Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a new target in his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election — and it’s not President Donald Trump.
FBI agents have begun to ask about the 2017 death of a man investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server.
Peter Smith, a veteran Republican operative, devoted a year of his life to hunting down a trove of missing Hillary emails from Russian hackers.
Smith told The Wall Street Journal in May 2017 that he’d uncovered 33,000 of Hillary’s emails that were previously deleted.
He was dead just ten days later.
Police say Smith was found with a bag over his head that was hooked to a helium tank. His reported suicide note read —
NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER..
RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY 2017…
LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.
The Chicago Tribune wrote that Smith’s unexpected death raised a lot of eyebrows. Conspiracy theories quickly circulated.
Friends say the timing of Smith’s death stunned them.
“Retired Wall Street financier Charles Ortel said he spoke with Mr. Smith on the phone in the hours before his death about a new project to brief the Obama Foundation and warn its leaders against the mistakes they believed were made by the Clinton Foundation,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “According to Mr. Ortel, Mr. Smith sounded excited, and he began brainstorming who to contact and how to proceed.”
“I came away from that conversation saying this is great. We’re going to make progress,” Ortel told The Journal. He was reportedly stunned when news of Smith’s death was reported days later.
He’d raised over $100,000 in private funds the investigation into Hillary’s illegal email server and spent over a year of his life on the case — and just days after reporting a major breakthrough, he reportedly took his own life.
Smith had previous contacts with former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who is cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
That has led investigators to start digging for the documents Smith said he’d found.
“Smith’s estate has reportedly given documents to Mueller’s probe, as well as to investigations being conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees,” Newsmax reported.
What they contain is anyone’s guess… but the American people could finally get some answers.
— The Horn editorial team