Newly Declassified DOJ Watchdog Report Shows FBI Cut Corners in Clinton Email Investigation
I'm archiving "Clinton annex" here to make its text searchable. You can download the annex in PDF format via the link below:
Check my other posts for the previous parts. This is part 12.
B. (redacted) FBI Reasons for Not Requesting Review of the Thumb Drives in Midyear
(redacted) Witnesses told us that the draft memorandum was never finalized or sent to the Department. Although notes obtained by the OIG indicate that members of the Midyear team discussed the thumb drives in a meeting with Comey and McCabe on June 27, 2016, witnesses differed on who made the decision to forgo review of the thumb drives and what the basis for that decision was. However, despite statements in the draft memorandum about the need to review the thumb drives, no witness we interviewed told us they thought that the information would have changed the outcome of the Midyear investigation.
(redacted) When asked what happened after she sent the revised May 27 draft memorandum, FBI Attorney 1 told the OIG that she did not recall, but that she thought that the Midyear team got "sidetracked" with their efforts to obtain the laptops used by counsel to former Secretary Clinton, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, to cull Clinton's personal and work-related emails. FBI Attorney 1 said that the Mills and Samuelson laptops were the Midyear team's primary focus:
(redacted) [Review of the thumb drives] was certainly something we thought...we should do. Was it something as important as getting into the Mills and Samuelson laptops? No way. And, I always thought of this as sort of also opening the door for us to get more access to the (redacted) because Midyear was such a high-profile issue that it would give DOJ some more impetus to work with us.
(redacted) FBI Attorney 1 said that she did not recall additional discussions about the request to review the thumb drives, stating that the issue "just dropped off." She said that the Midyear team was meeting with Comey on a weekly basis at the time, and that FBI management would have been aware that the request to search the thumb drives was "an issue dangling out there."
(redacted) Asked whether the FBI viewed the request to search the thumb drives as critical to the investigation, FBI Attorney 1 told the OIG that her draft memorandum was intended to make the best case possible for obtaining access to the thumb drives, She stated, "I did not think it was essential that we look at this material, (redacted). I think the chances that it would have been really important to our case were minimal," FBI Attorney 1 said that when she drafted the memorandum, Strzok and the Lead Analyst had not looked at the issue to determine whether the thumb drives were needed to complete the investigation.
(redacted) Anderson also characterized the draft memorandum as an advocacy piece that was intended to make the best possible case for obtaining access to the thumb drives. Anderson told the OIG that she did not recall why the FBI never finalized it or sent it to the Department. She said that obtaining access to the thumb drives for purposes of the Midyear investigation was never a major topic of conversation at any of the meetings with FBI management, and that the idea "never got traction" within the Midyear investigative team. According to Anderson, Strzok and the Lead Analyst were the ones who determined that the Midyear team did not need to pursue the thumb drives. Anderson said that near the end of the investigation, Comey asked Strzok and the Lead Analyst whether the team had obtained the information they needed to complete the investigation, and both responded that they had.
(redacted) Anderson noted that the data on the thumb drives (redacted). Anderson said that she thought that the Midyear investigative team did not need to review the data on the first five thumb drives because it was never the objective of the investigation to trace and contain the spill of classified information. According to Anderson, the only thing that would have changed the ultimate prosecutive decision with respect to former Secretary Clinton was evidence of her intent in setting up the private email server. She said that the (redacted) collection began (redacted) the setup of former Secretary Clinton's server in 2009, and that as a result (redacted).
(redacted) In his OIG interview, Strzok rejected the idea that the Midyear investigative team was responsible for the decision not to obtain access to the thumb drives. Strzok characterized reviewing the thumb drives as a "logical lead" that the Midyear team would have liked to have taken, but not one that was necessary for the investigation to be considered thorough and complete given the time period of the (redacted) intrusions into the State Department. He said that the decision not to send the draft memorandum to the DAG was made above his level, not by the investigative team, and was "opaque" to him. When asked whether the Midyear team did not seek to review the thumb drives because they were under pressure to complete the investigation quickly, Strzok replied, "No."
(redacted) After reviewing a draft of the classified appendix, the Lead Analyst also rejected the idea that the Midyear investigative or analytical teams were responsible for finalizing and transmitting a legal memorandum. The Lead Analyst stated:
Strzok approved it to go forward from the investigative team's perspective via an email he sent and then [FBI Attorney 1] subsequently made edits to address Anderson's comments. As a result, I consider the last version sent by [FBI Attorney 1] to Anderson and the Cyber Law Unit to be a final version from the perspective of the Midyear team and it was therefore, in my view, up to OGC to approve and submit it as appropriate to DOJ like they had in previous instances. I do not believe that Strzok or I had any reason to believe we were responsible for the decision to send the memorandum to DOJ since that would have been a significant departure from past practice (and outside the boundaries of my authority and role).
(redacted) The Lead Analyst told the OIG that he considered the Information on the thumb drives to be unavailable to the Midyear team. He said that it was impossible to divorce the request to search the thumb drives in Midyear from the "protracted battle" with the Department to obtain access to the thumb drives for other purposes, including conducting the (redacted) source searches. The Lead Analyst explained that the White House and the Department previously had made the determination that certain U.S. victim information was potentially privileged, including State Department information, and that policy concerns about those privileges prohibited them from reviewing the first five thumb drives. The Lead Analyst stated that he did not recall what happened to the request in the draft memorandum. He said that he did not think that "everyone forgot about it," and that it was possible that a definitive decision was reached at a meeting of FBI management that he did not attend, since he did not recall such a decision and it was not reflected in his notes.8
(redacted) Asked about the importance of the data on the thumb drives to the intrusion analysis, the Lead Analyst said that the Midyear team looked at any means that would allow them to develop a more accurate and confident assessment of whether foreign actors had compromised former Secretary Clinton's email server. The Lead Analyst said that the data on the thumb drives potentially could have been one more "check box" to help the team determine whether the server had been breached. The Lead Analyst stated:
If there's nothing on the thumb drive, it doesn't mean in any way definitively that the (redacted) didn't compromise the server architecture. But it's at least a place you could look. And if there's a (redacted) there that appears to contain the entirety of it, well then you get an opposite answer.
(redacted) The Midyear SSA was not formally told about the details of the (redacted) collection or the request to search the thumb drives for purposes of the Midyear investigation. However, he told the OIG that he was generally aware of the data and thought that it was a "logical investigative lead" that might allow them to obtain access to additional State Department emails.
8 After reviewing a draft of the classified appendix, the Lead Analyst stated that neither he nor Strzok made "an affirmative choice to not review the material on those drives."