New York // Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief has accused the FBI of double standards for revealing details of an investigation into her emails days before last year’s election while saying nothing about a simultaneous inquiry into Russian attempts to swing the result for Donald Trump.
Democrats have long blamed Mrs Clinton’s shock defeat on FBI director James Comey’s decision to make public the reopening of an investigation into her email server a little more than a week before the November 8 election.
This week Mr Comey revealed that his agency began looking into Russian attempts to sway the election in July, the month that hacked Democratic party emails were released by WikiLeaks, but said nothing publicly.
John Podesta, the chairman of Mrs Clinton’s campaign, whose emails were also hacked, said: “His intervention, just 11 days before the election to say I’m going to reopen the Clinton investigation, yet his total silence with respect to the Russian intervention — and now the potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian actors — was really a double standard that is still inexplicable to me.”
The controversy over Mrs Clinton’s emails was an ever present shadow over her run for the White House.
Republicans said her decision to use a private server during her time as secretary of state put classified information at risk of being hacked.
They repeatedly suggested she may have used the server as part of a cover-up to hide information about an attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi in 2012, including the US ambassador to Libya.
Last July, Mr Comey announced that no charges should be brought against Mrs Clinton, although he described her use of a personal server as “extremely careless”.
On October 28, he said newly discovered emails would need to be reviewed. Although he then announced on November 6 that the emails had not changed his original conclusion, Mrs Clinton’s supporters accused him of interfering in the election.
Meanwhile, from last July the FBI was also investigating Russian attempts to hack into Democratic emails — as Mr Comey confirmed to the house intelligence committee on Monday.
The inspector general of the US justice department has already announced an investigation into how the FBI director handled the probe of Mrs Clinton’s emails.
Mr Podesta said the review should also look at the difference in treatment of the two cases, adding that there was no doubt Russia had meddled.
“Starting with President Putin himself, the Russian Federation interfered in the election, were responsible for the hacks, wanted to see Hillary Clinton damaged,” he said.
“Maybe that’s the motivation at the beginning but at the end of the day, given the compliant nature of the foreign policy that Donald Trump was putting out in the course of the election, [they] favoured Trump and tried to do everything they could to ensure he could be elected.”
Just as the emails haunted Mrs Clinton’s campaign, the questions over Russia have cast a long shadow over Mr Trump’s administration.
Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser when it emerged he misled officials over conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington after the election. Mr Trump’s attorney general has had to recuse himself from investigations into Russia ties after failing to reveal his own meetings with the ambassador.
A dossier of evidence collected by a former British spy even suggests Russian intelligence agencies collected compromising information they hoped to use to pressure Mr Trump.
This week the White House attempted to talk up Mrs Clinton’s own ties to Russia, accusing Mr Podesta of sitting on the board of a Russian energy company founded by President Putin.
In fact, he was on the board of an American company that counts a US subsidiary of Rusnano among its investors.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
