title: RED FLAG IN CLINTON’S FBI INTERVIEW Shocks Former Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy
text: Finally, something else about those lawyers. I nearly fell out of my chair upon reading the very first paragraph of the notes of Clinton s interview, which identifies the lawyers for Clinton who were permitted to be present for the interview. Among them is Cheryl Mills, Clinton s longtime confidant and chief-of-staff at the State Department.Readers may recall that I suggested back in May that  the fix  was in in the investigation of the Clinton emails. The reason was that the Justice Department was allowing Cheryl Mills   a witness, if not a subject, of the investigation   to invoke attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mrs. Clinton in order to thwart the FBI s attempt to inquire into the procedure used to produce Clinton s emails to the State Department. Mills was a participant in that procedure   and it is the procedure in which, we now know, well over 30,000 emails were attempted to be destroyed, including several thousand that contained government-related business.When she worked for Clinton at State, Mills was not acting in the capacity of a lawyer   not for then-Secretary Clinton and not for the State Department. Moreover, as Clinton s chief-of-staff, Mills was intimately involved in issues related to Clinton s private email set up, the discussions about getting her a secure BlackBerry similar to President Obama s, and questions that were raised (including in FOIA requests) about Clinton s communications.That is to say, Mills was an actor in the facts that were under criminal investigation by the FBI. Put aside that she was not Mrs. Clinton s lawyer while working for the State Department; as I explained in the May column, Mills, after leaving the State Department, was barred by ethical rules from acting as Mrs. Clinton s lawyer  in connection with a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially as a public officer or employee. There is no way Mills should have been permitted to participate as a lawyer in the process of producing Clinton s emails to the State Department nearly two years after they d both left.I thought it was astonishing that the Justice Department indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI s ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation. But it is simply unbelievable to find her turning up at Mrs. Clinton s interview   participating in the capacity of a lawyer under circumstances where Clinton was being investigated over matters in which Mills participated as a non-lawyer government official.FLASHBACK: REMEMBER WHEN CHERYL MILLS WALKED OUT OF FBI MEETING: Read more: NRO