Hillary Clinton was surely ecstatic when President Obama told a national TV audience that her private e-mail server was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
Oops: The flip side of Clinton’s glee is the anger reportedly felt inside the FBI — where agents fear the president was trying to compromise their ongoing investigation.
Yes, Bernie Sanders won whoops and hollers at Tuesday’s debate by painting the scandal as a GOP smear, but the feds have been hard at work on it for over three months now.
They’re trying to answer the very question Obama so blithely dismissed: Did her use of a private, unsecured server — target of multiple foreign hack attempts — endanger national security?
According to Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, the agency is focused on whether there was a violation of the Espionage Act involving “gross negligence” in the handling of defense information.
The case is very similar to the prosecution of former CIA Director David Petraeus for providing classified info to his mistress.
And that, says The New York Times, is precisely why the FBI is so enraged.
Obama made similar comments while Petraeus was under investigation, saying he’d seen “no evidence” the disclosure “had a negative impact on our national security.”
The FBI concluded Petraeus should be charged with a felony and face prison time — only to be overruled when the Justice Department let him plead to a misdemeanor.
The feeling then was that Justice bowed to Obama’s wishes. Echoes of that may push the FBI to prove it’s not being pressured.
“Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the FBI’s mouth,” former top agency official Ron Hosko told the Times.
Everyone else’s, too.