By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
Some veteran FBI agents say the bureau’s reputation has been permanently damaged by the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The New York Post reports that FBI Director James Comey reported to “unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Cinton and her aides that limited their investigation.”
“In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.
Among the complaints is that Comey offered immunity to several key witnesses, rather than compelling testimony through a grand jury.
The Post wrote:
The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.
Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence.
Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements. And yet Comey indulged it all.
What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation.
