The problems with Loretta Lynch’s story: Senate Judiciary Committee reviews new evidence

by WorldTribune Staff, July 9, 2017

The Senate Judiciary Committee reportedly has received new information with direct relevance to its investigation of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s involvement in the Hillary Clinton email scandal. The panel wants to know from Lynch if she “ever communicated with Amanda Renteria,” who headed Clinton’s political operations during the 2016 campaign. Renteria has also been asked to testify before the committee. The committee is also looking into whether Lynch or any of her aides were in contact with former DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz regarding the Clinton email investigation.

The new revelations were made in a three-page list of questions that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein recently sent to Lynch at her New York apartment, according to a July 6 op-ed in the New York Post by Paul Sperry. During a four-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2016, Lynch either “refused to answer or give an appropriate response” no fewer than 74 times.

Rep. David Trott, Michigan Republican, took Lynch to task for failing to recuse herself from the Clinton investigation despite meeting privately with former President Bill Clinton “a week before the then-attorney general let Hillary skate,” Sperry wrote. Then, referring to rumors of her possibly staying on in a hypothetical Hillary administration, Trott asked if Lynch had met with anyone on Hillary’s staff during the yearlong investigation, to which she replied: “I have not spoken to anyone on either the campaign or transition or any staff members affiliated with them.” Sperry noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee now knows of a document obtained by the FBI reportedly showing a Democratic operative’s claim that Lynch had privately assured Renteria that the Justice Department “would not push too deeply” into the investigation of Clinton’s private email server.

The committee will also “press her to explain the discrepancy – along with why she reportedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to leave her office when he confronted her with the document.”

Sperry continued: “There are three explanations: Either Lynch lied under oath, or she never in fact talked to Renteria, or her categorical denial was meant to later claim she was merely discussing her role post-election.

In her meeting with Bill Clinton in her plane on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, Lynch had said the former president stopped by simply because “he wanted to say hello.” But the meeting lasted at least 30 minutes and had to be cleared by the Secret Service as well as FBI security details. It was also the first meeting of any kind on Lynch’s plane, Sperry noted. “Lynch also got squirrelly when asked about reports that her FBI security detail had banned cameras, even phones, from her meeting with Clinton. “Since her lawyer is on record saying Lynch will ‘fully cooperate’ in the Senate investigation, she’ll have a hard time pleading the Fifth in hearings. But that doesn’t mean she won’t try to stonewall,” Sperry wrote.

http:// www.worldtribune.com/the-problems-with-loretta-lynchs-story-senate-judiciary-committee-reviews-new-evidence/

Open Up the Horowitz Secret Appendix

The public needs to know the history of the Russian info that had a big effect on Mr. Comey’s decisions.''' June 15, 2018 5:07 p.m.ET

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report points to multiple irregularities in FBI chief James Comey’s actions in the 2016 election campaign, sees no evidence of political bias, but never really gets to the bottom of why Mr. Comey played the role he did. Mr. Comey may have been worried that a Justice Department decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would lack credibility, but it was in no sense his obligation to solve this problem. It simply was not the FBI chief’s job to relieve the Obama administration of the need to sell its decision to the electorate. This is why we have elections. It’s what political accountability is all about.

This is where Russia enters in. It is highly absurd at this point to keep this information secret, as Mr. Horowitz does in a classified appendix. We already know from press reporting last year that the FBI was in possession of some kind of Russian intercept of a purported Democratic email that referred to an alleged conversation between Clinton aide Amanda Renteria and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Mr. Horowitz says Mr. Comey did not find the information credible, didn’t investigate it, and didn’t tell his Justice Department superiors about it. Except that as recently as a few weeks ago in a TV interview Mr. Comey indicated the information might not be false. Hmm.One more thing we learn: The same classified source reported an allegation that Mr. Comey himself would seek to delay the Hillary investigation to aid Republicans.

So the information wasn’t credible, wasn’t investigated, and wasn’t shared with his superiors. We also don’t know which agency it came from or what discussions about its relevance took place. And yet it was hugely consequential. Mr. Comey himself tells us in his memoir that this classified information was pivotal to his decision to intervene. He feared it would leak and be used to discredit any DOJ decision to clear Mrs. Clinton. Let’s pause here. Readers may have noticed a slight elision in my May 30 column on these matters. Mr. Comey’s second intervention, the one reopening the Hillary investigation shortly before the election, was one intervention that was not based on Russian intelligence.

It was also the one intervention decidedly not urged on Mr. Comey or favored by his Obama administration colleagues. But consider: Mr. Comey by this point could not have failed to notice that all the FBI’s interventions were tending to benefit Mrs. Clinton. He could not have failed to notice that the intelligence basis for his actions (e.g., the Steele dossier) was disconcertingly thin. He would have been lacking in shrewdness not to wonder if Obama spy masters were playing him for a sap. When the Anthony Weiner laptop surfaced, he would have had every reason to be eager to re-establish his bona fides with his GOP congressional overseers as somebody who in retrospect would be seen to have played an evenhanded role in the election.

Voilà. Yet this line of inquiry has not been so much neglected as dropped by the media. Virtually no press accounts this week even mention Mr. Horowitz’s classified appendix. This is not exactly surprising. Democrats and Mr. Trump’s press critics ecstatically embraced the Russian interference theme but, unfortunately for them, the Russian interference theme also gives coherence and motive to the story they wish to ignore. This story concerns a consistent pattern of meddling in the race by our own intelligence agencies, using Russian intelligence as an excuse. Indeed, a fact becomes clearer than ever, especially from the poorly self-serving babblings of former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper : The now-defunct theory that Mr. Trump was Russia’s cat’s-paw had been widely adopted at the highest echelons of the Obama administration. It inspired many of the administration’s actions.

https:// www.wsj.com/articles/open-up-the-horowitz-secret-appendix-1529096831?mod=hp_opin_pos3