U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Sunday rebutted criticism by John Podesta of the FBI.
Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman had blasted the agency in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
Podesta accused the FBI, which he described as “deeply broken,” of taking more of an interest in investigating Clinton’s private email server than protecting the Democratic National Committee against further breaches of its internal communications by Russia hackers.
“What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server,” Podesta wrote.
“I allow him this opinion, but I disagree with that, if that is in fact the characterization he is trying to make,” Lynch told CNN’s Jake Tapper, who had asked if Podesta’s assessment — that the FBI was more concerned with Clinton’s emails than Russia’s cyberactivity — was accurate.
“You have to look at every investigation separately. You have to look at every case separately,” she advised.
Lynch also said the intelligence community’s probe into Russia’s election-related cyberattacks is ongoing so “it’s impossible to characterize it one way or another.”
“Because of [Podesta’s] involvement in the campaign, he’s going to have a certain interest in this and a certain view,” she said.
