Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
The false story that the Justice Department was being asked to launch a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton continues to be shoved back into the faces of the
New York Times and whoever leaked the fake version of the story. And the fact that one of the key sources of pushback is Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, might provide a wee clue as to the likely source of that leak. (There's no good explanation for the
Times falling for it.)
Cummings provides more support for the fact that the investigation the State Department Inspector General wants to see is not into Clinton's actions but into the State Department's later handling of the emails she turned over:
"I spoke personally to the State Department Inspector General on Thursday, and he said he never asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation of Secretary Clinton's email usage,” Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Friday in a statement.
Instead, State Inspector General Steve A. Linick, “told me the Intelligence Community IG notified the Justice Department and Congress that they identified classified information in a few emails that were part of the [Freedom of Information Act] review, and that none of those emails had been previously marked as classified."
Cummings also provided
another memo from the Office of the Inspector General making clear that the investigation in question wasn't about Hillary Clinton's actions, and that the classified emails were not marked as classified at the time. For more on that question, Marcy Wheeler has a
great look at the practice of retroactive classification.
On top of the investigation referral not being about Hillary Clinton's actions, the Justice Department is now also saying it's not a criminal inquiry at all. Could this story have been any more screwed up?
