Another Official Overseeing Hillary Email Investigation Has Ties to Clinton
A Department of Justice official who notified Congress Monday that the agency would “dedicate all necessary resources” to the reopened Hillary Clinton email investigation has a close relationship with campaign chair John Podesta, hacked emails show.
Peter Kadzik, assistant attorney general, sent his son to seek a job on the Clinton campaign given his personal relationship with Podesta. He was invited to a small birthday gathering for Podesta’s lobbyist brother last year. Kadzik also dined with Podesta at his home in January, when the first FBI probe was well underway.
. . . .
In 2008, Podesta raved about Kadzik to Cassandra Butts, a member of President Obama’s transition team, and noted Kadzik was “willing to help” with vetting for Obama’s Cabinet.
“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote of Kadzik.
While I am on the topic, I should note that I have been pretty tough lately on Andrew McCabe, a top FBI supervisor who has been overseeing the email investigation despite Hillary having help raise over half a million dollars for his wife’s political campaign. It’s probably worth noting in this regard that the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that McCabe was one of the people pushing for an investigation of the Clinton Foundation. At the same time, he appears to have been notified of the existence of the Weiner emails in early October, and there is some dispute about whether he acted to delay that or not.
This one is a red herring.
This guy is Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs. Its his job to respond to inquiries from Congress. He sent letters to several Senators and House members who cosigned a letter to the AG on Saturday following Comey’s announcement on Friday.
He has NOTHING to do with supervising the investigation. The office he oversees doesn’t do case work, they don’t supervise case work, and on this particular case the entire staff probably doesn’t have the necessary security clearances to participate in the case. His office simply responds to Cong. inquiries with information they are directed to send.
The email investigation is being supervised by the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, who is currently in an “Acting” capacity. That means the political appointee who headed up the National Security Division has left the department. The current Acting AAG is Mary McCord, who was a 20 year veteran of the DC US Attorney’s Office before joining the National Security Division in 2014. She was both the Appellate Chief and Criminal Division Chief at the DC US Attorney’s Office.
This issue is a nothingburger.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/1/2016 @ 10:12 pmNothing to see here: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/43150
——-
Fwd: Heads up
From:john.podesta@gmail.com
To: jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com, bfallon@hillaryclinton.com, cheryl.mills@gmail.com, hsamuelson@cdmillsgroup.com, kschake@hillaryclinton.com, nmerrill@hillaryclinton.com
Date: 2015-05-19 11:12
Subject: Fwd: Heads up
Additional chances for mischief.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: *Peter Kadzik*
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Subject: Heads up
To: John Podesta
There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division
Not Peter Kadzik (aa1ad8) — 11/2/2016 @ 7:24 amwill testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another
filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that
indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the
emails.
Not sure how that at #2 is significant.
The DOJ filing, whatever it was, was a public record document.
The oversight hearing was a public proceeding, and the fact that the Civil Division head would be testifying would have been on a public agenda.
“Likely to get questions on State Dept. emails” is a “duh” — it had been in the news for 10 weeks at that point.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 8:07 am@shipwreckedcrew:“Likely to get questions on State Dept. emails” is a “duh” — it had been in the news for 10 weeks at that point.
It doesn’t matter. Kadzik wanted Podesta to hear the news first hand from a friendly source, as a courtesy.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 11/2/2016 @ 8:20 amI see ZeroHedge has run out another story on the Wikileaks dump today connecting Podesta to Kadzik.
This is the kind of nonsense that makes it easy to wave-off legitimate concerns about connections inside DOJ to the campaign.
ZeroHedge points out that when Kadzik sent this email, it was from his personal “gmail account”.
Well, I had a personal gmail account — still have the same one — and I used it while I worked at DOJ.
I didn’t use it for DOJ business, I used it for personal stuff. In fact, I used it to communicate with the proprietor of this site, rather than use my DOJ.gov email. Why? Because it wasn’t government business.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 8:38 am#4 – So what?
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 8:39 amGreetings:
But otherwise everything else is A-OK, right ???
In my short time under the tutelage of the Jesuits, I learned that it’s much better to go from the general to the specific as opposed to the vice versa. My time sailing the North Atlantic taught me that when you come up on an iceberg, all you see is the tip.
11B40 (6abb5c) — 11/2/2016 @ 8:50 am@shipwreckedcrew:So what?
Try to look at it from the perspective of someone who is outside.
If I were in that sort of trouble, I’d not be getting friendly a heads-up from Peter Kadzik.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 11/2/2016 @ 10:07 amthe corruption is so deep it’s
it’s hopeless
happyfeet (28a91b) — 11/2/2016 @ 10:55 amKept Podesta out of jail?
What was he in danger of being out in jail for?
He represented him during the Monica Lewinsky investigation.
Now he lawyer might have made him look in more danger of indctment than he was. He could also have “kept him ut of jail” by telling him to be careful how he dealt with investigators.
Sammy Finkelman (3fda43) — 11/2/2016 @ 11:24 amThe potential is, if Hillary Clinton is elected, we could be wallowing in Watergate for several years…
Or, even worse, we might not be wallowing in Watergate.
Sammy Finkelman (3fda43) — 11/2/2016 @ 11:25 amWell, when you see more, let me know.
Because right now there’s nothing to the Kadzik connection.
They went to law school together.
They are friends.
And…
Provide a meaningful indication that Kadzik has in any way influenced the email investigation — or even that he has the capacity to influence the email investigation. Find a path by which the AAG for Legislative Affairs plays a role in the functions of the National Security Division.
Or are you “shocked, shocked” that someone with ties to significant figures in Dem. politics would occupy a position at DOJ that goes to a political appointee of a Democratic President?
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 12:10 pmSammy — Poesta was the subject of a criminal investigation by Ken Starr with regard to testimony he gave in connection with Starr’s investigation which was determined to be false. Podesta later acknowledged it was false, but the nature of the testimony was him repeating what he was told by Bill Clinton — and it was Clinton who had originated false information to Podesta, which Podesta passed on to others, and then Podesta testified to the false information.
The investigation eventually established that Podesta’s version was accurate — he unwittingly testified to false facts based on untruthful information he was given by Clinton. My recollection is fuzzy, but I think it had to do with when and how Clinton eventually admitted he knew Lewinsky, and a timeline with regard to efforts to get Lewinsky a job outside the WH.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 12:14 pmMy theory is, given all this, that the purpose of McAuliffe recruiting McCabe’s wife as a Democratic candidate for the state Senate in Virginia, was to get him to recuse himself from any investigation concerning the Democratic Party, and especially, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe himself, the latter of which he actually did maybe (we don’t really know one way or the other, according to an Oct. 24 2016 Wall Street Journal article)
The Wall Street Journal further reported in that article that after Andrew McCabe had that telephone conversation with some Justice Department official on Friday, August 12, in which he asked point blank if he was being asked to shut down a validly predicated investigation, he then reiterated (to some people who were standing in the room, and hearing the call on Speakerphone?) that they were to keep pursuing the work within the authority they had (probably meaning no subpoenas, or use of a grand jury, but they could review evidence, collect public information and do witness interviews – anything that did not require approval from a prosecutor or DOJ official.)
But agents further down say they were given an instruction to “stand down.” And were told that the order had come from the deputy drector, Andrew McCabe. Which would appear to be a lie, or somebody’s lying the other way.
Some people in the FBI also said to the Wall Street Journal that no such stand down order had come from Andrew McCabe or any other senior FBI official.
In September, agents on the Clinton Foundation case run by the EDNY it looks like) asked to see emails on non-government laptops that had been searched for classified information in the email case, but were turned down by the Eastern District of New York. The reason given apparently was that they had been obtained under a grant of partial immunity and for limited use and they could only be searched for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
When that happened, some FBI agents wanted to go to the Southern District of New York and ask for help there, but McCabe told them they couldn’t go prosecutor-shopping.
A little bit later, in early October, FBI agents, (probably working under the auspices of the Southern District of New York) told the FBI’s leaders about the Weiner laptop and what it seemed to contain. The metadata showed thousands of messages that appeared to come from or to clintonemail.com (or maybe even other domain names used by the private server)
So what happened first is that “senior FBI officials” asked them to take a closer look at the metadata. Metadata would be only who messages were to and from, and time and size of messages and things like that.
Nothing much seems to have happened for about two weeks.
Early in the week of Monday, October 24 through Friday October 28, at a meeting of senior FBI and Justice Department officials, a member of DOJ’s senior national security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop.
Then, they realized that nobody had asked for a search warrant. It was only being scrutinized for the presence of what would constitute child pornography = nude pictures of the 15 year old high school girl in North Carolina, and you needed a search warrant to acrually see those messages.
Andrew McCabe, at that point, asked the email investigators to ask the Weiner investigators if the contents of Weiner’s laptop could be relevant to email probe (we’re not talking about the Clinton Foundation investigation here) And they said yes.
Comey was informed on Thursday and told members of a Congressional committee on Friday.
But it remains to be seen, of course, if anyone will be allowed to look at any of the emails to see if theer is anything in it relevant to the Clinton Foundation investigation.
To make the link, there’s going to have to be something relevant BOTH to the e-mail probe, and to the Clinton Foundation one, and it looks to me like procedures are being adopted that would tend to avoid that.
Preet Bharara, or whoever, needs probable cause for a search warrant, to look specifically for corrution or bribery, and we don’t know if everyone involved wants to find out if there is criminal activity there..
The Clinton Foundarion investigation has been going on for more than a year. A presentation was made by some FBI officials to Justce Deparftment officials in February, but they pooh-poohed it.
Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive.
– article by Devlin Barrett on page A8 of the Monday, October 31, 2016 Wall Street Journal, continued from the front page.
Sammy Finkelman (3fda43) — 11/2/2016 @ 12:23 pm@shipwreckedcrew:Because right now there’s nothing to the Kadzik connection.
They went to law school together.
They are friends.
I think your status as an insider, or perhaps former insider, is keeping you from seeing this.
Those two things you cite are not nothing to the public.
I don’t have highly connected law school buddies telling me what to expect in the next couple of days from the investigation I am subject to. Most of the public, you probably already know, does not.
Stuff like this is why 2016 is going the way it has been. It’s pretty far from “nothing”.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 11/2/2016 @ 12:35 pmI don’t know Peter Kadzik, and I’d be happy to excoriate him if he had done anything unusual or wrong.
The guy was in private practice in DC for THIRTY YEARS before joining the DOJ in 2013. His first job was as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs. He later was made Principal Deputy, and in 2014 — year 6 of the Obama Administration — he became Assistant Attorney General.
Podesta recommended him for a job in 2008 when Podesta was heading up Obama’s transition team — HE DIDN’T GET A JOB!!!!!
The fact that the AAG for the Civil Division was going to testify that day before the House Judiciary Committee would have been noted on the Committee’s website for any one of 300 million Americans to see.
The fact that there was a pleading being filed in court in one of the pending FOIA requests was also a matter of public record on the Court’s ECF system which any one of 300 million Americans could see by signing in (if you contact the court to set up an account — which are free).
IT IS NOTHING. IT’s only “SOMETHING” if you make up “SOMETHING” to go with the facts that are known.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 12:55 pm#14 — what has likely happened, and the reason for the icyness in the room, is that the DOJ lawyers who were not allowing the Clinton Foundation case to move into a full criminal case investigation (search warrants, witness interviews, and grand jury) realized that their control over the reins of that investigation was slipping away from them.
Remember that in neither the email investigation nor the Foundation investigation had DOJ attorneys authorized the use of search warrants. But, there was a significant number of prosecutors and agents who had worked on the email investigation who thought more aggressive investigative techniques should have been used, but those were denied to them by higher authorities.
Now when a member of DOJ’s National Security Division asked in this meeting for an update on Weiner’s laptop, he/she is told that no one has done anything. The FBI agents take their request to seek a search warrant internal first — to McCabe and Comey — and they agree.
I’m starting to think that Comey’s announcement last Friday was done in part to make it impossible for DOJ to object to seeking a search warrant in connection with the email investigation. The optics would have been HORRIBLE had they done so, that’s why you heard on Sunday that a search warrant had already been obtained — DOJ attorneys went along.
But here’s the big one — there is no way the lawyers in the EDNY who were blocking the use of search warrants and grand jury for the Foundation investigation can now stand in the way any longer. This was the subject of the McCabe phone call that the WSJ reported. DOJ thought the FBI was going to shut that probe down, but McCabe said “just keep doing what you’re doing without search warrants, grand jury,” etc.).
BUT, if the Foundation agents now get a search warrant for Weiner’s computer on the back of the search warrant obtained for the email investigation, then that firewall is breached. No way DOJ can stand in the way of other search warrants or witness interviews. If Clinton is elected, its going to end up leading to the appointment of a special prosecutor, and everyone involved can see how it is going to play out.
Any Clinton appointed AG would be conflicted, and the investigation could not be closed down without massive political and DOJ/FBI fallout. A special prosecutor gets grand jury subpoena power, and his own office full of FBI agents assigned to the investigation — out from under all supervision from either DOJ or FBI.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 1:10 pm@shipwreckedcrew:IT IS NOTHING.
Is it proof of corruption, or a thumb on the scale for the Clintons? No.
Is it “nothing”?
Do you know how many people in this country get helpful emails from Kadzik on his personal account when he is off work–regardless of whether that is public info or not?
Suppose on November 10, President Obama emails you in the evening from his personal account, saying, “Hey, SWC, tomorrow we have this observance and I just wanted to remind you not to miss it because I know you’ll want to see it, and if you’re in town that day come check it out”.
Would that be “nothing”, or would that be evidence that somebody powerful takes time out his day to think about you? After all, he’s not telling you anything not publicly known. After all, anyone could check his calendar and see he’s doing that.
But it would speak volumes about the kind of person you are to him.
So no, it is most definitely “something”.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 11/2/2016 @ 1:22 pmBut this entire issue arises ONLY because Peter Kadzik signed a letter to Dem Senators and House members who had written to the AG on Saturday to complaint about the FBI announcement.
From the mere fact that he signed that letter — which is strictly within the scope of his job responsibilities — CONSPIRACY THEORIES have spun out that he’s “in charge” of the email investigation, or “overseeing” the email investigation.
That FICTION is then linked to his 4 decade friendship with Podesta, dating back to Law School at Georgetown in the 70s (imagine if he had gone to Yale — OY VEY!!!!), a couple of stray emails between them, and suddenly Podesta and Hillary have a mole overseeing the email investigation.
THAT’s ALL NONSENSE, and if you can’t see that then you’re beyond help.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 11/2/2016 @ 1:43 pmnow many of these folks are untrustworthy,
https://twitter.com/alimhaider/status/793516521674772480
note how the clintons have been able to escape accountability for 15 years, just on this matter,
narciso (d1f714) — 11/2/2016 @ 1:55 pmand on another matter by 13 years,
http://spectator.org/clinton-email-scandal-evokes-berger-burglary/
narciso (d1f714) — 11/2/2016 @ 2:08 pm@SwC:he’s “in charge” of the email investigation, or “overseeing” the email investigation.
I have made no such claims. What claim I have made, is that his relationship to Podesta is not “nothing” and is not perceived by the public as “nothing”.
There’s a lot of ground in between my actual claim, and the conspiracy theories here you talk about.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 11/2/2016 @ 2:18 pm