“FBI agents opened an investigation in late 2014 into a foreign power’s effort to curry influence with Hillary Clinton’s prospective presidential campaign through donations, but the bureau’s leadership slow-walked a surveillance warrant and instead arranged for the candidate to get a defensive briefing, newly declassified memos show.
A clipping from an email that reveals the FBI’s early struggles to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate possible foreign influence peddling and the upcoming Clinton campaign. (Pg 14 – Clinton FBI Debriefing, 1/21/2021)
FBI agents became so frustrated that they were being stonewalled from securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to investigate the foreign money plot that they even escalated to then-FBI Director James Comey, according to the memos declassified by President Trump on Tuesday night and obtained by Just the News.
“The FISA application has remained in limbo for the last four months, even though subsequent investigative activity by [redacted] provided additional probable cause for the FISA application,” an FBI employee wrote Comey in an April 14, 2015 email in which he expressed concern he was “overstepping” his chain of command by raising his concerns.
That email stated the FBI field office leading the probe was “still uncertain as to why the application has not been sent to DOJ for final approval although several reasons have been put forth by CD [Criminal Division], most recently that the decision to put the application on hold originated ‘on the seventh floor.'”
The seventh floor of the FBI headquarters is where the FBI director and his team have their offices and is a common reference among field agents to the FBI’s management team.
Comey wrote back to the agent, “Don’t know anything about this but will get smarter.”
You can read the memos here:
ClintonDefensiveBriefing.pdf
The memos don’t offer any further evidence that a FISA warrant was ever approved. Instead, they show that FBI leadership ultimately decided to give Clinton’s team a defensive briefing in October 2015 as her presidential campaign geared up. The briefing was given to her legal team led by David Kendall and Katherine Turner, the memos show.
“Kendall and Turner were advised the FBI was providing them with this briefing for awareness and so Ms. Clinton could take appropriate action to protect herself,” a summary memo stated. “They were also told the FBI was seeking their assistance to identify other appropriate recipients of the brief, if any.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 1/21/2021) (Archive)