FLASHBACK: John McAfee Called FBI ‘Corrupt’ Or ‘Incompetent’ Over Hillary’s Emails In 2016 Op-Ed

Last Updated on June 23, 2021

John McAfee, who was found dead in a Spanish jail cell earlier today in what Spanish authorities are calling a suicide, wrote a lengthy op-ed featured in the International Business Times calling the FBI either “corrupt” or “incompetent” for its handling of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 email scandal.

McAfee, a technology and cryptocurrency pioneer who was being held on suspected tax evasion – and was recently set to be extradited to the United States – at the time of his death, wrote a scathing article suggesting the FBI was “incompetent” due to its suspicious handling of failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.

McAfee’s article was penned on November 3, 2016, only days before the 2016 election that saw President Donald Trump win an upset victory, and shortly after disgraced former FBI Director James Comey was interrogated in Congress for his agency’s role in examining Clinton’s emails. According to McAfee, “It was an eye-opening epiphany, and it once and for all made clear to me that the cyber technologists within the FBI are either the most incompetent on this planet or corrupt in handling the Hillary Clinton email saga.”

In the article, McAfee noted that Comey claimed he had no knowledge of Paul Combetta’s Reddit post questioning users about how to “strip an email address from a server’s email data base” and wrote, “Mr. Combetta, by the way, is the technical expert who ultimately deleted 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails.” McAfee suggested that Combetta was tasked with using Reddit to create a cover story that he was only tasked to save Clinton the “embarrassment” of having her private email leaked.

“The inescapable conclusion, to me at least, is that the post was carefully crafted to provide a record indicating that Combetta was merely attempting to save Clinton the potential embarrassment of having her email address released to the public,” wrote McAfee. “If Combetta did indeed try to modify the header to change an email address, then the result would most assuredly have been the total destruction of the header. Email providers create safeguards against such modifications. A world-class hacker could do it, with a lot of work, and time, which Combetta did not have.”

McAfee noted that this ploy would have ultimately been successful, had Wikileaks not intervened with the mass release of Clinton emails. However, McAfee also claimed that the FBI could, with effort, restore more of Clinton’s emails. “It would not take much to write a forensics program to cross reference known email senders, receivers, dates and times, with the redacted emails. I suspect that 95% or more of the missing data could be recovered.” He concluded, “Has the FBI thought of this? That is the question at the heart of it all.”

McAfee was found dead in his cell at the Spanish jail he was being detained in this afternoon. As many have noted, McAfee repeatedly warned that he would be murdered while in jail, and his death would be disguised as a suicide.