Hugh Galyean Open Letter to James Comey – Investigation Pending!
Summary of eRumor:
An open letter from retired FBI Agent Hugh Galyean to FBI Director James Comey raises issues with the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state.
The Truth:
We’ve been able to confirm details about Hugh Galyean’s background as an FBI agent, but we haven’t been able to identify the original source of this open letter, so our investigation is pending.
The open letter began circulating via emails and message board in late September, and it went viral in early October. It begins by stating that Comey “eloquently laid out” enough evidence against Hillary Clinton to convict her in federal court, but Comey “soft pedaled” Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless”:
As a retired Special Agent of the FBI, I have standing to write this letter. My thirty years in law enforcement, including 22 years as a Special Agent with the FBI have given me the knowledge, expertise and experience to question and confront you for your perplexing actions, which (as you well know) were outside the normal standard operating procedure of the FBI and Federal judicial procedures. Some of the finest people in the world proudly carry the credentials of FBI Agent and you have soiled them and not allowed them to speak. But I will not be silent.
We were able to use a credible newspaper report to confirm that there is, indeed, a retired FBI agent named Hugh Galyean. The Eastbay Times identified Galyean as the outgoing director of the Almeda County Sheriff’s Department Terrorism Early Warning Group in August 2016.
A LinkedIn page for Galyean also confirms those details — however, we have been unable to identify the original source of the open letter, so we have been unable to confirm that Galyean wrote it. Our investigation is ongoing.
The open letter goes on to allege that Clinton was not merely careless in her handling of classified information, but that she was “knowingly purposeful in her decision and actions to set up a server under her exlusive control and possession in order to control what information was available” to the public and Congress:
Normally, an investigation will be assigned to an agent, or team of agents with one being the Case agent, or the lead investigator. When the investigation is complete, an investigative report will be presented to the U.S. Attorney for the Federal District involved. It would be the U.S. Attorney who decides whether to decline prosecution for that investigation….NOT the FBI agent.
But in the Clinton investigation, YOU (unilaterally) decided not to forward the investigation to the U.S. Attorney or the Attorney General of the U.S. but, instead, personally made the decision not to prosecute her or even provide the information to a Federal Grand Jury. You were wrong to take this upon yourself. Sir, in order to indict a subject, only a preponderance of evidence , or 51% is needed for probable cause to exist. You did not think even that level of probability existed? Who do you think you are fooling? What judicial proceeding did you think you were following?
The open letter concludes by asserting that Comey had “trampled on the rule of law” and had destroyed the public’s trust in the FBI and in unbiased enforcement of the law.