Congressional investigators are puzzling over a December 2016 text message that suggests the Justice Department sought to grant immunity to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
In a Dec. 13, 2016 text exchange, FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok sent his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, a text message referring to a conversation he had with the Justice Department discussing immunity and potential grand jury testimony.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released the text message along with 384 pages of additional records on Wednesday.
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“Talked with DoJ about HA interview,” Strzok wrote to Page.
“Told them we had to interview, no immunity. They said they thought that would get counsel to the point of saying she’s either taking the 5th in the Gj or you need to give her immunity. I said that’s fine, please have discussions to get the decision to that point and I would run it up the chain.”
The initials “HA,” the feminine pronouns, and other text messages that Strzok sent in that time frame strongly suggest that he was referring to Abedin.
A day before the text about immunity, Strzok said that a top FBI official had offered to meet with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall.
Kendall did not represent Abedin in the email case so it is unclear why the FBI sought to meet with him. A lawyer who represented Abedin on the email matter did not respond to a request for comment.
It is unclear what case Strzok was investigating at the time, and there have been no reports that Abedin was granted immunity or that she pleaded the Fifth.
The Hillary Clinton email investigation was closed for good on Nov. 6, 2016, just two days before the election. The FBI re-opened its investigation in late October 2016 after Clinton emails were discovered on a laptop shared by Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
The FBI was still investigating Weiner for sending lewd messages to an underage girl.
Strzok was one of the lead investigators on the Clinton email investigation. He conducted the interviews of Clinton and several of her aides, including Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Heather Samuelson.
Mills and Samuelson were granted limited immunity in order to cooperate in the case.
As The Daily Caller has reported, Abedin and Mills gave conflicting answers about Clinton’s email server during their interviews with Strzok. They claimed that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until she left the State Department. But emails that the two aides sent while they worked for Clinton at State show that they discussed Clinton’s server, which maintained thousands of classified emails.
This report, by Chuck Ross, was cross posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
