While Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scurries to convince lawmakers that he is not part of the Trump/Giuliani/Barr efforts to use government powers to target Trump's election opponents, the press this weekend got wind of a new push in Pompeo's State Department to use government powers to target Trump's previous election opponent.
That's right: Former Benghazi-obsessed House Republican Mike Pompeo's State Department has reactivated a heretofore long-dead investigation into how Hillary Clinton and Clinton-era department employees used ... emails.
The New York Times reports that "in recent months the diplomatic security bureau has been interviewing current and former employees again about their email use under Mrs. Clinton." There's no clear reason why this investigation is suddenly starting up yet again, as the Trump administration gears up for the 2020 presidential elections, but it's what the department is investigating that's peculiar.
The Washington Post, which broke the story, says State Department investigators have been contacting as many as 130 current and former officials who sent emails to then-Secretary of State Clinton or who had their emails forwarded to Clinton. "Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations," the Post reports. Those email-senders have been targeted for sending classified information that was not classified at the time they sent it, but now may face career repercussions for "mishandling" the retroactively classified materials when they weren't classified.
If you think that sounds skeevy, if not like an outright abuse of government classification powers to pursue a political spat, you're not alone. To the outside eye, it looks remarkably like a focused administration effort to target, probe, and punish any department workers who had so much as glancing contact with Clinton's emails.
It is unclear what role Pompeo himself may be playing here. The investigation appears to have been relaunched in August, on his watch, after an initial probe immediately after Trump's election ended without a peep. It also does not appear to target staffers who sent similar emails under the next secretary to take the post, John Kerry—only communications to Hillary Clinton. All of that at least hints at the investigation being exhumed as a political, rather than security, operation. It also matches, far too well, Trump's own post-Mueller obsession with proving that it was somehow Clinton, and not himself, his staff, or the Russian government, that was involved in shady business during the 2016 elections.
Too coincidental by half, in other words.
Does Pompeo have some personal connection to the relaunch of the probe? We don't yet know, but it would be easier to believe that he was not personally involved had he not himself been an obsessive Clinton dirt-hunter during his own House tenure. Or, say, if Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had not spent the last week telling every camera turned in his direction that Mike Pompeo personally knew of Giuliani's campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government into launching new probes of the Biden family—a campaign that Giuliani claimed he undertook the request of Pompeo's State Department.