© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
National Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington on April 30, 2014.
The FBI lost notes from a 2015 meeting with people from the office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), according to newly released FBI records on the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's alleged mishandling of classified information.
The news raises concern that some information about an explosive lead passed by the ICIG to the FBI now might be lost.
The lost notes memorialized a meeting that took place on Aug. 3, 2015, less than a month after the ICIG made a referral to the FBI that classified information may have been disclosed in an unauthorized manner to a foreign power because Clinton conducted State Department business through an email hosted on an insufficiently secured server in her basement.
The ICIG-FBI meetings
hold special significance because it was allegedly several of these meetings where the ICIG officials passed a lead to the FBI about
anomalies in the metadata of the emails indicating that a copy of nearly every email was sent to an agent of a foreign power.
Several lawmakers, as well as the Justice Department's
Inspector General,
publicly confirmed that then-ICIG Charles McCullough told them about the metadata anomalies and that the lead was communicated to the FBI. The FBI acknowledged that Clinton's emails could have been breached by foreign actors who covered their tracks, but denied that any evidence of foreign infiltration was found. Several current and former senior FBI officials involved in the Clinton case denied in congressional testimonies any recollection of receiving the metadata lead.
Comment: The Barr-Horowitz investigations will no doubt turn up more of the same shenanigans.