Former FBI Director James Comey planned to exonerate Hillary Clinton from her email investigation—months before the FBI had finished gathering evidence.
The FBI released documents on Monday titled, “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016, Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation Part 01 of 01.”
Although the Bureau redacted the vast majority of the documents, one unclassified email appeared quite damning. FBI official James Rybicki asked officials in mid-May to “please send any comments on this statement so we may roll it into a master doc for discussion with the Director at a future date,” referring to an email forwarded from Comey that discussed the exoneration of Clinton.
Rybicki’s email, on May 16, 2016, was nearly two full months before Comey publicly made his recommendation not to charge Clinton with wrongdoing. At that point in May, the FBI was still gathering evidence in the email investigation—and had not even interviewed Clinton herself.
An article from Newsweek earlier this year first shed light on the fact that Comey may have planned to let Clinton off the hook months before the evidence was in—but this document drop finally confirms it.
In August, shortly after Newsweek first broke the story, two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, wrote the FBI demanding answers.
“Conclusion first, fact-gathering second—that’s no way to run an investigation,” they wrote.
“The outcome of an investigation should not be prejudged while FBI agents are still hard at work trying to gather the facts.”
AAN Staff
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