Last week, the judge overseeing the lawsuit that seeks access to Hillary Clinton’s emails while Secretary of State was told that a key witness intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination during his upcoming deposition by Judicial Watch. The witness is Bryan Pagliano, sub C-list political hack, who earned a six-figure salary to manage Hillary Clinton’s private email server on government time. He had already invoked the Fifth before Trey Gowdy’s committee. The judge demanded to see Pagliano’s immunity agreement. Now, in a panic, Justice has responded.

The Justice Department on Friday filed a court motion pushing to keep secret the terms of an immunity agreement with a former IT aide to Hillary Clinton, warning that release of the documents could undermine its ongoing investigation connected to Clinton’s private server. Releasing the agreements reached with former State Department contractor Bryan Pagliano “could prematurely reveal the scope and focus of the pending investigation,” the Justice Department said in its Friday filing. “Therefore, if this court determines that it has a need to review the agreements, the United States respectfully requests that the court exercise its inherent discretion to receive the agreements ex parte and under seal,” it added.

There are some interesting data points. The concern about the “scope and focus” of the investigation getting out implies that it is much larger than we know. We already know there is a public corruption going on in addition to the investigation into how top secret information came to be stored on Clinton’s private server. Here the implication is that there are targets beyond Clinton and her immediate circle of cronies… of course, if it follows the baby parts investigation model in California, the people who are causing the lawsuit might be indicted. It might also mean that straphangers like Sid Blumenthal, who revealed classified signals intelligence he had illegally received from someone, might be in the crosshairs. There could even be conclusive evidence that the server was a digital petri dish harboring malware viruses from every intelligence agency on the globe.

When one puts this in context with the White House’s admission, yesterday, that a criminal probe was underway into Clinton’s email and the fact that Loretta Lynch met privately with Obama yesterday afternoon, one gets the feeling that things are gathering speed, though towards what destination we do not know.