Watchdog: Federal grand jury granted FBI subpoenas in Clinton email probe

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch says it has proof that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was targeted last year by a federal grand jury in an effort to obtain further information about her private email server.

State Department documents released by the group Thursday show the grand jury provided FBI agents with subpoenas related to Clinton’s BlackBerry email accounts.

A declaration from FBI Special Agent E.W. Priestap, the supervisor of the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s email activities, stated that the subpoenas “produced no responsive materials, as the requested data was outside the retention time utilized by those providers.”

The documents were produced as the result of legal action taken by Judicial Watch in an effort to obtain Clinton’s emails. Prevously it had been speculated that a grand jury investigation into Clinton’s emails had been conducted. In February, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz pressed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to convene a grand jury or charge Bryan Pagliano, the IT aide who worked on Clinton’s email server.

“The FBI convened a grand jury to investigate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Why is this information being released only now?” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “And it is disturbing that the State Department, Justice Department and FBI are still trying to protect Hillary Clinton. President Trump needs to clean house at all these agencies.”

The FBI conducted an investigation into the unauthorized private email server Clinton used to conduct official business while she served as secretary of state. Of the tens of thousands of emails it reviewed, just over a hundred contained classified information at the time they were sent. FBI Director James Comey recommended last summer — as Clinton was running for president — that the Justice Department not prosecute the Democratic nominee, citing a lack of evidence that would show she intentionally mishandled classified information. He did, however, criticize Clinton’s email situation as “extremely careless.”

Comey later reopened the investigation in the month before the 2016 election. He announced that the reopened case reached no new conclusions about Clinton just days before Election Day. Critics, and Clinton herself, have pinned blame on Comey for hurting her election chances with the timing of the re-opened investigation.