Judicial Watch announced yesterday that it has received 218 pages of previously classified emails exchanged between former FBI officials Peter Strzok-Lisa Page.
The emails were obtained following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuitfiled by Judicial Watch after the Justice Department failed to respond to a December 4, 2017, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)) requesting:
- All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strozk and FBI attorney Lisa Page;
- All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strzok;
- All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.
The emails show that on August 16, 2016, then-FBI General Counsel James Baker emailed then-Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich; Michael Steinbach, former executive assistant director for national security; former Acting Assistant Director Jason V. Herring; former FBI lawyer Lisa Page; former Principal Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson; Michael Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, now retired; James Rybicki, former chief of staff to Comey; and others to inform them that he “just spoke” with Clinton’s lawyer Kendall.
Kendall had requested documents from the FBI specifically asking Baker to focus first on Hillary Clinton’s 302 (the summary report of her FBI/DOJ interview), and to get them to him on an expedited basis.
Baker followed up by instructing FBI officials to expedite the release of the FBI investigative material to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall in August 2016, without concern for Kendall’s lack of security clearance.
Eight days later, on August 24, 2016, Daily Beast reporter Shane Harris sent an inquiry to the FBI asking if Comey’s admission to Congress was accurate that Hillary’s lawyers at William & Connolly did not possess the security clearances needed to see and possess highly classified Hillary emails being stored at their law offices.
Harris’s question set off a scramble at the that went all the way up to Comey over the next 28 hours. The result was a seven-page (mostly redacted) email discussion, with Lisa Page concluding, “Could we say something more equivocal?”
In another email exchange, Page responded to Strzok, Moffa and others telling them that, unbelievably, four FBI 302 report of interviews related to the Clinton “Midyear Exam” investigation had never even been written:
[Redacted] to the best of my knowledge, yes they will when Pete identified for [redacted] the DOJ edits that needed to be made to the 302s [redacted] discovered that there were four (I think) 302s that had never been written.
The emails clearly show that the FBI failed to document interviews in the Clinton email ‘matter ’in a timely manner, lending further credence to suspicions that the entire investigation was a sham, with the FBI’s exoneration of Mrs. Clinton having been preordained by FBI Director Comey.
JAN CRAWFORD: Um, what’s the status of Huber’s investigation in Utah? I think the former Attorney General Sessions had asked him to look at this.
WILLIAM BARR: Right, so Huber had originally been asked to take a look at the FISA applications and the electronic surveillance but then he stood back and put that on hold while the Office of Inspector General was conducting its review, which would’ve been normal for the department. And he was essentially on standby in case Mr. Horowitz referred a matter to him to be handled criminally. So he has not been active on this front in recent months and so Durham is taking over that role. The other issues he’s been working on relate to Hillary Clinton. Those are winding down and hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring those to fruition.
