According to the latest report on Thursday, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, is expected to testify before the Congress regarding his role in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.
The report regarding Podesta’s testimony comes as the House Intelligence Committee continues to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russian government in order to influence the elections.
Podesta is known to be central figure in the 2016 elections, not because of his performance as Clinton’s campaign manager, but because of his leaked emails that were handed over to WikiLeaks. The leaked emails, which amounted to thousands, were used to excoriate the candidate and are pointed at, as the main reason behind Clinton’s downfall.
The leak, which happened due to Podesta’s misunderstanding of another campaign official’s directive to change his password after receiving an email that looked like a phishing scam, also led to the Pizzagate conspiracy. The conspiracy, as peculiar as it sounds, alleged that Clinton and Podesta were at the center of a secret child-trafficking ring being run out of a Washington DC pizzeria.
In an interview back in February, Podesta himself suggested that FBI officials had conspired to bring down Clinton in the elections.
“There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose,” he told Bloomberg Politics editor John Heilemann “I’m not sure they really understood the alternative, but they wanted her to lose. I think that’s one possibility.”
Additionally, he blamed James Comey, the former FBI Director, for Clinton’s loss in the elections, as a result of his announcement that the FBI will be re-starting the investigation into Clinton’s emails, just a week before voting day.
“[Comey] made a bad judgment, and I think virtually anybody who has opined on the topic … have said it was a terrible mistake of judgment,” he told Heilemann. “And I think it did terrible damage to us. If you look at the polling at that period time, that’s when the race began to tighten in that week.”
