During the 2016 campaign, the FBI came into possession of a document which purported to claim that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had made a tacit agreement not to push too hard into the Clinton email investigation.

According to a report in the Washington Post, the document was an email between Loretta Lynch and a Clinton campaign staffer by the name of Amanda Renteria. In this alleged email, which was not supplied to the FBI, it indicated that Lynch told Renteria that she would not let the FBI investigation into Clinton go too far.

The document, obtained by the FBI, was a piece of purported analysis by Russian intelligence, the people said. It referred to an email supposedly written by the then-chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and sent to Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, an organization founded by billionaire George Soros and dedicated to promoting democracy.

The Russian document did not contain a copy of the email, but it described some of the contents of the purported message.

You know what's coming next, don't you?

Yes, by August the FBI had determined that it was unreliable intelligence. But in July, James Comey made his grandstanding statement that there would be no charges in relation to the email server, and the subsequent scolding about her sloppiness, an unprecedented overreach of FBI authority.

Then on July 5, Comey decided to announce on his own — without telling Lynch ahead of time — that he was closing the Clinton email case without recommending charges against anyone. Aides to Comey said he decided to act alone after Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton for nearly a half-hour on an airport tarmac in Phoenix about a week earlier — and have since said privately the Russian document was also a factor in that decision.

The fake Russian document.

For her part, Renteria doesn't even know Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though she did say she'd had some interaction with the "other" Loretta Lynch -- the one Breitbart confused with the real Loretta Lynch after President Obama nominated her.

“The idea that Russians would tell a story in which the Clinton campaign, Soros and even an Obama administration official are connected — that Russians might tell such a story, that is not at all surprising,” said Matt Rojansky, a Russia expert and director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center. “Because that is part of the Kremlin worldview.”

Be that as it may, it seems as if FBI Director James Comey was all too eager to allow it to influence his actions in early July, 2016, which in turn influenced the ultiimate outcome of the election, and not for the better.