Photo by Marija Zaric

The 2016 presidential election was so tainted that it spurred the Oxford English Dictionary to choose “post-truth” as the word of the year. But the 2016 election was actually far more corrupt than it appeared at the time. The FBI sought to cast a veto over the votes of American citizens.

Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, had used an unsecured private email server to handle top-secret documents while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The server in a bathroom of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, mansion exposed emails with classified information to detection by foreign sources, household servants, and others. Clinton’s private email server was not publicly disclosed until she received a congressional subpoena in 2015. A few months later, the FBI Counterintelligence Division opened a criminal investigation examining the “potential unauthorized storage of classified information on an unauthorized system.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch swayed FBI chief James Comey to mislead the public by denying the existence of a criminal investigation; instead, it was referred to simply as a “matter.”

The private email was intended to prevent Americans from ever seeing Hillary Clinton’s emails in her four year term as secretary of state. Clinton effectively exempted herself from the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and any public scrutiny on how she used her power. The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails prior to 2014 and insisted it required 75 years to disclose emails of Clinton’s top aides. A federal judge and the State Department inspector general slammed the FOIA stonewalling.

The FBI treated Clinton and her coterie like royalty worthy of endless deference, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Department Inspector General. The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of top Clinton aides after a limited examination of their contents (including a promise not to examine any post-January 31, 2015, emails or content). When Clinton aides used BleachBit software and hammers to destroy email evidence under congressional subpoena, the FBI treated it as a harmless error.

The Inspector General criticized FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the disclosure of key evidence. An unnamed FBI agent on the case responded to a fellow FBI agent who asked how an interview went with a witness who worked with the Clintons at their Chappaqua residence: “Awesome. Lied his ass off. Went from never inside the scif [sensitive compartmented information facility] at res [residence], to looked in when it was being constructed, to removed the trash twice, to troubleshot the secure fax with HRC a couple times, to everytime there was a secure fax i did it with HRC. Ridic.” When his colleague replied that “would be funny if he was the only guy charged n this deal,” he replied, “aint no one gonna do shit” as far as filing charges.

FBI investigators shrugged off every skullduggery they encountered from Hillary’s staffers. The Inspector General report revealed that key FBI agents in the investigations were raving partisans. “We’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok texted his mistress/girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in August 2016. One FBI agent labeled Trump........

© CounterPunch