Did Cheryl Mills get immunity?
I am posting in this group because this thoughtful article is from National Review and I don't want to fight off the hordes. There are more thoughtful articles there wrt this matter.
SNIP...............
For example, did Mills get immunity?
The report states that “investigators consider Mills . . . to be a cooperative witness.” Again, the Post can know that only if its Justice Department sources are telling it so. But more to the point, as I’ve previously laid out in some detail, there are all kinds of “cooperative witnesses.” Some, for example, are mere innocent observers who have nothing to do with potentially criminal activity and unconditionally cooperate with law enforcement because they are not suspects. Others may be accomplices in the potentially criminal activity; they generally cooperate only if promised immunity, or at least a reduction of criminal charges.
What is Mills’s status? Were there conditions placed on her interview? Would she really voluntarily cooperate, no strings attached, with government officials who have prosecutorial authority? After all, Mills has a record of being uncooperative even under circumstances where government investigators were not in a position to file criminal charges against her.
For example, earlier this year, a State Department inspector general (IG) issued a report regarding the department’s appalling record of non-compliance with FOIA during Clinton’s tenure. It noted that Mills was well aware that Clinton’s e-mails circumvented State’s filing system and therefore were not searched in order to determine whether some were responsive to FOIA requests. This was a violation of federal law, which requires each government agency to undertake a search that is “reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents.” (See Report at p. 8 & n.29 and pp. 14-15.)
Mills not only failed to ensure that such a search was done; she knowingly allowed the State Department to represent — falsely, it turned out — that it possessed no responsive documents. We now know that, when IG investigators attempted to question Mills to ascertain why she did that, she told them, through her lawyer, that she refused to speak with them. (See January 27, 2016, letter of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) to Secretary of State John F. Kerry.)
She had good reason to take that position: Obstructing an agency’s lawful compliance with a FOIA request could constitute a felony. For present purposes, though, the point is that Mills’s refusal to cooperate with the State Department IG suggests she has concerns about potential criminal jeopardy. It thus seems highly unlikely that she consented to an interview by FBI agents conducting a criminal investigation unless she was given some form of immunity.
I have previously explained, a person in her position generally has three choices: (a) she could assert her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refuse to submit to FBI questioning unless the government gave her immunity from prosecution — which would be legally prudent but, if it became public, politically lethal; (b) she could agree to testify before the grand jury, during which she would have to face questions from a prosecutor and the grand jury without having her lawyer present, and would risk incriminating herself; or (c) she could agree to submit to an interview by agents and prosecutors, with her attorney permitted to be present, in exchange for qualified immunity.
This qualified form of immunity would be memorialized in a proffer agreement — the so-called Queen for a Day arrangement — in which the government agrees not to use the witness’s interview statements against her at any future proceeding. (There are some important reservations, including the right to prosecute the witness for any false statements during the interview.) Option (c) is the usual preference for “cooperative” witnesses who have potential criminal exposure but feel they can’t afford to take the Fifth for political reasons. It allows their lawyers to be active participants in the interview — to call timeout, for example, if questioning paints the witness into a corner where she must either admit guilt or lie.
So was Mills given at least qualified immunity in exchange for answering the FBI’s questions? The Post doesn’t tell us.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435393/hillary-clinton-e-mails-Cheryl-Mills-DOJ
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think under the circumstances, the FBI didn't have to give Mills immunity in order to get her to testify.
Instead, I think that Hillary gave Mills, and her 3 or 4 other aides, permission to talk about it now, without them first being given immunity.
Mills may have asked for immunity, but I doubt it.
Clinton is obviously paying all of her aides' legal fees now since we learned that they are all using the same attorney.
