- In late July 2025, social media users circulated an excerpt from a newly declassified review into the FBI's 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices, claiming it "confirmed" that former U.S. President Barack Obama pressured then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey to cover up the investigation.
- In 2016, Comey said that although Clinton and her staff had been "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," it was the FBI's judgment that "no charges are appropriate in this case."
- Online claims cited two reports that the FBI reviewed as part of a dataset from an anonymous source. However, according to the declassified review, the FBI found the reports to be "not credible on their face." Comey and Lynch both told the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General, which carried out the review, that neither felt pressured by nor had pressured the other regarding the investigation.
On July 21, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice released a newly declassified internal review of the FBI's handling of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server while secretary of state.
On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey said that although Clinton and her staff had been "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," it was the FBI's judgment that "no charges are appropriate in this case."
Following the release of the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General's review in 2025, a claim (archived) spread rapidly online that this document confirmed that former President Barack Obama pressured Comey and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to cover up the Clinton investigation.
One such claim came from the political commentator Benny Johnson, who posted a screenshot from the review on X alongside the claim.
Johnson wrote, "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."
The claim was very popular on X (archived) but also spread across Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and TikTok (archived). Snopes readers searched our site to find out if the claim was true.
However, while the excerpt from the review circulating online was genuine, meaning it appeared in the document released by the DOJ, it was misrepresented in online claims.
The paragraph about Obama allegedly pressuring Lynch and Comey to cover up or "shut down" the Clinton investigation because the president didn't wish for it to "mar" the final days of his term came from a pair of reports that the FBI investigated, discussed and found lacking in credibility. The paragraph shared by online users appeared in a section of the Office of the Inspector General's review discussing exactly how the FBI reached this conclusion. Therefore, we rate this claim — that the OIG's review confirmed Obama exerted pressure to cover up the Clinton email investigation — false.
The paragraphs in question read (Page 6, emphasis ours):
[REACTED] 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. According to Wassermann 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.
[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....
A second report (Page 7) further 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."
Reports found 'not credible on their face'
Though the claims made in the report excerpts about Obama, Comey and Lynch were no doubt damning, the FBI also established (Page 6) at the time of the 2016 investigation that they were "not credible on their face."
The claims appeared in reports found in a dataset called "Post-8 data" or "Mission Ridge data." The eight in "Post-8" referred to the eight thumb drives that a source named "T1" gave to the FBI. The drives formed the basis of accusations by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican who secured the release of the document that he dubbed the "Clinton annex," that the FBI had "failed to take normal investigative steps and review all evidence" in the Clinton investigation. According to the Office of the Inspector General's review, none of the thumb drives had ever been fully investigated. The eighth drive had never been reviewed at all, according to the OIG. "T1" handed over the dataset that contained the reports that formed the basis of this claim separately from the eight thumb drives.
The OIG said in its review (Page 6) that: "[REDACTED] 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 reports were allegedly based on "purported communications" between Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then-chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and people working for the Open Society Foundations, a group of offices and foundations created by billionaire investor George Soros.
However, the FBI never found any evidence of the "purported communications" the reports claimed to be based on. Rather, reviews of the "Post-8 data" found that "a [REDACTED] Russian of unknown affiliation" was involved in drafting and editing both reports.
For reasons (pages 8-9) including the lack of evidence behind the reports, top FBI figures dismissed their credibility.
Comey and Lynch both dismissed allegations
The review cited Comey and Trisha Anderson, then the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI, who both dismissed the credibility of the reports.
Comey told the Office of Inspector General (Page 8):
[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 that 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.
Anderson told (Page 9) the OIG that:
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." She said that these factors contributed to their conclusion that the assertions in the [REDACTED] reports were not credible.
The OIG document also included comments from Lynch, who the discredited reports claimed pressured Comey to cover up the investigation into Clinton's email practices and communicated the FBI's intentions to Clinton's campaign staff. The OIG wrote (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 name the FBI gave its investigation into Clinton's email practices.
In sum, the document that contained the report excerpt claiming that Obama pressured Lynch and, in turn, Comey, to cover up the Clinton email investigation actually discredited rather than confirmed this claim. Comey and Lynch both told the Office of Inspector General that neither felt pressured by the other during the investigation.
According to the OIG (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." Additionally, the FBI found the reports themselves "not credible on their face." This assessment appeared on Page 6 of the report — right before the report excerpts that social media users falsely circulated as confirmation of Obama's alleged pressuring of Lynch.