Former FBI Director James Comey used a possibly fake Russian document to justify his decision to end the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server to send classified information during her tenure as Secretary of State, The Washington Post reported.
The document, received by the FBI in March 2016, mentioned a supposed email between then-Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schlultz and Leonard Benardo, an official at the Open Society Foundations founded by George Soros, where Wasserman-Schultz said then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch told a top Clinton campaign aide she would not allow the Clinton probe to go too deep.
Comey might have used the document to go public with his decision in order to make it clear the FBI, and not the Justice Department, was making the call, the Post reported.
"It was a very powerful factor in the decision to go forward in July with the statement that there shouldn't be a prosecution," a person familiar with the matter to the Post. "The point is that the bureau picked up hacked material that hadn't been dumped by the bad guys [the Russians] involving Lynch. And that would have pulled the rug out of any authoritative announcement."
The FBI, though, later found the document to be bad intelligence and some sources believed it to be a fake planted to confuse the agency. Wasserman Schultz and Bernardo told the Post they do not know each other and have never communicated. The Clinton campaign aide, Amanda Renteria, said she does not know Lynch. People close to Lynch said she does not know Renteria.
"It didn't mean anything to the investigation until after [senior FBI officials] had to defend themselves," one person familiar with the matter told the Post. "Then they decided it was important. But it's junk, and they already knew that."
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