Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never regained the public’s trust after it was revealed that she used a private email server to conduct official government business, making hundreds of messages that contained sensitive information vulnerable to foreign parties who could have threatened U.S. national security. Now, a new report suggests that there’s even more to the story than originally believed.

According to an exclusive report from The Epoch Times, evidence has since been discovered by congressional investigators that suggests that the FBI purposely ignored evidence suggesting that Clinton’s private server had been breached by a foreign power.

According to the Times, the FBI shrugged off evidence that “suggested that a copy of every email Hillary Clinton sent during her tenure as the secretary of [S]tate was forwarded to a foreign third party.”

Metadata “anomalies”

The report sourced transcripts of closed-door congressional hearings involving several current and former FBI officials.

According to these testimonies, the FBI was first made aware of “anomalies” in the metadata of Clinton’s server in December 2015.

Details about the emails that were allegedly forwarded to foreign agents were shared with the FBI by then-Inspector General Charles McCullough.

But at least one official — fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, who played a lead role in the Clinton server investigation — chose to ignore the information from McCullough, keeping it from others in the bureau and intelligence community, according to the Times‘ report.

Peter Strzok strikes again

The congressional transcripts cited by the Times revealed that Republican North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows seemed to catch notice of this suppression from the FBI.

But when Meadows confronted Strzok about it, the agent denied having any such knowledge — despite the fact that he was one of the only FBI officials on the Clinton case to have received a briefing from top members of the inspector general’s team in late 2015.

That briefing was one of several that occurred after the inspector general referred the Clinton email case to the FBI in July 2015, which, per the Intelligence Authorization Act, required agencies to “immediately” inform the FBI “of any information, regardless of its origin, which indicates that classified information is being, or may have been, disclosed in an unauthorized manner to a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.”

The real culprit?

While it is unclear exactly which foreign power may have received forwarded copies of every email on Clinton’s private server, all signs point to China as the most likely recipient.

Indeed, evidence emerged anonymously in 2018 that suggested that a Chinese-owned company located in the D.C. Metro area obtained Clinton’s emails by virtue of an unauthorized backdoor code embedded in the server, according to reports from The Daily Caller and Fox News.

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It had long been suspected that the emails Clinton hid on her private server were vulnerable to foreign powers, and while it hasn’t exactly been confirmed that a foreign power gained access to all of Clinton’s emails, it looks like that isn’t too far from the truth — and if this report is correct, the FBI didn’t do anything about it.