Peculiar new details have come to light regarding the immunity deals given to Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Heather Samuelson, an ex-campaign staffer.
According to Fox News sources, side-deals were cut in addition to Mills’ and Samuelson’s overall immunity deals. One side-deal dictated that the FBI only be allowed to review documents on Mills’ and Samuelson’s laptops generated prior to January 31, 2015–over a month before Clinton’s private email server became public knowledge. Even stranger, in a second side-deal, the FBI was ordered to destroy the laptops after their search was complete.
Is this real life?
Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch in which he asks two salient questions:
“Doesn’t the willingness of Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to have their laptops destroyed by the FBI contradict their claim that the laptops could have been withheld because they contained non-relevant, privileged information? If so, doesn’t that undermine the claim that the side agreements were necessary?”
The answer to those questions are yes, and yes. An innocent party does not withhold access; an innocent party does not agree to provide access only if they receive an immunity deal; an innocent party does not restrict what can and cannot be looked at within the scope of that access; and an innocent party does not demand the obliteration of innocuous information.
Each behavior on its own is enough to arouse suspicion–let alone all of them combined.
Why did Mills and Samuelson, via their immunity deals, dictate that anything after January 31st was off limits? There are several possible answers, one of them being that documents from after the 31st may have contained evidence of obstruction with regard to Clinton’s private server.
Why did Mills and Samuelson demand, via their immunity deals, that their laptops be destroyed after the search? Again, there are several possibilities, the most likely of which being that they didn’t want the information on their hard drives to be accessible in the event of a future investigation.
Another possibility is that the laptops contained information directly damaging to Clinton herself. This was touched upon in Goodlatte’s letter to AG Lynch:
“Why was this time limit necessary when Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were granted immunity for any potential destruction of evidence charges?”
If Mills and Samuelson were indeed in the clear–regardless of what was uncovered on their laptops–the only conceivable reason to demand limited access, and even take it a step further by ordering the destruction of information, is if Mills and Samuelson were protecting someone–in this case, Hillary Clinton.
At this point, however, it’s all speculation. Until more evidence is unearthed, the bottom of this sordid story will never be reached.