Thursday, October 20, 2016

A Deal That Never Happened

I haven’t paid that much attention to the Clinton email WikiLeaks dump. I figure if something big comes out of it I’ll hear about it. Instead most of it all seems like pretty reasonable things that a few outlets are making a big deal out of when they shouldn’t. This is a typical example, Factcheck.org goes into details on A Deal That Never Happened.

Donald Trump is making false and grossly inflated claims about an alleged ‘quid pro quo’ between the State Department and the FBI regarding one of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Trump insists in campaign appearances that newly released documents show that a State Department official offered a deal to the FBI if it would declassify one of Clinton’s emails, and that this reveals ‘how corrupt she is.’

What the FBI documents actually show is that:

  • A deal was first suggested by a now-retired FBI official — not anyone at State — and he quickly dropped it.
  • The FBI-State deal never happened. The sentence remains classified as ‘Secret’ as the FBI wanted, and the FBI didn’t get the added agents in Iraq that it wanted State to approve.

Furthermore, our reporting shows the deal would have involved one short sentence in a single email that was forwarded to Clinton, then secretary of state, regarding arrests of suspects in the Benghazi attacks of Sept. 11, 2012.

But to hear Trump describe it, this amounts to a massive, illegal cover-up."

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