Fact Check: Did Obama pressure James Comey and Loretta Lynch to 'cover up' Hillary Clinton email probe?

WASHINGTON, DC: Social media lit up with various claims after the Department of Justice dropped a newly declassified internal review of the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

The headline-grabbing claim was that the report confirmed former President Barack Obama pressured then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey to cover up the Clinton probe.

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted on X, “DON’T MISS THIS: The Department of Justice just confirmed that President Obama ordered the FBI to shut down the Clinton email scandal. FBI Director James Comey followed orders and buried it.”

What does the DOJ report say?

The DOJ released its latest report on July 21, as part of a broader review into how the FBI handled its so-called “Midyear” investigation into Clinton’s email habits while serving as Secretary of State.

Back in July 2016, Comey made headlines by publicly stating that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” but that “no charges are appropriate in this case.”

Fast forward to July 2025, netizens appear to have seized on a few paragraphs buried in the newly declassified report. The pages in question included allegations that Obama wanted the scandal buried to protect the final days of his presidency, and that Lynch was tapped to apply pressure to Comey.

“[REDACTED] Recent information appearing in the media about the FBI investigating possible facts of corruption connected with the State Department [under Clinton] and the granting of preferences to Clinton Fund donors created a negative reaction within the party, though this information was known to Democratic Party leaders since June 2015," stated Page 6 of the document. "According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz [sic], so far the FBI does not have any hard evidence against Hillary Clinton because data was removed from the mail servers just in time.”

It continued, “[REDACTED] Obama is not in the mood to mar the very final segment of his presidency, his legacy with a scandal around a leading nominee for the [D]emocratic [P]arty. To deal with this he is using Attorney General Loretta Lynch to mount a pressure on FBI [D]irector James Comey. Alas, so far, with no concrete results.”

“[REDACTED] Comey is leaning more to [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections; in order to effectively undermine the chances for the [Democratic Party] to win in the presidential elections...” the document added.

Another passage from Page 7 claimed Obama had “sanctioned use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects of the FBI investigation of the business of the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence of the State Department,” and that “the political director of the Hillary Clinton staff, Amanda Renteria [PH], regularly receives information from Loretta Lynch of the Department of Justice, on the plans and intentions of the FBI.”

Those are the quotes fueling the claim that Obama orchestrated a cover-up. But there’s a major detail the online versions reportedly leave out, Snopes reported.

The FBI took a hard pass

While the paragraphs are real, their context was misrepresented. They weren’t presented as fact. Instead, they were explicitly flagged by the FBI as untrustworthy and never followed up. The report makes it clear that the claims came from two reports the FBI reviewed and rejected in 2016.

Here’s what the DOJ review says (Page 6), “As described in this section, witnesses told us that the reports were not credible on their face for various reasons, including that they contained information that the FBI knew to be ‘objectively false.’”

The suspect info came from what's known as the “Post-8 data” — a dataset derived from eight thumb drives handed over to the FBI by a source dubbed “T1.” These reports became part of a broader issue pushed by Senator Chuck Grassley, who argued the FBI hadn’t properly investigated all the Clinton evidence and dubbed the files the “Clinton annex.”

Turns out, the thumb drives weren’t even fully reviewed. The eighth drive was never opened.

The reports at the center of the Obama-pressure claim were separate from those drives and came from the same sketchy data pile.

Meanwhile, the source behind the documents was reportedly a “[REDACTED] Russian of unknown affiliation” who was involved in drafting and editing the reports.

They were based on so-called “purported communications” between Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, and members of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations — communications the FBI never actually found.

James Comey, Loretta Lynch and FBI lawyers refute claims

Key players from the 2016 investigation were asked about the documents.

James Comey told the Office of the Inspector General, “[REDACTED] I want to be clear on this, I had felt no effort to control me, no intervention by the Attorney General. On their face, I didn’t find these communications to be credible, and I read them as an effort by Ms Wasserman Schultz to assure donors that this is not going to screw up the presidential campaign of Secretary Clinton. And so I didn’t find them credible on their face.” (Page 8)

Trisha Anderson, then FBI Principal Deputy General Counsel, echoed the sentiment. She said, “The [REDACTED] lacked analytical rigor in terms of objectivity and vetting of information, and routinely engages in ‘exaggeration for purposes of inflating the importance of their reporting.’” (Page 9)

Loretta Lynch didn’t leave room for interpretation either. According to the report (Page 15), “Lynch said that there was no truth to the underlying allegations in the two reports: she was never in communication with anyone related to the Clinton campaign about the Midyear investigation, and she did not mount a pressure campaign on Comey to ensure that the investigation did not go too far.”

“Midyear” was the FBI’s codename for the Clinton investigation.

The OIG didn’t just take their word for it. They added their own findings (Page 8). “The FBI assessed that the information in the reports was inconsistent with Director Comey’s experience with Lynch and the experiences of other FBI executives in the course of the Midyear investigation," they wrote.