Immunity deals given to two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides as part of the investigation into her private email server also included secret side deals with the Department of Justice and FBI, according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.
Congressman Goodlatte fired off a letter on Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in which he first publicly disclosed the existence of the secret side agreements. According to Goodlatte, the immunity agreements given to Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson included side deals between the DOJ, FBI and Beth Wilkinson, the lawyer representing the two women who were formerly top aides to Clinton at the State Department. The side agreements provided that FBI would destroy the laptops turned over by Mills and Samuelson.
“Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers,” Congressman Goodlatte wrote in the letter. “Please provide a written response to the below questions and make DOJ staff available for a briefing on this matter no later than October 10, 2016.”
The letter goes on to list a number of questions for Attorney General Lynch, including whether 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….”
In addition to revealing the existence of side deals to destroy the laptops, the letter also reveals the DOJ “agreed to limit their search of the Mills and Samuelson laptops to a date no later than January 31, 2015.”
Congressman Goodlatte argues the search limit is significant because it prevented the FBI from uncovering “evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State.”
A Judiciary Committee staffer also reportedly told Fox News that lawmakers were also troubled about the search limit because Mills and Samuelson already had immunity for anything that was found on the laptops.
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