Western Journalism – by Charles Campbell
Republican lawmakers have been pushing for the FBI to release any documents from the three-and-a-half-hour interview it held last month with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
On Tuesday, the documents were finally released to Congress but they came with quite a surprise: Much of the information was redacted, or “blacked out.”
After learning about the redacted documents, Republican chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, expressed his concern of what they must contain since he doesn’t have the required security clearance to read the documents in their entirety.
“As the chairman of the chief investigative body in the House, it is significant I can’t even read these documents in their entirety,” Chaffetz told Fox News. “This shows how dangerous it was to have this intelligence, highly classified to this day, on the former secretary’s unsecured personal server where it was vulnerable.”
Former military intelligence officer Tony Shaffer thought the same thing, noting the significant contradictions between what the Clinton campaign has claimed, and the secretive actions of the State Department.
“This information being highly classified according to the FBI is in direct conflict with what the State Department and Ms. Clinton have said is on the server,” Shaffer said. “You could not have it both ways. You cannot say one day this is unclassified ‘nothing to see here’ and the next day, only certain people can see this and you must not be able to take it outside of a secure facility.”
Democrat leaders chalked it up as nothing more than another Republican attempt to revive the email scandal and finally pin Clinton on tangible charges.
“Republicans are now investigating the investigator in a desperate attempt to … keep it in the headlines, and distract from Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.
FBI Director James Comey has previously stated that Clinton was “extremely careless” with handling sensitive information, but her actions did not fall under “gross negligence,” which is required by the statute if one wishes to prosecute.