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The FBI on Wednesday pushed back against a right-wing report that had been promoted by President Donald Trump only hours earlier. The story claimed that a Chinese-owned firm operating in Virginia had hacked a private email server owned by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“The FBI has not found any evidence the (Clinton) servers were compromised,” a bureau official told NBC News.
The statement came in response to a report published Tuesday evening by The Daily Caller, a right-leaning news website, which claimed that an unnamed firm, working as a front for the Chinese government, had obtained “nearly all” of Clinton’s emails from the server during her tenure as secretary of state.
The information in the report was attributed to two anonymous sources, and was subsequently picked up by TV hosts on the right-leaning Fox News Channel on Tuesday night. This may have been where Trump first learned of the report, which prompted the president to demand that the Justice Department further investigate Clinton.
“Report just out: ‘China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server,'” Trump wrote. “Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information!”
Hours after Trump tweeted The Daily Caller’s story, which relied entirely on anonymous sources, the president had soured on the use of such sources.
“The fact is that many anonymous sources don’t even exist. They are fiction made up by the Fake News reporters,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning.
The response from the FBI on Wednesday was merely the latest in a string of events that have pushed the president and his own Justice Department further and further apart in recent months. Trump has repeatedly signaled that he would like to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, most recently in early August, when the president reportedly discussed firing Sessions with his personal criminal attorneys.
The Daily Caller’s story appears to have originated not with the Justice Department, but from a claim by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who said during a July House committee hearing that virtually all of Clinton’s emails had been obtained by a “foreign entity.” The source of his knowledge, Gohmert said, was a report produced by the Intelligence Community Inspector General, a CIA watchdog agency.
The Daily Caller did not confirm the existence of such a report, instead citing an anonymous former intelligence officer who it said had been briefed on what the ICIG report contained.
In pushing back on the Daily Caller’s story, however, the FBI on Wednesday pointed to its own report, issued by the Justice Department Inspector General in June. That report said the “FBI investigation and its forensic analysis did not find evidence that Clinton’s email server systems were compromised.”
Despite a lack of evidence that Clinton’s server had been breached, the Justice Department report acknowledged that there was no way of knowing “100%” whether the servers had been accessed by hackers who expertly covered their tracks.
Still, a forensic specialist with the FBI who was quoted in the report said he was “fairly confident that there wasn’t an intrusion.”

Signed in as mikenova
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ARROWS OF THE ALMIGHTY The Most Extraordinary True Spy Story of World War II. By Michael Bar-Zohar. Illustrated. 228 pp. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. $16.95.
IT is a morning in April 1941. In Dachau 500 prisoners in blue-striped uniforms – the inmates of the ”Jewish block” of Camp Number Three – tensely await the new day’s horrors. Some will be beaten to death, some shot. Others will be taken to the Bunker (”the sinister cave used for solitary confinement, where the tortures inflicted . . . were so cruel that they were kept secret even from the regular SS guards”) or sent to a torture table called the Bock (on which one would be bound and then struck with a bullwhip that had been soaked in water). The crematorium will receive its share. Groups of others will listlessly head off to do the camp’s soul-destroying, physically punishing work, in the stone quarry or the swamp.
As often as one reads about them or hears about them, the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps somehow never lose their ability to haunt. Using this particular morning in April as the effective opening of his book, Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli author of numerous books, including a biography of David Ben-Gurion, now adds significantly to the literature of the Holocaust by revealing the tragic true story of Paul Ernst Fackenheim, whose life would be forever changed by that day.
To the dispassionate observer, Fackenheim was just another faceless prisoner, No. 26,336. But this loyal German, who had distinguished himself in World War I and had become a friend of Hermann Goring, would soon become ”the only Jew to be willingly released by the Nazis” during the current war, a man whom the Abwehr (the German military intelligence organization) had specific plans for. He was to be trained as a spy and ultimately parachuted into Palestine, to learn what he could of the British effort to stop Field Marshal Erwin Rommel from taking control of the Suez Canal.
Beginning with a casual conversation in Hamburg with a former Abwehr officer, who ”knew vaguely that a Jew had been sent to Palestine” but could not recall his name, Mr. Bar-Zohar impressively pieces together Fackenheim’s story from documents, conversations with other former German and British officers and, most important, hours of conversation with Fackenheim. Mr. Bar-Zohar discovered that Fackenheim was living in a small town north of Hamburg and not only interviewed him but gained access to his diaries. Though it lacks the page-by-page suspense of a good spy novel, ”Arrows of the Almighty” is still a gripping tale. One comes to understand why Fackenheim was chosen for this unenviable role and why the Abwehr concluded he wouldn’t refuse it (if he did, his mother would be killed); why the alias he was given – Paul Koch -would later be a significant point of confusion; and why the bitter rivalry between the Nazi party, which opposed Fackenheim’s release from Dachau, and the defiantly autonomous Abwehr, ultimately made Fackenheim an even greater pawn in this clever but highly risky scheme. A S the action moves from Brussels, where Fackenheim learned how to operate radio transmitters and use code books, to Berlin and then to Athens, where the chief of the German security service threatened his life, we are given more and more pertinent information about Fackenheim’s past, and Mr. Bar-Zohar manages to make us feel we are experiencing Fackenheim’s adventures as this most unusual spy moves toward his appointed task. ”It is not for Hitler and his butchers that I am risking my life,” Fackenheim told himself, ”but for my homeland, for my comrades, for the German nation that is the victim of a fit of folly.”
It would be unfair to reveal all the details of what happened to Fackenheim after he jumped from a Heinkel 111 bomber on the night of Oct. 10, 1941, and landed in Palestine. But his mightmarish odyssey only worsened and, not surprisingly, the Abwehr eventually didn’t keep its word. In February 1943 Paul Fackenheim’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where she died.
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