Why should you care who Peter Kadzik is? Well, Kadzik is the senior Justice Department official who is supervising the investigation of the 650,000 e-mails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer in a file folder named “Life Insurance” which include e-mails said to be “pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server.

Kadzik penned a letter to Congress yesterday assuring them that DOJ “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible” to get to the bottom of the issue.

#BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review.#8days pic.twitter.com/PCgT2ODkQd

— Just the Facts (@JTF_News) October 31, 2016

And why should you worry about the efforts Kadzik describes? Well, Zero Hedge did a fairly deep dive into his background, and…

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony?

It was Peter Kadzik.

In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.

And the Daily Caller also investigated Kadzik’s background with Podesta and found it goes a long way back – all the way to the 1990’s, when last the Clintons were keeping lawyers in DC at full employment…

Podesta and Kadzik have a long history — one which has largely gone unnoticed during the ongoing Clinton email scandal.

Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office.

That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account.

In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign.

Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”

It is unclear to which case Podesta was referring and whether he was joking about prison. But Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal.

As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky.

In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.
Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time.

“He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe.

Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.

Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon.

To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001.

A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”

The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon.

On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

So that’s who Peter Kadzik is and why you might not be overly comfortable to know that he’s the Justice Department official overseeing the investigation into the “Life Insurance” folder and how its contents might involve violations of federal law.

Something tells us this is going to become rather contentious in a relatively short time.