The conservative legal group Judicial Watch obtained the emails as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. Clinton said she turned over to the State Department all documents from her private account.
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In the email, Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of (redacted)”. “Personnel has been sending him options”, Abedin replied.
Given this troubling and undemocratic pattern-one that appears consistent with possible pay-to-play schemes-the crucial question becomes: what favors have wealthy donors to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative received due to their unequal access to power?
Douglas Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton after he left the White House, had a “Very imp” message for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff: The State Department needed to reach out to a billionaire businessman – who also was a major donor to the Clinton Foundation.
Abedin emailed back that the person Chagoury should speak with was Jeffrey Feltman, who had recently left his post as the USA ambassador to Lebanon. “Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury”. Bernie Sanders goofed by dismissing Clinton’s possible ethics issues: “the American people are sick and exhausted of hearing about your damn e-mails”, Sanders famously said at the first Democratic debate.
“Neither of these emails involve the secretary or relate to the Foundation’s work”, Josh Schwerin, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said in an emailed statement to CNN.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Clinton campaign said Wednesday that Chagoury only wanted to offer insights on the then-upcoming Lebanese election and was not looking for any specific action from the State Department. The Justice Department last month declined to file charges against Clinton over her use of the private server. In early 2009, a donor to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Lana Moresky, asked Clinton directly for help finding an associate a job at the State Department.
“If there was a schedule that was created that was her Secretary of State daily schedule, and a copy of that was then put in the burn bag, that … that certainly happened on … on more than one occasion”, Abedin said to lawyers representing Judicial Watch, the New York Post reported.
Three separate reporters–starting with NBC’s Abigail Williams–asked Trudeau about whether there was any improper relationship between State and the Clinton Foundation.
“The DOJ’s decision to deny the FBI’s request is an obstruction of justice and a flagrant dereliction of duty from our elected officials”, reads the Trump’s campaign petition.
That’s according to CNN, which provided new details on Thursday to its report on Wednesday that the DOJ had shot down an Federal Bureau of Investigation request to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
“This did not clear our internal vet, but WJC wants to know what state thinks of it if he took it 100% for the foundation”, Amitabh Desai, the foundation’s director of foreign policy, wrote, referring to the former president by his initials.
To establish a criminal conflict of interest, authorities would have to prove that a government employee received something of value, like a job, or money, in exchange for the favor. The FBI went to the Justice Department earlier this year asking for it to open a case into the foundation, but the public integrity unit declined.
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Now, she is once again on the board of the Clinton Foundation while running her own development business focusing on African business. “The idea that this poses a conflict of interest is absurd”.
