The FBI said Wednesday that it has no evidence Hillary Clinton’s private email server was compromised even though President Donald Trump tweeted a news report that alleged the Chinese had hacked it.
Trump tweeted Tuesday evening about a report in the conservative Daily Caller that said a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington area had hacked the server Clinton had used as secretary of state and obtained nearly all of her emails.
Trump’s tweet: ‘What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information!’
FBI and Justice Department officials have said publicly that there was no evidence Clinton’s server was hacked by a foreign power.
Former FBI Director James Comey said at a July 2016 news conference that the FBI did not find direct evidence that the sever had been successfully hacked though he also acknowledged that, ‘given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved,’ it would have been unlikely for the bureau to find such direct evidence.
Push back: AN FBI official went public to say it had not found any evidence of a hack of Hillary Clinton’s secret server and its emails, despite Trump saying they ‘got hacked by China’
A June report from the Justice Department’s inspector general on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton investigation said FBI specialists did not find evidence that the server had been hacked, with one forensics agent saying he felt ‘fairly confident that there wasn’t an intrusion.’
An FBI official said Wednesday after the Daily Caller story and Trump tweet that the ‘FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.’
The White House did not immediately comment on the FBI’s statement.
The report claimed that a Chinese company known to conduct government espionage was able to insert code into Clinton’s homebrew server, and managed to forward her emails to a third party in real time.
The bombshell report on the Chinese hacking allegations cited two sources: an anonymous intelligence officer and Republican Rep. Louie Gomert, who has put forward complex conspiracy theories in the past.
According to the report, two officials with the inspector general for the Intelligence Committee, identified as investigator Frank Rucker and lawyer Janette McMillan, warned FBI officials about the Chinese intrusion, to no avail.
A former member of the IG’s office told the publication: ‘When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China.’
Hillary Clinton’s emails were automatically forwarded to a Chinese firm located in Virginia, a report claimed Tuesday. The sources for the report included Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert
‘The [the ICIG] believe that there was some level of phishing,’ the source said, according to the report. ‘But once they got into the server something was embedded,’ he said. ‘The Chinese are notorious for embedding little surprises like this.’
But the official failed to identify the company, which would provide one way to verify the authenticity of the claim. ”We do know the name of the company. There are indications there are other ‘cutouts’ that were involved,’ the official said. ‘I would be in a lot of trouble if I gave you the name,’ the person said.
At a public hearing in July, Gohmert grilled former FBI official Peter Strzok on why he wasn’t able to recall more about a meeting with the IG and other officials about ‘ an anomoly they had found on Hillary Clinton’s emails that were going to and from the private unauthorized server that you were supposed to be investigating.’
Strzok remember the meeting, but little more, prompting Gohmert to express astonishment why he didn’t know about each Clinton email going to an ‘unauthorized source’ that he said was a ‘foreign entity unrelated to Russia.’
Former Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill trashed the report as well as the publication when it sought comment.
‘This is the most combed over subject in modern American political history,’ Merrill said. ‘The FBI spent thousands of hours investigating, and found no evidence of intrusion. That’s a fact.’
Gohmert has also made claims about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the U.S. and the Russians tipping the election to Harry Truman in 1948.
He drew media ridicule for holding up a chart last year at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that connected Justice Department officials, a Uranium company, former attorney general Eric Holder, Benghazi, political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, Clinton’s secret server, Bill Clinton, the IRS targeting scandal, and other topics.