The RNC today filed two lawsuits in federal court alleging that the State Department is intentionally “stonewalling” in refusing to respond to requests from the National Archives for email records of various State Department staffers, including the now infamous Bryan Pagliano. As most are aware by now, Pagliano’s emails during his tenure at the State Department, like many of Hillary’s, mysteriously went “missing” after the private email server scandal blew up early last year. According to Law News, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sent a request to the State Department back in July 2016 to produce Pagliano’s emails but the RNC says there has been no response to date claiming an obvious attempt to “stonewall” until after the election.
Documents obtained by ABC News reportedly show the National Archives sent a request to the State Department in July that asked for an explanation about the lack of emails from Clinton’s top IT aide Bryan Pagliano. The State Department was asked to respond to the request within 30 days, but more than three months has now passed without a response.
“The State Department is clearly stonewalling another federal agency’s efforts to recover the emails of the IT staffer who set up Clinton’s illegal server and was granted immunity by the FBI,” Priebus said to ABC News. “If this isn’t an Obama Administration cover-up to protect Hillary Clinton, I don’t know what is.”
The RNC chairman argues the failure to respond to the request could be grounds for the Department of Justice to initiate an investigation into what happened to the emails. If Pagliano destroyed the records — and Preibus seems to think he did — he could be prosecuted for the destruction of federal records. Although, it is important to note that Pagliano did receive immunity for his cooperation in the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of the private server. And while the scope of the immunity agreement is currently unknown, Preibus does not believe the DOJ would’ve given Pagliano blanket immunity for the intentional destruction of federal records.
Of course, the State Department simply asserts that they can’t find a single email received or originated by Pagliano during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State…which seems completely reasonable. But, as State continues, that doesn’t necessarily indicate that Pagliano intentionally destroyed federal records in an obvious attempt to coverup mass corruption at the State Department and FBI because “employees’ emails have not always been automatically retained.”
State Department spokesman John Kirby offered no explanation to the network for why the deadline was missed.
“As we have publicly explained months ago, the Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” Kirby said. “As we have also previously explained, employees’ emails have not always been automatically retained, so the absence of this email file does not necessarily indicate that Mr. Pagliano intentionally deleted his emails.”
Kirby’s comment focuses on the State Department’s failure to locate Pagliano’s emails, but it does not address the entirety of the National Archives request. For example, the request said “if it’s determined Federal records have been alienated or destroyed, please describe all measures your agency has taken, or expects to take, to retrieve the alienated records or retrieve them, to the extent necessary and appropriate.”
As most will recall, Pagliano was the first to receive an immunity deal from the FBI which many speculated, at the time, implied that the FBI was close to bringing official charges against Hillary. Now, of course, we know that Pagliano and at least 4 other people linked to Hillary’s email scandal, were more likely granted immunity as part of what appears to be a massive cover-up operation by the FBI and DOJ.
Pagliano was also the first to “plead the 5th” rather than testify before a congressional panel and, thanks to a WikiLeaks data dump earlier this week, we now know exactly how Neera Tanden felt that decision:
Yes, “suboptimal” indeed…but don’t worry because:
via http://ift.tt/2fh5E0N Tyler Durden