July 21, 2025 – More on the never investigated Clinton thumb drives mentioned in the 2018 DOJ/OIG report and recently released by Grassley

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

Jason Foster was the Chief Investigative Counsel for Chuck Grassley and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

For the record, I have not been a source for this or any other story mentioning the classified appendix to the @JusticeOIG’s Clinton e-mail report.

However, I will state publicly—without revealing anything I’m legally obligated to keep confidential—that as @ChuckGrassley’s chief investigator at the time, we arranged a bipartisan briefing for Senators on the Judiciary Cmte.

Then-DOJ IG Michael Horowitz summarized the information in the appendix to the several Democrat and Republican Senators who chose to attend.

Each of them, from both sides of the aisle, expressed shock that the gov’t turned a blind-eye to the information at issue. Even prominent Democrat Senators acknowledged in this private setting that it required further investigation, even if it was likely to be politically embarrassing for their party.

IG Horowitz explained why his office was limited in conducting further inquiry due to jurisdictional issues. I urged him to partner with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG) on a joint follow-up probe, an idea which several of the Senators present thoroughly endorsed.

To my knowledge, no joint DOJ/IC IG probe ever happened. But I left in Fall 2018, so I’m not privy to nonpublic developments that may have occurred after that.

One of the things I did before I left was to seek a briefing from the FBI to explain its failure to investigate the information in the DOJ IG appendix, regardless of whether the rest of the Intelligence Community did anything.

A first-term Trump-era congressional affairs official acknowledged to me that it was a huge and legitimate concern and that the FBI needed to answer for it—but asked for more time to “get their arms around it” before coming in to brief us.

No such FBI briefing occurred while I was still there.