Two Senate committee chairmen are seeking details of the immunity agreement reportedly forged last week between the Justice Department and Bryan Pagliano, a former IT assistant to Hillary Clinton.
“From the get-go, Bryan Pagliano was clearly a key witness in getting to the bottom of why Secretary Clinton used an unsecure personal email server that improperly stored highly classified information,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday. “The Justice Department is now one step closer to getting some much-needed answers.”
Along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Grassley pressed Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a March 3 letter for a copy of the immunity agreement offered to Pagliano. The letter was made public Tuesday.
Johnson and Grassley noted that in an earlier request to the Justice Department, the Republican senators had asked that any potential immunity agreement include a provision to compel Pagliano to cooperate with congressional inquiries.
In September, Pagliano invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions about his role in setting up Clinton’s private server.
“The committees believe that Mr. Pagliano possesses unique information about Secretary Clinton’s private email account and server that is vital to the committees’ ongoing inquiries into this matter,” Johnson and Grassley wrote in their letter.
Clinton has said she is “delighted” that Pagliano is cooperating with FBI investigators. She has repeatedly denied that the probe, which was opened by the law enforcement agency in August, is targeting her for criminal violations.
In another letter to Pagliano, Grassley and Johnson asked the embattled former State Department aide to “reconsider” his decision not to speak to congressional investigators who have been looking into Clinton’s server arrangement for months.
