This Is How The FBI Hamstrung Democracy In 2016 And Beyond – OpEd
The 2016 presidential election was so tainted that it spurred the Oxford English Dictionary to choose “post-truth” as the word of the year. But the 2016 election was actually far more corrupt than it appeared at the time. The FBI sought to cast a veto over the votes of American citizens.
Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, had used an unsecured private email server to handle top-secret documents while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The server in a bathroom of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, mansion exposed emails with classified information to detection by foreign sources, household servants, and others. Clinton’s private email server was not publicly disclosed until she received a congressional subpoena in 2015. A few months later, the FBI Counterintelligence Division opened a criminal investigation examining the “potential unauthorized storage of classified information on an unauthorized system.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch swayed FBI chief James Comey to mislead the public by denying the existence of a criminal investigation; instead, it was referred to simply as a “matter.”
The private email was intended to prevent Americans from ever seeing Hillary Clinton’s emails in her four year term as secretary of state. Clinton effectively exempted herself from the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and any public scrutiny on how she used her power. The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails prior to 2014 and insisted it required 75 years to disclose emails of Clinton’s top aides. A federal judge and the State Department inspector general slammed the FOIA stonewalling.
The FBI treated Clinton and her coterie like royalty worthy of endless deference, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Department Inspector General. The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of top Clinton aides after a limited examination of their contents (including a promise not to examine any post-January 31, 2015, emails or content). When Clinton aides used BleachBit software and hammers to destroy email evidence under congressional subpoena, the FBI treated it as a harmless error.
The Inspector General criticized FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the disclosure of key evidence. An unnamed FBI agent on the case responded to a fellow FBI agent who asked how an interview went with a witness who worked with the Clintons at their Chappaqua residence: “Awesome. Lied his ass off. Went from never inside the scif [sensitive compartmented information facility] at res [residence], to looked in when it was being constructed, to removed the trash twice, to troubleshot the secure fax with HRC a couple times, to everytime there was a secure fax i did it with HRC. Ridic.” When his colleague replied that “would be funny if he was the only guy charged n this deal,” he replied, “aint no one gonna do shit” as far as filing charges.
FBI investigators shrugged off every skullduggery they encountered from Hillary’s staffers. The Inspector General report revealed that key FBI agents in the investigations were raving partisans. “We’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok texted his mistress/girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in August 2016. One FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as “retarded” and declared, “I’m with her” [Hillary Clinton]. Another FBI employee texted that “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.”
The FBI delayed interviewing Clinton until the end of the investigation, after she had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, and just before the Democratic National Convention. FBI agents at that interview found Clinton’s answers “strained credulity”; one agent put her responses in the “bucket of hard to impossible to believe.” The FBI planned to absolve her “absent a confession from Clinton,” the Inspector General noted. There was no recording or transcript of that final interview. Minimizing the evidence maximized the discretion of FBI officials in a landmark political case.
Shortly after that interview, FBI chief Comey publicly announced that “no charges are appropriate” because Hillary didn’t intend to violate federal law. But that law is a strict-liability statute; “intent” is irrelevant to the criminal violation. After his actions outraged supporters of both Trump and Clinton, Comey blamed Twitter “demagoguery” for the widespread belief that the FBI was not “honest” or “competent.”
After voters made their choice in November 2016, one FBI lawyer texted that he was “devastated” by Trump’s election and declared, “Viva la Resistance!” and “I never really liked the Republic anyway.” The same person became the “primary FBI attorney assigned to [Russian election interference] investigation beginning in early 2017,” the IG noted.
In May 2023, Special Counsel John Durham issued a 316-page report with fresh documentation on how the FBI repeatedly rescued Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The Clinton Foundation raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in squirrely foreign contributions while she was secretary of state and readying her presidential campaign. The Durham Report found that “senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how [the Clinton Foundation investigation was] handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” On top of that dereliction, the FBI “appears to have made no effort to investigate … the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance of a[n illegal] campaign contribution that was made by the FBI’s own long-term [confidential human source] on behalf of Insider 1 and, ultimately, Foreign Government.”
Top FBI officials also saved Hillary Clinton by scorning the federal statute book and treating her pervasive, perpetual violations of federal laws on classified documents as a harmless, unintentional error. Shortly after FBI chief Comey announced no charges against Hillary, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,” according to the Durham Report. CIA chief John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama and other top officials on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal … to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” There is no evidence that Obama and his policymakers had any objections to Hillary’s vilification proposal (referred to as the “Clinton Plan” in Durham’s report). FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though “[n]o FBI personnel … [took] any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the report noted.
The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign paid former British agent Christopher Steele to create a dossier — known as the “Steele dossier” — with lurid, unverified accusations against Trump. The FBI was willing to pay any price to defeat Trump and offered Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in the dossier before the 2016 election. Steele could not do so. Steele was already on the FBI payroll, though he was terminated in November 2016 for dishing allegations to the media. “The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the Durham Report noted. As FBI analysts recognized that the Steele dossier was a hoax, FBI bosses ordered “no more memorandums were to be written” analyzing its claims.
The FBI relied on the Steele dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Even after the Steele dossier was discredited, the FBI paid Igor Danchenko, the primary Russian source for the dossier, as a “confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents.” The Federal Election Commission fined the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign $113,000 in 2022 for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in spawning the Steele dossier.
After the 2016 election, FBI officials sought to cripple Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence of connections to Russia. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that FBI officials made 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in its application to the FISA Court to spy on former Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI withheld details from the court that would have crippled the credibility of its request to spy on Trump campaign officials.
Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to target Trump campaign officials. A federal prosecutor declared that the “resulting harm is immeasurable” from Clinesmith’s action. But Federal Judge James Boasberg conducted a “pity party” at the sentencing, noting that Clinesmith “went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane….. Clinesmith has lost his job in government service — what has given his life much of its meaning.” Scorning the prosecutor’s recommendation for jail time, the judge gave Clinesmith a wrist-slap — 400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation. The FISA court in late 2019 publicly condemned the FBI lies that resulted in nuclear-powered surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign. “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote.
After he was fired in May 2017, FBI chief James Comey leaked official memos with confidential information to a lawyer who delivered them to the New York Times, a disclosure that was later condemned by the Inspector General. Comey’s leak triggered the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. Mueller’s investigation generated endless allegations and controversies and helped Democrats capture control of the House of Representatives in 2018. In April 2019, after two years of media frenzies, Mueller finally admitted he found no evidence to prosecute Trump or his campaign officials for colluding with Russia in the 2016 campaign.
The only lesson the FBI learned from the 2016 election was to work harder to rig results. In December 2019, FBI agents came into possession of a laptop that Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. That laptop’s hard drive was a treasure trove of crimes, including evidence that Hunter and other family members had collected millions in payments from foreign sources for providing access in Washington and other favors. That laptop provided ample warnings of how Joe Biden could be compromised by foreign powers. But FBI bosses blocked their agents from investigating its contents until after the 2020 election. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) reported that FBI agents examining the evidence on Hunter Biden “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
When news finally leaked out about the Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials effectively torpedoed the story by claiming that the laptop was a Russian disinformation ploy. Their letter was orchestrated by Biden presidential campaign advisor — and later his Secretary of State — Anthony Blinken. The FBI knew that the laptop was bona fide but said nothing to undercut the falsehoods made by the former spooks. Twitter and other social media outlets suppressed information on the Hunter Biden laptop until after the election.
Special Counsel John Durham asserted that the FBI’s abuses in the Clinton and Trump investigations caused the agency “severe reputational harm.” But Congress awarded the FBI a record budget regardless, and that is the only “reputation” that matters inside the Beltway.
The Washington Post fretted that the Durham Report “may fuel rather than end partisan debate about politicization within the Justice Department and FBI.” The FBI announced that it had taken “dozens of corrective actions” to prevent similar “missteps” in the future. Law professor Jonathan Turley scoffed that the FBI’s statement “is ample evidence of a lack of remorse by the FBI like a habitual offender giving a shrug in his court ‘allocution’ before a judge.”
When getting caught trying to steal an election is a mere “misstep,” it will happen again. Unless Congress and federal courts leash or slash the power of the FBI, there needs to be a change in inaugural festivities. Instead of invoking “the will of the people,” perhaps future presidents should invoke “the will of the FBI.” If that happened, much of the Washington press corps would probably stand up and cheer for their favorite agency.
- An earlier version of this piece was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation.