Republicans and other conservatives were incensed when then-FBI director James Comey laid out the case against Mrs. Clinton in congressional testimony:

Comey: “110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.”

Then he dismissed the whole scandal in a single sentence:

Comey: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Clinton went on to lose the election, but several legal groups still wanted to get to the bottom of the email scandal and submitted FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. Earlier this week, in what Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch says is a “Comey-esque cover-up,” David Hardy of the FBI’s Records Management team arbitrarily decided no one was interested in that old scandal anymore.

It hasn’t been shown that “the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” Hardy stated in a letter on Monday.

“It’s completely arbitrary, in my view,” says the Judicial Watch president, “and the Justice Department and the FBI are going out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton.”

To be clear, that’s the Trump Justice Department and FBI Fitton is referring to. “In this case, you had lawyers for the Trump administration come in and say the public interest doesn’t outweigh the privacy interests of Hillary Clinton, who has virtually zero privacy interests, given the public nature of her activities,” he explains.

To be specific, the FBI’s Hardy wrote:

“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA.”

But as The Washington Times points out, the matter was front-page news for the better part of two years because it involved “the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, former chief diplomat, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of both the U.S. and Arkansas.”

While the decision can be challenged in court, Fitton says it’s another example of the swamp reaching out to protect one of its own.

“The Deep State’s doing this,” he tells OneNewsNow. “I know the bureaucracy is going to be a defender of Hillary Clinton and her corruption. They’ve been doing it for years.”

A petition on the White House website was launched on Tuesday urging President Trump to compel the FBI to release to the public all records related to the Clinton email investigation.