Fact Check

Was an FBI Agent Who Exposed Hillary Clinton's Corruption Found Dead?

A murder-suicide involving an FBI agent and his estranged wife was not related to a probe into Hillary Clinton and the "Fast and Furious" scandal.

Published July 23, 2018

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Image Via Prath / Shutterstock.com
Claim:
An FBI agent who exposed Hillary Clinton's corruption was found murdered.

Origin

On 18 June 2018, the disreputable Neon Nettle website published an article reporting that an FBI agent was murdered as part of a conspiracy to cover up the corruption of Hillary Clinton, who unsuccessfully ran for the presidency of the U.S. in 2016:

An FBI Special Agent, who was anticipated to expose the extent of Clinton and Obama malpractice and corruption in the "Operation Fast and Furious" cover-up before a US Federal Grand Jury, has been found dead at his home.

The FBI official's wife was also found dead at the scene with the couple both being murdered using the 52-year-old agent's own gun.Special Agent David Raynor was “stabbed multiple times” and “shot twice with his own weapon,” according to local media reports. Raynor's tragic death comes just one day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand Jury.

He was widely expected to testify that Hillary Clinton acted illegally to protect Obama administration crimes while covering up the Fast and Furious scandal.

But there's no mystery surrounding how Raynor died — Anne Arundel County Police Lt. Ryan Frashure told us officers witnessed Raynor's turning his gun on himself on 7 March 2018:

There is nothing in the investigation that turned up evidence indicating it’s anything other than a domestic-related suicide. When our officers confronted [Raynor], he committed suicide in front of our officers. He was given verbal commands to drop the weapon, and when [officers] were approaching him, that’s when he put the gun to his head.

Investigators believe Raynor stabbed his 54-year-old wife, Donna Fisher, to death near their home in Crownsville, Maryland, before killing himself. The couple had been in the midst of divorce proceedings and, Frashure said, were "having serious domestic issues." The week they died they were in court fighting over custody of their 10-year-old daughter.

According to investigators, no evidence suggests Raynor's death was in any way connected to the Fast and Furious operation, an Obama-era "gunwalking" scandal. Moreover, "Fast and Furious" had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton's State Department, as it involved the Phoenix division of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF), an organization within the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).

Neon Nettle's sole documentation for their claim that Raynor died "just one day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand Jury" was a link to an eight-month-old news article about the shooting death of a Baltimore homicide detective, an article that made no mention of David Raynor, the FBI, Hillary Clinton, or "Fast and Furious." (The slain detective was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury, but that case was about Baltimore police accused of shaking down citizens and conspiring with drug dealers, not about the ATF and gunwalking in Arizona.)

As is often the case with stories published by Neon Nettle, the only other sources reporting that Raynor was murdered in a conspiracy to cover up Clinton's corruption were similar disreputable web sites.

Sources

Davis, Phil.   "Police: FBI Agent in Crownsville Murder-Suicide Had No History of Domestic Violence."     Capital Gazette.   8 March 2018.

Martinez, Peter.   "FBI Agent, Estranged Wife Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide."     CBS News.   7 March 2018.

Lynch, Sarah.   "Trump Administration to Provide Records on Obama-Era Gun-Smuggling Probe."     Reuters.   7 March 2018.

Bethania Palma is a journalist from the Los Angeles area who has been working in the news industry since 2006.

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