GOP senator seeks Obama-Clinton emails from National Archives - Washington Examiner

The hunt for Hillary Clinton's emails lives on.

A top Republican senator is asking the National Archives and Records Administration to share any email communications it has between former President Barack Obama and Clinton.

“I write to request email communications between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama. In January 2018, I requested the Department of Justice (DOJ) produce emails Secretary Clinton sent to President Obama while she was located in the 'territory of a sophisticated adversary,'" Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero on Thursday.

“Given that DOJ acknowledged that they ‘are not in a position' to produce emails to the Committee that contain ‘equities of other executive branch entities,’ I ask that, pursuant to the Presidential Records Act, you please provide all email communications between Secretary Clinton and President Obama," he added.

The request is based on a communication from former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok to FBI Director James Comey’s chief of staff James Rybicki, which Johnson said indicates there are multiple emails that exist between Obama and Clinton.

“Jim – I have the POTUS – HRC emails [Director Comey] requested at end of briefing yesterday. I hesitate to leave them, please let me know a convenient time to drop them off," Strzok wrote an email on June 28, 2016 — a week before Comey publicly recommended that no charges be brought against Clinton or anyone else involved with her private email network, despite admonishing Clinton and her team for being "extremely careless" in handling classified information.

In that press conference, Comey said the FBI found "it is possible that hostile actors gained access" to Clinton's email account, after which the Justice Department inspector general wrote in a critical report that he “insinuated that hostile foreign actors may have in fact gained access to former Secretary Clinton’s private email account, based almost entirely on speculation and without any evidence from the … investigation to support his claim."

However, Strzok, who had a leading role in both the Clinton emails investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, said in a May 2016 email to FBI executives that it was known that "foreign actors" had access to some of Clinton's emails, "including at least one Secret one."

Strzok was removed from Mueller's investigation upon the discovery of text messages displaying an anti-Trump bias that he traded with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. He was later fired.

Johnson, in his 2018 correspondence with DOJ seeking the Obama-Clinton emails, refers to FBI notes from their interview with Clinton that show she emailed Obama from Russia. In 2015, Obama claimed he learned about Clinton's use of a private email server "at the same time everyone else learned it — through news reports." But shortly afterwards, Obama's press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama did "trade emails with his secretary of state."

Notes from an April 2016 FBI interview with top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, reveal Obama used a pseudonym when emailing Clinton. The bureau said Abedin "expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym" when emailing with Clinton in late June 2012, around the same time as her boss's trip which included a stop in St. Petersburg.

Johnson's letter to NARA comes after State Department identified nearly 600 security violations in its review of email records of dozens of former agency officials and aides to former Clinton, some of which were deliberate. However investigators uncovered "no persuasive evidence of systematic, deliberate mishandling of classified information." The review covered roughly 33,000 emails that Clinton turned over to investigators. This did not include deleted emails that her team had deemed to be private in nature.

It also comes as President Trump faces impeachment by Democrats in the House who are investigating whether he abused his power by urging Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden, who is running for president in 2020.

Johnson asked that Ferriero provide the requested documents in two weeks on Thursday, Nov. 14. A spokesperson for NARA did not immediately return a request for comment.