If this was not serious it would be hilarious. The FBI is actually wasting time and tx payer money chasing down the people who blew the whistle on the corruption in the crony infested DNC/Clinton political machine. UH?
Something is terribly wrong here. Is the FBI not supposed to be protecting us from the bad guys rather than those who expose them?
Rather than chasing whistle blowers should the FBI not be chasing the people the whistle was blown on?
How about this guy for example?
Of all the characters in the political drama of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, none has been more mysterious—and potentially more important—than a 40-year-old technology specialist named Bryan Pagliano.
Pagliano didn’t just set up the now infamous “homebrew” server in the basement of Clinton’s New York home, which she used for official business while serving as secretary of state. Pagliano has been the former secretary’s go-to IT guy for the past several years. He’s also the only person in the entire investigation of Clinton’s email who got an immunity deal, protecting him from possible criminal prosecution. That was Pagliano’s demand for telling FBI investigators about Clinton’s unorthodox system—a system that he apparently knows more about than anyone else.
Federal prosecutors only offer someone immunity when they think he has unique information that can’t be obtained anywhere else. And for his part, Pagliano’s lawyer has said that the fact that the Justice Department granted it shows that he had a reasonable “fear of prosecution.” Over what isn’t entirely clear. It could be because of his role in establishing and maintaining the server.
But Pagliano also had an unusual employment arrangement. He was pulling down a six-figure salary at the State Department, which put him at the high-end of the pay scale for what appeared to be an ordinary tech support job. But Paliano was also being paid on the side in cash by the Clinton family, something his immediate supervisors didn’t know. In fact, they were never clear on precisely what his job was and didn’t know that during office hours, Pagliano was working for Clinton personally to maintain her private email system.
What is clear is that Pagliano believed he could be in legal jeopardy as a result of his work for Clinton, and the FBI was willing to cut a deal.
It paid off. After speaking to him last December, FBI investigators trying to reconstruct Clinton’s system—and determine whether it broke any laws—had a better sense of its complexity. As it turns out, there was more than one server, and Clinton used multiple devices. When the email story broke last year, Clinton said she used a private server for “convenience,” so that she wouldn’t have to carry different devices for her personal and private accounts.
Congressional Republicans have seized on the FBI’s findings of multiple devices as evidence that Clinton is lying, and they have now asked the bureau to investigate whether she perjured herself in testimony last year that touched on the email system.
Pagliano appears to have been a linchpin in the technical aspects of the FBI investigation. Ultimately, Director James Comey recommended that the Justice Department not press charges against Clinton or her aides for mishandling classified information—secrets did pass through her private server, which Comey said may have been hacked by “hostile actors.” But in an extraordinary public statement this month, followed by lengthy congressional testimony, Comey said Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless,” and in detailing all the ways she’d risked national security or behaved recklessly, he handed Republicans plenty of political ammunition to use against her.
Pagliano has given no interviews to journalists. His lawyer, Mark MacDougall, declined to comment for this story.
As Clinton prepares to accept her party’s nomination for president in Philadelphia this week, the email scandal still haunts her. She’s the subject of two congressional investigations. The State Department is conducting an internal inquiry into how Clinton and her aides handled classified information. And a federal judge in Washington is weighing whether Clinton should be deposed under oath by a conservative watchdog group that has been one of the Clinton family’s tireless political foes.
Pagliano may well figure in these spinoff scandals. And he may find his own communications with his former boss laid bare. The Republican National Committee is in the midst of a lawsuit against the State Department to obtain Pagliano’s emails—which for reasons the department has never completely explained have been very hard to locate.
Congressional officials privately told The Daily Beast that they continue to be interested in hearing from Pagliano, under oath, about his work for Clinton. Two powerful senators have been hounding him for more than a year to testify and have said that now that he has an immunity deal, he should have nothing to fear from appearing before Congress.
But Pagliano has remained almost entirely silent in the face of his inquisitors. He has rebuffed congressional requests. When he was ordered to give a deposition to the conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch, he declined to answer every question posed to him, invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself 125 times. The only statement he has given on the record was to the FBI, which has never released a transcript of the interview.
For Pagliano, working for Clinton was a major career booster, and personally enriching. But it has come at a cost. What started out as a dream job more than a decade ago has landed Pagliano a most unenviable role—a key witness in an election year scandal.
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