Senate, House Leaders Demand FBI Review Unexamined Clinton Email Drives

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford have called on FBI Director Kash Patel to urgently review eight thumb drives containing unexamined evidence related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. These materials, held since 2018 at an FBI offshoot office in Northern Virginia, reportedly include sensitive intelligence, foreign communications, and information linked to former President Barack Obama and the Clinton Foundation. The lawmakers criticized the FBI under former Director James Comey for failing to thoroughly assess crucial evidence despite acknowledging its necessity for a complete investigation. Their request follows the declassification of an appendix to a 2018 Department of Justice Inspector General report, revealing that executive privilege asserted by the Obama White House contributed to the FBI's failure to review the documents. The unexamined data also reportedly contains foreign intelligence information, possibly obtained by Russian cyber espionage, which had not been exploited by the FBI. Grassley and Crawford emphasized that the mishandling of this evidence has contributed to public distrust in the FBI's impartiality and called for immediate assessment and potential declassification of the materials.