In a 2009 email exchange, Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band pushed two of Clinton’s top aides to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and top foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in contact with the US ambassador to Lebanon. Abedin responds that “personnel has been sending him options”.
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The new set of emails was obtained by Judicial Watch by way of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the group against the Department of State a year ago.
The Trump campaign has also used the most recent batch of emails as supposed proof that Ms Clinton is corrupt. The prolonged investigations into her use of a private email server while at the State Department has fueled public distrust of her and plagued her presidential bid.
This email, and the response to it, emerged this week as a result of a lawsuit over emails sent on the Clinton family’s private server. The Chagoury Group co-founder has given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to a list of donors posted online. Band asked the aides to get Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon.
“As you know, he’s a key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon”.
Abedin said the “substance person” was Jeff Feltman, the former US ambassador to Lebanon. “He calls me every day and we owe him some attention”.
“I’m also not going to speak to specific redactions”, she replied, stressing that she can’t “speak to specific cases”.
Feltman told CNN Wednesday that he never met with Chagoury.
“The almost 55,000 pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails released by the department over the past year give a sense of the wide range of individuals, inside and outside the government, that State Department officials are in contact with on a range of topics”, Trudeau said.
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. Clinton said those emails were not work-related and therefore not part of what she turned over to the State Department for archiving. The State Department OIG has been looking into connections between the State Department and Clinton during her term as Secretary of State since earlier this year, but has not said anything about the matter.
“We will appropriately and with due diligence process any additional material we receive from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify work-related agency records and make them available to the public consistent with our legal obligations”, said Elizabeth Trudeau, director of press relations at the State Department. More than 10 million dollars.
‘Once again, the Department of Justice has protected Hillary Clinton. He also sought to draw attention to newly revealed emails involving State Department staffers during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department. The Clinton Foundation is a different situation. Now, it appears she may have tried to protect Clinton from an entire other investigation into possible official corruption.
Filton also said that there were 44 emails hidden on goal.
But Mark Corallo, a Washington-based spokesman for Chagoury, said in a statement Wednesday that Chagoury had been seeking to contact someone in the State Department to provide his insight into the coming elections that June in 2009 in Lebanon, where he has deep ties and experience. However, Attorney General Loretta Lynch refused to allow the Department of Justice to go forward with the investigation, noting that a preliminary investigation done the year prior did not produce enough evidence to launch a case against the foundation.
“She was caught”, said Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, which released the latest emails.
At the NABJ-NAHJ conference on August 5 in Washington, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reiterated her stance that she didn’t send or receive classified emails while serving as secretary of state.
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True, the campaign’s denials don’t answer the question completely: Trump has every right to ask whether Clinton’s aides adhered to the letter and spirit of an agreement to keep foundation and government work entirely separate. DOJ said that probe could continue but declined to open a case on the foundation.
