NYPD Detective Mike Greene on Connections Between Clintons, Loretta Lynch, James Comey-Truth! & Disputed!
Summary of eRumor:
Former NYPD Detective Mike Greene has investigated and written about the connections between U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The Truth:
Many of the claims that former NYPD Detective Mike Greene makes about connections between Loretta Lynch, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and James Comey are true.
But, taken together, these claims don’t necessarily prove that there was a conspiracy between all of those people to help Hillary Clinton operate a private email server or to clear her of any charges related to it. It could be argued that many of these connections are the result of these people working in the same professional circles for more than 20 years rather than a master plan of some kind. That’s why we’re also calling this one “disputed.”
After Comey announced that the FBI would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, Mike Greene wrote that he had investigated the case himself and had concluded:
At the end of the day, how do we have Lynch, previously appointed by Bill Clinton, and formerly an employee of the law firm that is connected to Hillarys email scandal, in charge of the investigation into Hillarys email scandal, with the lead investigative agency led by a man who twice investigated the Clintons and both times found them not guilty of wrong doing, also appointed by the current U.S. President, who appointed Lynch, who is Comeys boss?????? And Comey and Lynch have known each other for decades as well. How was this investigation to have ever been legitimate????
We’ll take a look at each of those claims individually to let you form your own opinions:
Bill Clinton Appointed Lynch U.S. Attorney in 1999-Truth!
It’s true that Bill Clinton appointed Loretta Lynch to serve as a U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn in 1999, and that she held the post until President George W. Bush asked her to resign in 2001, the New York Times reported in 2001:
Ms. Lynch and two of her counterparts upstate — all appointed by President Bill Clinton — are leaving at President Bush’s request. But Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has been asked by the Bush administration to stay on while she investigates Mr. Clinton’s last-minute pardons.
Ms. Lynch said: ”I recommended Alan Vinegrad to be the interim, and I’m very, very pleased the attorney general followed that recommendation. Alan is very talented and has a background in a wide variety of cases, and an excellent relationship with the law enforcement agencies we work with. It’s very good for the office, and very good for him.”
At the time, Lynch said she was unsure what her next step would be but said she would likely return to private practice.
Lynch Joins Law Firm in 2002, Firm Later Represented Company that Set up Hillary’s Email Servers-Truth! & Misleading!
It’s true that Loretta Lynch joined Hogan & Hartson LLP in 2002 (which later became Hogan Lovells) as a partner in the firm’s New York Office.
It’s also true that Hogan & Hartson represented MX Logic, a company specializing in email defense solutions that was later tied to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, in its bid to secure a patent for an email spam filtering algorithm in 2004 (U.S. patent 7,051,077 was eventually granted in July 2006).
However, MX Logic, which was acquired by McAfee in 2009, didn’t set up Hillary Clinton’s personal email and server system while she was secretary of state. The company reportedly took over and “reconfigured” her email system in 2013, after her term as secretary of state, Yahoo Finance reports:
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton’s private email account was reconfigured to use Google’s servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google’s accusations in June 2011 that China’s government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton’s private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.
So, many of the details of Mike Greene’s findings are true. But it’s not clear what, if anything, the 2004 patent case has to do with MX Logic working on Clinton’s email system nearly 10 years later, in 2013. After all, McAfee was one of the world’s leading email security providers, so it wouldn’t be surprising for the Clintons (or anyone else) to choose the company for email security solutions based on its reputation alone.
FBI Director James Comey Investigated Clintons in 1999, 2002 and Found No Wrong Doing-Truth! & Fiction!
It’s true that FBI Director James Comey is no stranger to investigating the Clintons — but the idea that he found them guilty of no wrong doing in all cases is false.
Back in 1996, Comey served on the Senate Whitewater Committee, which investigated and reported on the Clintons’ investments in the Whitewater Development Corporation.
The Senate Whitewater Committee’s final report, which listed Comey as deputy special counsel, found that Hillary Clinton had personally mishandled documents and had told others to block investigators building a case. The report concluded that the Clintons’ interference and destruction of documents amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naïveté,” and that it represented “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”
And, as Greene argues, after President Bush appointed James Comey U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, he was tasked with investigating Bill Clinton’s last-minute presidential pardons in 2002, Time reports:
Comey parlayed the Whitewater job into top posts in Virginia and New York, returning to Manhattan in 2002 to be the top federal prosecutor there. One of his first cases as a line attorney in the same office 15 years earlier had been the successful prosecution of Marc Rich, a wealthy international financier, for tax evasion. But on his last day as President in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich. “I was stunned,” Comey later told Congress. As top U.S. prosecutor in New York in 2002, appointed by George W. Bush, Comey inherited the criminal probe into the Rich pardon and 175 others Clinton had made at the 11th hour.
Despite evidence that several pardon recipients, including Rich, had connections to donations to Bill Clinton’s presidential library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, Comey found no criminal wrongdoing. He was careful not to let the investigation be used for political purposes by either party. When pressed for details in one case, he said, “I can’t really go into it because it was an investigation that didn’t result in charges. That may be a frustrating answer, but that’s the one I’m compelled to give.”
So, it’s true that James Comey previously investigated the Clintons twice, but Greene’s argument that he cleared them of wrong doing both times isn’t necessarily true. The committee that Comey worked on skewered the Clintons for alleged misconduct, and it was special attorney Kenneth Starr — not Comey or the committee — cleared the Clintons in 1998. Click here for a complete timeline.
Overall, the connections that Greene draws between Lynch, Comey, the Clintons, MX Logic and Lynch’s former law firm are true. However, those connections don’t necessarily prove there was any kind of conspiracy between them. That’s why we’re calling this one truth and disputed.