sometimes confuses our workforces, and I have gotten emails from some employees about this, who said if I did what Hillary Clinton did I’d be in huge trouble. My response is you bet your ass you’d be in huge trouble. If you used a personal email, Gmail or if you [had] the capabilities to set up your own email domain, if you used an unclassified personal email system to do our business in the course of doing our business even though you were communicating with people with clearances and doing work you discussed classified matters in that, in those communications, TS/SCI, special access programs, you would be in huge trouble in the FBI....
...Of that I am highly confident. I’m also highly confident, in fact, certain you would not be criminally prosecuted for that conduct....
...What I’m getting from the left is savage attacks for violating policy and law by talking publicly about somebody who wasn’t indicted, by revealing facts that you should’ve been prescribed from revealing by decades of tradition. All of that’s nonsense just as this is nonsense. It is a uniquely difficult time. I expect after the election, which is coming up I’m told, we will have probably more conversations about this....
We asked Comey in general about the SAC Conference and whether he recalled receiving criticism about the Midyear investigation while at the conference. Comey said he did not recall specific criticism, but noted that “given how prevalent the criticism was, I would have expected it to be talked about.”
II. Midyear Talking Points Distributed to FBI Field Offices (October 21)
On October 17, Page sent an email to Baker and Anderson entitled “MYE TPs (LCP).”[1] Strzok, the Lead Analyst, FBI Attorney 1, and FBI Attorney 2 were cc’d on the email. The email stated:
Last week, Jim Rybicki and Mike Kortan reached out to a couple of us to ask that we put together some detailed MYE information related to the topics SACs most frequently get asked about. I’m not 100% certain about the uses these talking points will be used to, (I think the current thinking is that they would be provided to SACs to use with formers, in Citizen’s Academies, etc.), but attached is a very quick attempt at answering the specific questions requested by Jim and Mike. Could you both please take a look, and edit at will? Thanks.
The Midyear talking points were ultimately distributed to FBI SACs on October 21. The talking points, which included a section on frequently asked questions, were nine pages and largely tracked Comey’s July 5 statement and his July 7 testimony before Congress. At the top of the first page of the talking points was a
- ↑ After reviewing a draft of the report, Page asked the OIG to clarify that she did not draft the talking points, but was the conduit through which they were distributed.
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