FBI accused of double standards over Clinton email investigation

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 US election, while saying nothing about a simultaneous inquiry into Russian attempts to swing the presidential election 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 use of an 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 overshadowed 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.

They suggested she may have used the server as part of a cover-up to hide information about the 2012 Benghazi attack in which four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya, were killed.

In July, Mr Comey announced that no charges should be brought against Mrs Clinton, although he characterised her use of a personal server as “extremely careless”.

On October 28, he said newly discovered emails would need to be reviewed. On November 6, he said that they had not changed his original conclusion. Clinton supporters accused him of interfering in the election.

Meanwhile, in July, the FBI was also investigating Russian attempts to hack into Democratic emails – as Mr Comey confirmed to the house intelli- gence committee on Monday.

The justice department inspector general has announced an investigation into how the FBI director handled the examinations 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 ( Vladimir) 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.” This week, the White House talked up Mrs Clinton’s own Russia ties, accusing Mr Podesta of sitting on the board of a Russian energy company founded by Mr Putin.

In fact, he was on the board of an American company that counts a US subsidiary of Rusnano among its investors.