Paul Ryan: FBI Ignores Obstruction of Justice in Clinton Investigation

During Wednesday’s episode of The Hugh Hewitt Show, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) discussed the FBI’s dump of documents that occurred just before the Labor Day Weekend.

The host noted that earlier in the week, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) had sent a letter to the CEO of Platte River Networks, which had maintained former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server. He also noted there was a “mysterious meeting” that included Clinton attorneys David Kendall and Cheryl Mills, which PRN employees won’t discuss on Fifth Amendment or attorney-client privilege basis.

“The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s emails, the conference call, the work ticket, the use of BleachBit, and PRN’s subsequent refusal to discuss a conference call with the FBI, raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton acting through her attorneys instructed PRN to destroy records relevant to the ongoing Congressional investigation,” Hewitt said, quoting Chaffetz’s letter. “Are you concerned, Speaker Ryan, that the House is being denied its Constitutional oversight by an FBI that is indifferent to what is obviously an obstruction of justice?”

Ryan said he was, but this wasn’t the first time the House of Representatives has faced obstruction.

“I was part of the IRS investigation in my last job here in Congress, and I would say it’s a very, very similar story,” he said. “It’s a story of stonewalling. The reason we know about these things is because of our investigation, our oversight.

“Jason Chaffetz is doing a great job. You know all of these things that you just discussed because of our oversight. But as we do this oversight, we see more obfuscation. We see more misleading. We see that the claims that were made, you know, six months, a year ago, about servers and emails and devices are now, were false when they were made, knowingly false.

“So we clearly see that she’s not being truthful. We clearly see, and also with our investigations, you see the Clinton Foundation and all what I would call the pay to play, just basically the stink of corruption surrounding that. So this is not a new story, unfortunately, with the Clintons. But it’s an ongoing one, and that is, to me, very alarming.”

Hewitt and Ryan also briefly discussed Congress’ confidence in FBI Director James Comey, as well as the situation in Syria. They also discussed Clinton’s response to a former Navy pilot’s question about her emails.

Ryan said he hadn’t heard the exchange before, and was stunned not only by Clinton’s response, but by the fact she was even capable of answering at all.

“I honestly don’t, and I don’t think any dabba-dabba-dabba, any kind of misdirection, is going to get around that fact,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why she’s such a flawed candidate, and I think it’s one of the reasons why she’s not doing so well in the polls right now.

“I don’t know how you get around this. I really just don’t, and you know, I’ve been around national security issues quite a bit. I’ve, in this current capacity I have, I’m deeply enmeshed in it. You know what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. It’s not that hard to figure this stuff out, how you conduct yourself with respect to classified material.

“And I just think she believes she’s above the law. And I think they’ve lived like that for a long, long time. And I just don’t know how you get around that.”