New Documents: FBI Opened and Then Immediately Closed a Fakey-Fake "Inquiry" Into the Clinton Foundation's Obvious Pay-for-Play Scheme with Foreign Governments

One surmises that Wray's FBI opened the investigation only because of pressure from some Republicans, and then immediately closed it and said "Nothing to see here, move along."

Margot Cleveland for The Federalist:

This morning Sen. Chuck Grassley released the FBI Washington Field Office's 12-page "electronic communication" (EC) that opened a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Its extensive evidence of potential pay-to-play criminality among the Clinton family confirms the politicalization and weaponization of the Department of Justice.

Late last year, another trove of documents--also released by Grassley--summarized the origins of three separate FBI investigations into the Clinton Foundation, opened respectively out of the New York, Little Rock, and Washington D.C. field offices. As The Federalist reported at that time, those documents indicated that Ray Hulser, then head of the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section (PIN), did not support the investigations into the Clinton Foundation and withheld information from the U.S. attorney's office running the probe out of Little Rock.

...

Hulser's refusal to open an investigation out of PIN, and his excuse that the FBI presented the case "poorly," just cannot be reconciled with the detailed summary contained in the EC that is now public. As Grassley highlighted in a letter sent today to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, "Included in the FBI's EC are numerous allegations of foreign influence concerns that arose 'from speaking fees and donations to the [Clinton] Foundation.'"

The Iowa senator then pulls a few examples from the Washington Field Office's opening communication, beginning with donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling $2.35 million from the then-head of the Russia government's uranium company, Uranium One.

The EC is not limited to evidence about Uranium One. It also details evidence of donations to the Clinton Foundation from an executive of Polo Resources. Eight weeks later, it says, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh persuaded the prime minister to reauthorize pit mining, including one in which Polo Resources had an interest. Another section of the EC highlights evidence suggesting a pay-to-play scheme involving Colombian timber and another Clinton Foundation donor.

The FBI EC also notes that Hillary Clinton traveled to Russia, where she allegedly prompted >o?"Russian officials to enter into a $3.7 billion aircraft purchase with Boeing," then two months later Boeing pledged $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.>o? The EC further discussed the Haitian government awarding Hillary Clinton's brother a "rare 'gold exception permit' (the first issued in 50 years)...during the same time period in which 'billions of U.S. tax dollars had been spent in Haiti, following the Haitian earthquake in 2010.'"

What--if anything--the FBI did to investigate these additional potential pay-to-play schemes before the Department of Justice closed the investigations in 2016 is unclear. What we do know, though, is that after Donald Trump's election in 2016, Little Rock was able to reopen its investigation, but Hulser and the Department of Justice continued to interfere in the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:02 PM

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