Tag: FBI

Fox News says its report of a possible Clinton indictment is wrong, but Trump keeps citing it

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Donald Trump cited an erroneous Fox News report on the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email on Friday as he pressed his case that his Democratic rival is a criminal who belongs in prison.

At a country club rally on a crisp autumn day in southern New Hampshire, Trump pronounced Clinton guilty of perjury, saying she lied to Congress about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of State.

“The FBI agents say their investigation is likely to yield an indictment,” Trump told about 1,000 supporters, alluding to a Fox News report that the network retracted Friday morning.

It was unclear whether Trump was aware that Fox News anchor Bret Baier had just acknowledged that there were no facts to back up his statement Thursday that the federal probe would result in an indictment.

“No one knows if there would or would not be an indictment,” Baier told Fox News viewers in a rare on-air apology.

“It was a mistake, and for that I’m sorry,” Baier said.

Fox News also retracted another element of its reporting that Trump has used to tar Clinton during the week since FBI Director James Comey announced that investigators were examining newly discovered emails to see whether they had any significance in the Clinton probe that was closed in July with no charges.

Fox News reported incorrectly – and Trump has repeated — that as many as five foreign intelligence agencies might have hacked Clinton’s private server, despite Comey saying in July that there was no evidence of a breach.

Baier acknowledged Friday that there were “still no digital fingerprints of a breach.”

(h/t Los Angeles Times)

Media

Giuliani Confirms FBI Insiders Leaked Information To The Trump Campaign

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Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate has recently dropped a series of hints that he knew in advance that the FBI planned to look at emails potentially connected to Clinton’s private server. The agency discovered the messages while investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) for allegedly sexting with a minor. (Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide to Clinton.)

Giuliani has bragged about his close ties to the FBI for months, mentioning in interviews that “outraged FBI agents” have told him they’re frustrated by how the Clinton investigation was handled. And two days before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was reviewing the newly uncovered emails, Giuliani teased that Trump’s campaign had “a couple of surprises left.”

“You’ll see, and I think it will be enormously effective,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

All of this has led to suspicion that someone in the FBI is leaking information to Giuliani and the Trump campaign. The Daily Beast’s Wayne Barrett explored those suspicions on Thursday, detailing how Giuliani’s ties to the agency date back to his days as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s.

Giuliani confirmed that notion Friday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” he said. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”

Giuliani also said he expected Comey’s announcement to come weeks before it did.

“I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago, because way back in July this started, they kept getting stymied looking for subpoenas, looking for records,” he said.

FBI officials knew about the newly discovered emails weeks before Comey’s announcement, according to multiple reports.

Giuliani insisted he had nothing to do with Comey’s decision to announce the probe prior to Election Day ― a move that both Republicans and Democrats have condemned. He also insisted his information comes from “former FBI agents.”

“I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends,” he said. “All I heard were former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”

Trump press secretary Hope Hicks did not immediately return a request for comment.

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

I thought Donald Trump said we should vote for him to stop the corruption and collusion?

This is very serious stuff.

Reps. Elijah Cummings and John Conyers, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, penned a scathing letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz Friday, urging him to probe the bureau for leaks in light of Giuliani bragging about obtaining leaked information from former agents.

“It is absolutely unacceptable for the FBI to leak unsubstantiated — and in some case false — information about one presidential candidate to benefit the other candidate,” Cummings and Conyers said in the letter. “Leaking this information to former FBI officials as a conduit to the Trump campaign is equally intolerable.”

Media

Despite Trump’s Claims, Evidence From FBI’s Clinton Foundation Probe ‘Not Impressive’

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On the campaign trail today, Donald Trump touted allegations about the Clinton Foundation that reliable sources say are false and ill-informed.

“It was reported last night that the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s pay-for-play corruption,” the Republican presidential nominee said today in Jacksonville, Florida, during his first rally of the day. “The investigation is described as a high priority. It’s far-reaching and has been going on for more than one year. It was reported that an avalanche of information is coming in. The FBI agents say their investigation is likely to yield an indictment.”

ABC News sources, however, indicated those statements — and the Fox News reports they’re based on — are inaccurate and without merit.

The sources acknowledged that the FBI began looking into the Clinton Foundation after the controversial book “Clinton Cash” was published last year. In particular, agents were trying to determine whether donations to the foundation may have been traded for access to Clinton while she was secretary of state.

In February, FBI agents presented their findings to senior FBI officials and prosecutors in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, sources said. But the prosecutors and senior FBI officials agreed that there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing and that a criminal case tied to the Clinton Foundation could not be made, according to the sources.

“It was not impressive,” one source said of the February presentation. “It was not something that [prosecutors] felt they could authorize additional steps for. They were not impressed with the presentation or the evidence — if you could even call it evidence to that point.”

Investigators and higher-ups have continued to discuss the matter, but there has been no change in posture, sources said. Authorities still believe there is no evidence of wrongdoing, and they do not believe there is a sufficient reason to pursue charges, according to the sources.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times first reported many of the details about how the Clinton Foundation–related probe developed.

According to the Clinton Foundation, it provides healthful meals to children in nearly 35,000 schools across the United States; trains more than 150,000 farmers in Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania; and helps more than 11.5 million people around the world gain access to more affordable HIV/AIDS medications.

(h/t ABC News)

Trump Wrongly Tweets Social Media is Burying FBI Letter

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Sunday Morning Donald Trump sent out a tweet implying that major social media sites, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are trying to suppress information regarding a letter FBI Directory James Comey sent to congress about emails found on an device belonging to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her soon-to-be ex husband Anthony Weiner.

Reality

Donald Trump received this information in an article from the conspiracy theory website Zero Hedge which is known to produce disingenuous content.

For their only evidence they showed screen grabs of we assume their own social media feeds.

However all social media sites have their own independent algorithms, and for this claim to be true Trump and his unreliable source would need to provide evidence of a level of collusion between competing social media companies.

There are a few things to consider when looking at trending topics. First, they are all algorithm-based, meaning some computer code was written to determine what topics are most important, and second, part of that algorithm factors in the things that you like.

But a simple  review of each social media site shows, in most cases, the James Comey letter is indeed in the top trending stories.

Trump has a social media team who should be able to debunk this for him.

Google

Google Trend searches for “Clinton FBI” and “FBI investigation Clinton” both showed a 100% interest value at the time of Trump’s tweet.

And news about James Comey’s letter was the top story to a logged out user.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-google

Facebook

Top story on Facebook.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-facebook

Twitter

Top of the Twitter news for a logged out user.

trump-tweet-clinton-fbi-twitter

 

 

 

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