FBI executive involved in Clinton email probe
Mark F. Giuliano, a career FBI official who was secondin-command at the law enforcement agency when it launched a controversial investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server as she sought the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, died March 2 at his home in Decatur, Ga. He was 62.
The cause was an apparent heart attack, said his sister Ann Britz.
In an FBI career that began in 1988 and spanned almost three decades, Giuliano started as a street agent in Washington pursuing violent crime and gangs. He later supervised high-profile criminal cases and the FBI’S Ten Most Wanted program.
As with many FBI agents, the focus of his work shifted significantly following the al-qaida terrorist attacks of 2001. The FBI put a larger emphasis on global security threats and, for a time, he worked in Afghanistan overseeing an FBI team supporting U.S. Special Forces.
In a time when a terrorism case that started in the suburbs of Minneapolis could reach into far-flung corners of Somalia, Afghanistan or Iraq, Giuliano’s contemporaries credited him with integrating the FBI’S work with more secretive U.S. intelligence agencies.
In 2012, after years in senior roles at FBI headquarters, Giuliano was made the top FBI agent in Atlanta before director James B. Comey called him back to Washington the next year to help run the bureau as deputy director.
In 2015, Giuliano and Comey opened one of the most consequential investigations in FBI history — the probe into Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, over classified information found on a private, nongovernment email server.
Giuliano and FBI executives opened the case based on a referral from an inspector general — setting off an unpredictable chain of events that consumed the presidential race.
Clinton’s emails, in which some State Department message chains forwarded to her discussed classified material such as drone strikes in Pakistan, alarmed national security officials as possible criminal violations.
The FBI’S handling of the case had an outsized impact on the 2016 presidential election, though those events occurred after Giuliano retired in early 2016, having already stayed longer than he had planned.
Clinton later blamed Comey and the FBI for her defeat.