The FBI is under attack on two different fronts.
Three days after the FBI denied an attorney’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, a federal judge is telling the agency to make them public.
The Washington Times reports that U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg overruled objections by the Trump administration, which insisted that making the information public would violate grand jury secrecy rules.
“After reviewing the document in camera, the court concludes that it largely rehashes information already made public, thus obviating any need for secrecy,” Boasberg said.
The attorney, Ty Clevenger of Texas—who helped remove two federal judges appointed to lifetime appointments and trigger the indictment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to The Dallas Morning News—originally filed a FOIA request in March of 2016 to see the documents. The head of the FBI’s Records Management Division, David M. Hardy, sent a letter (originally obtained by Fox News) to Clevenger this week telling him that the bureau had “determined you have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject.”
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Meanwhile, former FBI director James Comey is under fire for allegedly planning to exonerate Hillary Clinton before the agency had completed its investigation. The 2016 presidential candidate was accused of conducting official business on a private email server.
The Washington Post reports that Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) sent a letter Thursday to FBI director Christopher Wray, “asking for documents to flesh out what to them seems a suspicious timeline: that Comey was apparently drafting statements to close the Clinton email probe at least two months before he publicly announced in July 2016 that the FBI was shuttering its investigation.”
President Donald Trump responded to the report in a tweet Friday morning:
Wow, looks like James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over…and so much more. A rigged system!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2017
The Senators gave the FBI a deadline of Sept. 13 to respond to their request.
