An FBI agent who is said to have quit the bureau over his belief that the Hillary Clinton email investigation was rigged, will testify before the House of Representatives, The Hill reported.
Three witnesses to the Clinton investigation will appear before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, run by Republican Reps. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, respectively.
The agents who will appear: Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Michael Steinbach, the former head of the FBI’s national security division, and John Giacalone, who preceded Steinbach as the bureau’s top national security official and oversaw the first seven months of the Clinton probe.
Goodlatte and Gowdy have been a source of much consternation for the months-long delay. After seven months, only 2 of 20 witnesses have been called. Naturally, Democrats want the probe to stop. This is all while they push the Mueller fishing expedition based on non-existant Trump-Russia collusion/obstruction.
Priestap is interesting because he supervised FBI agent Peter Strzok, the anti-Trump investigator.
Giacalone is more interesting. Fox News pundit Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote a column in which he claimed Giacalone had quit the bureau because he believed the investigation was rigged.
In the Oct. 28, 2016 column, Napolitano claimed at that at the start of the Clinton email investigation, “agents and senior managers gathered in the summer of 2015 to discuss how to proceed. It was obvious to all that a prima-facie case could be made for espionage, theft of government property and obstruction of justice charges. The consensus was to proceed with a formal criminal investigation.”
THE CLINTON PROBE WAS RIGGED
The judge spoke with Giacalone.
“Six months later, the senior FBI agent in charge of that investigation resigned from the case and retired from the FBI because he felt the case was going ‘sideways’; that’s law enforcement jargon for ‘nowhere by design,’” Napolitano wrote.
“John Giacalone had been the chief of the New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., field offices of the FBI and, at the time of his ‘sideways’ comment, was the chief of the FBI National Security Branch.”
“The reason for the ‘sideways’ comment must have been Giacalone’s realization that DOJ and FBI senior management had decided that the investigation would not work in tandem with a federal grand jury. That is nearly fatal to any government criminal case. In criminal cases, the FBI and the DOJ cannot issue subpoenas for testimony or for tangible things; only grand juries can,” Napolitano continued.
“Giacalone knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would be toothless, as it would have no subpoena power. He also knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would have a hard time persuading any federal judge to issue search warrants.”
Napolitano speculated about why it went “sideways. One reason was that Obama feared having to testify if Clinton went to trial. Obama sent emails to her private server and had a fake name we didn’t know about that he used to communicate to her. Also, a Clinton indictment could have led to Trump becoming president. Obviously, that would make Mr. O very angry.
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