It’s well known that if the FBI recommends prosecution in the Hillary Clinton email case, the decision will be put in the hands of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

But little known is the fact that Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at a major Washington law firm that served the Clintons.

Lynch was with the Washington-headquartered international law firm Hogan & Hartson LLP from March 2002 through April 2010.

According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004.

In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002.

While there is no evidence that Lynch played a direct role either in the tax work done by the firm for the Clintons or in linking Hillary’s private email server to MX Logic, the ethics of the legal profession hold all partners jointly liable for the actions of other partners in a business.

“If Hogan and Hartson previously represented the Clintons on tax matters, it is incumbent upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to [disclose] what, if any, role she had in such tax matters,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch.

His watchdog group is playing a leading role in pressing Freedom of Information Act litigation to obtain the release of Clinton’s email correspondence while she was secretary of state.

“If Lynch played any role at all regarding income tax work done for the Clintons by Hogan and Hartson, it would bolster the call for a special counsel should the FBI recommend prosecution in the Hillary Clinton email case,” Fitton said.

As WND reported earlier this month, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova is confident Department of Justice prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the Hillary Clinton email case, based on comments from Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Big Clinton backers

In a press release March 20, 2002, Hogan & Hartson, currently known as Hogan Lovells after a May 2010 merger with a London-based law firm, announced Lynch had joined the firm’s New York office as a partner in the Litigation Practice Group, focusing her law practice on commercial litigation, white collar criminal defense and corporate compliance issues.

Then, in a an April 26, 2010, statement Hogan & Hartson announced Lynch had decided to return to her previous Justice Department job after being nominated by President Obama in February 2010 to become once again the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

A report published April 8, 2008, by The American Lawyer noted Hogan & Hartson were among Hillary Clinton’s biggest financial supporters in the legal industry during her first presidential campaign.

“Firm lawyers and staff have donated nearly $123,400 to her campaign so far, according to campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics,” Nate Raymond observed in The American Lawyer article. “Christine Varney, a partner in Hogan’s Washington, D.C., office, served as chief counsel to the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992.”

Hogan & Hartson tie to MX Logic

As first reported by Patrick Howley on Breitbart.com last August, Hogan & Hartson filed with the Commissioner for Trademarks in Virginia to abandon MX Logic’s application for the trademark SPAMTRAQ in a letter written on Hogan & Hartson stationary and signed by the firm’s Virginia-based attorney Audrey H. Reed on May 19, 2004.

On July 30, 2009, Internet security software giant McAfee Inc. announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MX Logic for $140 million in cash.

On March 4, 2015, CBS News reported that in November 2012, without explanation, Clinton’s private email account was reconfigured to use Google’s servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed.

CBS further reported that in July 2013, five months after Clinton resigned as secretary of state, her private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which was then owned by McAfee.

In June 2013, Clinton hired Platte River networks in Denver to upgrade, secure and manage the private email server for both Clintons and their staffs, according to the Denver Post.

Email security under MX Logic questioned

Marc Perkel, a tech entrepreneur and former systems administrator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, went on the record on March 16, 2015, explaining that employees at MX Logic, now owned by McAfee, “had full access” to all of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails in an unencrypted form.

“Email from the Internet is routed by DNS records called MX records, [which] are used to look up where to deliver email destined for a recipient,” Perkel wrote. “When someone uses a Spam Filtering service they point their MX records to that service and all email for that domain goes to the spam filtering service first – they clean it – and forward the good email on to the recipient server which is secret to the world.

“What this means is that when Obama or anyone in the State Department emailed Hillary, the email went to MX Logic,” Perkel stressed. “It was then decrypted, checked for spam and viruses, and then reencrypted and sent over the open Internet to Hillary’s server. While it was at MX Logic it could be read, tapped, archived, or forwarded to anyone in the world without anyone knowing.”

Lynch’s role in HSBC money-laundering case

When Lynch’s nomination as attorney general was considered by the Senate one year ago, as WND reported, the Senate Judiciary Committee examined her role in the Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute the banking giant HSBC for laundering funds for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists.

WND was first to report in a series of articles beginning in 2012 money-laundering charges brought by John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager, based on his more than 1,000 pages of evidence and secret audio recordings.

The staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on Cruz’s allegations that Lynch, acting then in her capacity as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, engaged in a Department of Justice cover-up. Obama’s attorney general nominee allowed HSBC to enter into a “deferred prosecution” settlement in which the bank agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine and admit “willful criminal conduct” in exchange for dropping criminal investigations and prosecutions of HSBC directors or employees.

Cruz called the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on HSBC “a joke” and filed a $10 million lawsuit for “retaliation and wrongful termination.”