Former Intelligence Community Inspector General under Barack Obama, General Charles McCullough III, discussed the retaliation from the Clinton campaign for investigating the presence of classified information in email sent with Hillary Clinton’s private email server. As I posted in January 2016, General McCullough sent a letter to leaders on congressional intelligence committees indicating that the email on Hillary Clinton’s private server contained classified information, leading to further investigation.
The State Department Inspector General position was left vacant while Clinton was Secretary of State. After the post was filled, the State Department Inspector General report did indicate that Clinton had acted in violation of the law.
McCullough was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. While I hate to use Fox as a source, they are the network which carried the interview and therefore have the report. From their report of the interview:
A government watchdog who played a central role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation during the Obama administration told Fox News that he, his family and his staffers faced an intense backlash at the time from Clinton allies – and that the campaign even put out word that it planned to fire him if the Democratic presidential nominee won the 2016 election.
“There was personal blowback. Personal blowback to me, to my family, to my office,” former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said.
The Obama appointee discussed his role in the Clinton email probe for the first time on television, during an exclusive interview with Fox News aired on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” McCullough – who came to the inspector general position with more than two decades of experience at the FBI, Treasury and intelligence community – shed light on how quickly the probe was politicized and his office was marginalized by Democrats.
In January 2016, after McCullough told the Republican leadership on the Senate intelligence and foreign affairs committees that emails beyond the “Top Secret” level passed through the former secretary of state’s unsecured personal server, the backlash intensified.
“All of a sudden I became a shill of the right,” McCullough recalled. “And I was told by members of Congress, ‘Be careful. You’re losing your credibility. You need to be careful. There are people out to get you.’”
But the former inspector general, with responsibility for the 17 intelligence agencies, said the executive who recommended him to the Obama administration for the job – then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – was also disturbed by the independent Clinton email findings.
“[Clapper] said, ‘This is extremely reckless.’ And he mentioned something about — the campaign … will have heartburn about that,” McCullough said…
As one of the few people who viewed the 22 top secret Clinton emails deemed too classified to release under any circumstances, the former IG said, “There was a very good reason to withhold those emails … there would have been harm to national security.” McCullough went further, telling Fox News that “sources and methods, lives and operations” could be put at risk.
Some of those email exchanges contained Special Access Program (SAP) information characterized by intel experts as “above top secret.”
WikiLeaks documents show the campaign was formulating talking points as the review of 30,000 Clinton emails was ongoing.
The campaign team wrote in August 2015 that “Clinton only used her account for unclassified email. When information is reviewed for public release, it is common for information previously unclassified to be upgraded to classified.”
McCullough was critical of the campaign’s response, as the classified review had barely begun. “There was an effort … certainly on the part of the campaign, to mislead people into thinking that there was nothing to see here,” McCullough said.
McCullough discussed opposition from the Clinton campaign, Congressional Democrats, and some at the State Department for his desire to investigate Clinton’s actions. This included threats that he would be fired:
“It was told in no uncertain terms, by a source directly from the campaign, that we would be the first two to be fired — with [Clinton’s] administration. That that was definitely going to happen,” he said.
McCullough said he was just trying to do his job, which requires independence. “I was, in this context, a whistleblower. I was explaining to Congress — I was doing exactly what they had expected me to do. Exactly what I promised them I would do during my confirmation hearing,” he said. “… This was a political matter, and all of a sudden I was the enemy.”
…Asked what would have happened to him if he had done such a thing, McCullough said: “I’d be sitting in Leavenworth right now.”
James Comey’s report showed that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” While he declined to recommend prosecution, his report also demonstrated that many of Clinton’s public statements regarding the email scandal were false. Comey’s letter to Congress late in the campaign is on the long list of Clinton’s excuses for losing to Donald Trump. McCullough noted in the interview that the FBI’s involvement might have been avoided if Clinton had been more cooperative in the investigation:
Speaking about the case more than a year after the FBI probe concluded, McCullough in his interview also addressed the possibility that a more cooperative State Department and Clinton campaign might have precluded the FBI’s involvement from the start.
“Had they come in with the server willingly, without having us to refer this to the bureau … maybe we could have worked with the State Department,” he said.
Of course there would also have not been an FBI investigation if Clinton had not violated the law with her use of the private server. In addition, the scandal might not have repeatedly made news if Clinton had been more honest, as opposed to being constantly exposed for lying.
