Andrew McCarthy explains exactly how Loretta Lynch is quashing the FBI's Clinton Foundation probe

First of all, get your mind clear on this one thought: What really matters is not the illegality of Hillary's schlock, homebrew e-mail server, nor is it the classified information that was jeopardized because it passed through said server. That matters, but not as much as the thing that really matters. What really matters is the pay-for-play, bribery corruption of the Clinton Foundation. The e-mail server was set up to prevent Congress, the media and the public from learning what was really going on with the Clinton Foundation. The fact that the server was discovered, and that we now know classified information was compromised because of it, is flitting around the edges. Hillary knew she was playing a dangerous game handling classified information in this way. (So did Obama, by the way.) She did it anyway because the security of classified information was nowhere near as important to her as making sure no one ever knew how brazenly the Clinton Foundation was trading influence for cash.

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And as we told you yesterday, the FBI has been trying for months to investigate the Clinton Foundation's corruption - getting all kinds of resistance from day one from the Obama Justice Department, which has consistently thrown up every conceivable obstacle to a thorough and successful investigation. They refused to empanel a grand jury that could issue subpoenas. They have granted the people around Hillary absurd immunity deals. They agreed to completely insane conditions for the interview of Hillary herself. Understand, it was the Justice Department, not the FBI, that did all this. The FBI has a team trying its best to get to the bottom of the Clinton Foundation's corruption, and the Justice Department is thwarting that team at every turn. Now, I reference Andrew McCarthy a lot. He is a former U.S. attorney who now writes for National Review, and he worked with James Comey during those years. Every time something mind-boggling has happened in connection with this investigation, McCarthy has been the one who's been able to explain in detail not only what happened, but why, and who the players are. Today he really gets to the bottom of how and why Lynch is quashing the Clinton Foundation scandal:

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Readers are unlikely to know that the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn is not just any United States attorney’s office. It is the office that was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch until President Obama elevated her to attorney general less than two years ago. It was in the EDNY that Ms. Lynch first came to national prominence in 1999, when she was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton — the husband of the main subject of the FBI’s investigations with whom Lynch furtively met in the back of a plane parked on an Arizona tarmac days before the announcement that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. Obama reappointed Lynch as the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 2010. She was thus in charge of staffing that office for nearly six years before coming to Main Justice in Washington. That means the EDNY is full of attorneys Lynch hired and supervised. When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, those are the prosecutors — Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors — we are talking about. Recall, moreover, that it was Lynch’s Justice Department that:

• refused to authorize use of the grand jury to further the Clinton e-mails investigation, thus depriving the FBI of the power to compel testimony and the production of evidence by subpoena;
• consulted closely with defense attorneys representing subjects of the investigation;
• permitted Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — the subordinates deputized by Mrs. Clinton to sort through her e-mails and destroy thousands of them — to represent Clinton as attorneys, despite the fact that they were subjects of the same investigation and had been granted immunity from prosecution (to say nothing of the ethical and legal prohibitions against such an arrangement);
• drastically restricted the FBI’s questioning of Mills and other subjects of the investigation; and struck the outrageous deals that gave Mills and Samuelson immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the FBI with the laptops on which they reviewed Clinton’s four years of e-mails.

That arrangement was outrageous for three reasons: 1) Mills and Samuelson should have been compelled to produce the computers by grand-jury subpoena with no immunity agreement; 2) Lynch’s Justice Department drastically restricted the FBI’s authority to examine the computers; and 3) Lynch’s Justice Department agreed that the FBI would destroy the computers following its very limited examination. As I have detailed, it was already clear that Lynch’s Justice Department was stunningly derelict in hamstringing the bureau’s e-mails investigation. But now that we know the FBI was simultaneously investigating the Clinton Foundation yet being denied access to the Clinton e-mails, the dereliction appears unconscionable.

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So basically the Eastern District of New York is full of Loretta Lynch loyalists who are doing her bidding by putting up barriers to the Clinton Foundation investigation. And when the FBI tries to go to the more trustworthy and serious Southern District of New York - alma mater of both Andrew McCarthy and Jim Comey - the Justice Department smacks them down for "prosecutor-shopping." Crucially, the Justice Department is trying everything it can to restrict the FBI's ability to access and use the e-mails on the Clinton server because that's the information they need to thoroughly investigate the Clinton Foundation - which is the very reason Hillary set up the schlock, homebrew server in the first place. She thought no one would ever be able to see what was on it. Now that it's very much in the spotlight, she's trying everything she can to hide its contents, and Loretta Lynch is helping her with that coverup. That's how rotten this whole thing is. And yet it seems inconceivable that this can work for long. The information is in those e-mails, and sooner or later we're going to know what they say. When we do, the full extent of the Clinton Foundation's corruption will be known to the world. The only question is whether it stays hidden long enough to allow her to slip into the Oval Office. And . . . whether she will ultimately be the beneficiary of a presidential pardon - either by Obama or at her own hands. Either way, the fact that we don't already know the details of the Clinton Foundation's corruption is directly and irrefutably because Loretta Lynch is leading a coverup to make sure we don't.

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