Hillary Clinton reacts to FBI finding no criminality re her emails, before boarding her campaign plane at Miami airport October 26, 2016. (Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
The FBI didn’t open any inquiry into an alleged Hillary Clinton campaign election interference plan even after the CIA director briefed then-president Barack Obama and other senior administration officials, Special Counsel John Durham’s report noted.
The FBI received Russian intelligence analysis in July 2016 alleging that Clinton’s campaign cooked up a scheme to divert attention away from “her use of a private email server,” the Durham report stated.
The alleged scheme, dubbed the “Clinton Plan,” showed that the Clinton campaign “had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” against Trump “by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” the Durham report reads.
The intelligence community didn’t know the accuracy of the Russian intelligence, but the findings were notable enough for then-CIA Director John Brennan to inform the Obama administration “within days” of learning about it.
Brennan briefed President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey about the Clinton campaign’s plan, the Durham report says.
The findings also prompted the CIA to send “a formal written referral memorandum” to Comey and “the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, for their consideration and action.”
In contrast to the speed at which the FBI opened a full investigation into Trump “on raw, uncorroborated information,” the FBI “never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” Durham wrote. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 5/16/2023) (Archive)