According to National Review, former President Barack Obama exchanged some 20 emails, using a pseudonym, with Hillary Clinton via her private email server, including one from Clinton while she was in Russia.
The FBI determined it was possible that “hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account” through this exchange.
Obama, however, didn’t want anyone to know about his involvement with Clinton’s scandal. That’s why he insisted that he hadn’t learned of Clinton’s use of the server until he saw it on the news, even though he exchanged emails with her while she used her private account.
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He buried the email exchange, thinking they would only surface if Clinton was prosecuted. And that’s exactly why she never was.
National Review reports:
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If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen. The latest jaw-dropping disclosures of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, illustrate this point.
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We know that Comey drafted statements dismissing Clinton long before he publicly recommended against indictment.
The changes he made to those drafts, however, reveal how the FBI purposefully kept Obama out of the story.
On July 5, 2016, Comey held the press conference at which he delivered a statement describing Mrs. Clinton’s criminal conduct but nevertheless recommending against an indictment. We now know that Comey’s remarks had been in the works for two months and were revised several times by the director and his advisers.
This past weekend, in a letter to the FBI regarding the missing texts, Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) addressed some of these revisions. According to Senator Johnson, a draft dated June 30, 2016 (i.e., five days before Comey delivered the final version), contained a passage expressly referring to a troublesome email exchange between Clinton and Obama. (I note that the FBI’s report of its eventual interview of Clinton contains a cryptic reference to a July 1, 2012, email that Clinton sent from Russia to Obama’s email address. See report, page 2.) The passage in the June 30 draft stated:
We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. [Emphasis added.] Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.
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On the same day, according to a Strzok–Page text, a revised draft of Comey’s remarks was circulated by his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki. It replaced “the President” with “another senior government official.”
This effort to obscure Obama’s involvement had an obvious flaw: It would practically have begged congressional investigators and enterprising journalists to press for the identification of the “senior government official” with whom Clinton had exchanged emails. That was not going to work.
Consequently, by the time Comey delivered his remarks on July 5, the decision had been made to avoid even a veiled allusion to Obama. Instead, all the stress was placed on Clinton (who was not going to be charged anyway) for irresponsibly sending and receiving sensitive emails that were likely to have been penetrated by hostile intelligence services. Comey made no reference to Clinton’s correspondent:
We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. [Emphasis added.] Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.
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All reference to the president had been removed by the time Comey gave his final statement.
Perhaps Obama got a little too confident.
During a CBS interview, Obama claimed he didn’t know about Clinton’s use of the private server until he saw it on the news.
Now there was even more reason to keep the Obama/Clinton email exchange under wraps. The president had just lied on television, and a simple revelation would leave him completely defenseless. If Clinton were prosecuted, Obama would be dragged into it, and the public would know that not only was he involved, but that he told them a bold-faced-lie to cover it up.
Obama obviously knew the Clinton email address he corresponded with was private. It didn’t end in @state.gov. His aids saw the interview, knew they had a situation on their hands, and took immediate action to “clean this up.”
His and Clinton’s advisers were not so confident. Right after the interview aired, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other senior campaign staffers, stating: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it on the news.” Scherwin’s alert was forwarded to Mills. Shortly afterwards, an agitated Mills emailed Podesta: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.” (That is, Obama had emails from Clinton, which he had to know were from a private account since her address did not end in “@state.gov” as State Department emails do.) So how did Obama and his helpers ‘clean this up’? So how did Obama and his helpers “clean this up”?
Obama had his email communications with Clinton sealed. He did this by invoking a dubious presidential-records privilege. The White House insisted that the matter had nothing to do with the contents of the emails, of course; rather, it was intended to vindicate the principle of confidentiality in presidential communications with close advisers. With the media content to play along, this had a twofold benefit: Obama was able (1) to sidestep disclosure without acknowledging that the emails contained classified information and (2) to avoid using the term “executive privilege” — with all its dark Watergate connotations — even though that was precisely what he was invoking.
Of course, that executive privilege was limited. Those emails would be quickly disclosed as relevant evidence should Clinton have been prosecuted.
That ultimately explains why she never was, despite her obviously criminal actions.
