Hillary Clinton’s troubles simply refuse to subside.
As news of the Democratic front-runner suffering a heavy defeat to Bernie Sanders in West Virginia began pouring in, a report in the Washington Post related to her FBI investigation raised fresh doubts about the candidate’s “eligibility” to contest for the highest office in the land.
Clinton is currently the subject of two FBI investigations — one for public corruption and the other for espionage — with the agency reported to have made rapid developments in the latter case, having interviewed several of Hillary Clinton’s close aides over the course of the last few weeks.
And while Clinton and her campaign staff have maintained that the former Secretary of State is co-operating with the FBI during the investigations, recent evidence suggests that not everything is quite so well within the Clinton camp.
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According to the Hill , Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former State Department chief of staff, and her lawyer both stormed out of an interview with federal investigators when an FBI official began to discuss a topic considered off-limits.
While Mills and her lawyer returned for the interview some time later, the brief walk out “demonstrated some of the tension surrounding the criminal probe into possible mishandling of classified information involving the leading Democratic presidential candidate,” according to the Post .
Reports suggest that Cheryl Mills walked out of the interview when an FBI official broached a topic that both Cheryl’s lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, and the Justice Department, had agreed would not be discussed during the interview.
Several insider sources, on conditions of anonymity, told the newspaper that Clinton’s aide was generally cooperative with the agents but asked for a few breaks during the interview. Although the exact details of the questions that prompted the walkout from Mills were not mentioned in the report, sources claimed that the questions had to do with the “procedure used to produce emails to the State Department so they could possibly be released publicly.”
“Mills, an attorney herself, was not supposed to be asked questions about that — and ultimately never was in the recent interview — because it was considered confidential as an example of attorney-client privilege,” reported the Post .
When Wilkinson was approached to shed some light on what exactly transpired during the interview, the lawyer simply stated that “Ms. Mills has cooperated with the government.”
Several of Hillary Clinton’s top aides have been interviewed by the FBI in recent weeks, and reports suggest that Clinton herself could be summoned by the agency for a deposition before the Democratic Convention in July.
While Clinton has constantly maintained that she is “more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime” — a claim she repeated during CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday — the repercussions of the investigations on her campaign are almost palpable.
The investigation, which was prematurely dismissed by Hillary Clinton as merely a “security review” and by her husband Bill Clinton “as a game” cooked up by her political rivals, is now turning into something that could seriously dent Clinton’s chances in the presidential race and could even cost her the nomination.
What are your views on Hillary Clinton’s top aide walking out of the FBI interview? Should it be interpreted as a sign of things to come?
[Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images]