Documents from both the Obama and Biden administrations are now being declassified at an astonishing pace. The latest release comes from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has shared declassified documents regarding potential foreign hacking of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton and other officials.
NEWS UPDATE: Chuck Grassley has published a newly declassified report from the DOJ inspector general concerning the “Clinton annex”—an analysis of foreign access to Hillary Clinton’s email server. pic.twitter.com/WoSgGgrNPV
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) July 21, 2025
The full report is available for reading and is titled “A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election, Appendix One.”
There is, here, information that presents the possibility of foreign intrusion into U.S. government email servers. Here are a few highlights.
First, there are allegations of election interference:
(Redacted) is relevant to the Midyear investigation in two ways: First, in (redacted) and (redacted) the FBI obtained (redacted) reports purporting to discuss efforts to influence the Midyear investigation. The initial (redacted) report suggested that then Attorney General (AG) Loretta Lynch and then FBI Director James Comey were interfering with the Midyear investigation to help the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively. The second report stated that Lynch had been in contact with a named individual working for the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Midyear Investigation.
That looks a lot like federal law enforcement and the DOJ trying to influence elections, but here’s the interesting bit: There were, collected as data, no less than eight USB drives, described as “thumb drives,” collected from a source named “T1.” Now, in an investigation where these were collected as evidence, you would think that the FBI would have examined all eight drives, yes?
No.
Thumb drives 1 through 5:
…primarily contain data exfiltrated by (redacted) from various U.S. victims, including the Executive Office of the President (EoP, the State Department, federal agencies, and private sector and educational institutions. FBI employees told us that it was highly unlikely that data exfiltrated from other, unknown U.S. victims was also present on these thumb drives.
Thumb drives 6 and 7:
…contain (redacted) about cyber intrusions, with some U.S. victim data included as attachments.
Thumb drive 8 was not reviewed.
Here’s the onion:
III: In this section we discuss two (redacted) reports that the FBI obtained in (redacted) and (redacted). Both reports indicated information suggesting that (then-AG) Lynch was attempting to exert influence on the Midyear investigation, or was providing information about the investigation to former Secretary Clinton’s campaign.
And later, from a transcribed report:
According to Wassermann Schultz (sic), so far the FBI does not have any hard evidence against Hillary Clinton because data was removed from the email servers just in time.
Obama is not in the mood to mar the very final segment of his presidency, his legacy with a scandal around a leading nominee for the [D]emocratic [P]arty. To deal with this he is using Attorney General Loretta Lynch to mount a pressure on FBI [D]irector James Comey. Alas, so far, with no concrete results.
There’s a lot more to this mess, and a lot of it is redacted and the rest couched in some torturous language, but at least now it’s public record.
