wednesday that Comey would be hauled before Congress for questioning next week, especially with respect to the issue of whether Comey has examined the prospect that Clinton committed perjury.
The report of the scheduled hearing followed this week’s announcement by House Science Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, that he was issuing a subpoena for the agency related to questions about its investigation into Clinton, and a suggestion from Smith that the case could be reopened in light of recent developments. “It is unclear if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of these facts at the time of their investigation,” he wrote Monday.
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Matthew Whitaker, who heads the nonprofit Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust and who served as a Bush appointee in the Justice Department during a period that overlapped Comey’s time as deputy attorney general, criticized the agency’s behavior. “You would have hoped that they already gave Congress the information before a subpoena was necessary,” he said.
“The investigation could and should be reopened, but it won’t be,” he added. “It was clear from the FBI’s assessment of the case that they put weight on whether Clinton intended to expose classified information, but not whether she intended her actions as the law requires nor whether the information was actually exposed.”
In the meantime, lawmakers like Farenthold want to double check the FBI’s work.
“We’re … looking at the FBI’s notes and seeing what they found,” Farenthold said. “I want to be sure they did a thorough enough investigation.”
He also indicated he simply doesn’t believe the FBI when it says Clinton’s server wasn’t hacked.
“There’s a saying in the IT community that there are two types of companies: Those that have been hacked, and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked,” he said. “I’d be stunned if her server was not hacked.”
