I wonder if anyone at the FBI actually smirked when offering a silly rationale for denying a document request related to Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email server. (Remember? She used BleachBit to permanently delete 30,000 emails that may be official records, among various other potential felonies.)
Someone at the Bureau actually thought claiming there was a “lack of public interest” in the subject would not evoke peals of laughter.
Stephen Dinan writes in the Washington Times:
Hillary Clinton’s case isn’t interesting enough to the public to justify releasing the FBI’s files on her, the bureau said this week in rejecting an open-records request by a lawyer seeking to have the former secretary of state punished for perjury.
Ty Clevenger has been trying to get Mrs. Clinton and her personal attorneys disbarred for their handling of her official emails during her time as secretary of state. He’s met with resistance among lawyers, and now his request for information from the FBI’s files has been shot down.
“You have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” FBI records management section chief David M. Hardy told Mr. Clevenger in a letter Monday.
“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA,” Mr. Hardy wrote.
Quite obviously, the FBI has been so thoroughly politicized (thanks, James Comey!) that it cannot be trusted. This is both a tragedy and an actual crisis. The path toward banana republic status just got a lot shorter.
