Recently released emails that appear to show that donors to the Clinton Foundation had access and influence at the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state raise new questions about the Democratic presidential nominee.
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While serving as secretary of state, Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, traveled to NY to interview two high-level business executives being considered to run the nonprofit foundation, CNN reported.
The group says 44 of those pages had not been previously turned over to the State Department.
A Clinton Foundation donor’s suspicious activity prompted the FBI and several Justice Department field offices to request that DOJ headquarters open a public corruption investigation into the former secretary of state’s family charity.
Famed investigative reporter Bob Woodward, part of the team that exposed the 1972 Watergate scandal, said Democrats behind the scenes are nervous about the ongoing focus on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.
On a separate occasion, Band asked for “a favor” because one of the Clinton Foundation’s associates wanted to work at the State Department and it was “important to take care of”.
Huma Abedin, the State Department aide, replied that “personnel has been sending him options”.
In one email exchange released by Judicial Watch, Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, tried to put billionaire donor Gilbert Chagoury – a convicted money launderer – in touch with the US ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin offered Jeffrey Feltman, at that time the US ambassador to Lebanon. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.
“They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law”, he added.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A Clinton campaign spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Clinton campaign again forcefully pushed back on the perception that there was double-dipping going on between Foggy Bottom and the foundation.
Sen. John Cornyn is stepping up pressure on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to respond to reports that the Department of Justice ignored an Federal Bureau of Investigation request to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
The newly released batch also included an email to Mrs Clinton from Stephen Roach, then-chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, who said he was scheduled to testify to Congress and was “happy to help in any way I can”.
Chagoury, according to Corallo, said that his contributions to the Clinton Foundation were based on the “good philanthropic work around the world – especially in Africa”. After an interview with Fox News late last month, Clinton came under renewed scrutiny after telling interviewer Chris Wallace that FBI Director James Comey said her past statements regarding her emails were “truthful”, a claim Factcheck.org and other outlets found was false.
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Judicial Watch released 296 e-mails Tuesday, most sent to or from Abedin but not necessarily Clinton, whose use of a private e-mail system has caused an uproar.
