The emails, many of which are heavily redacted, point to a special relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, which appears to have directly influenced some of the department’s decisions.
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The conservative legal group Judicial Watch obtained the emails as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. In the email Band says Chagoury is a “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us”.
Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide, offered to connect Chagoury with Jeff Feltman, the US Ambassador to Lebanon at the time. “It’s not true.” The former president then launched a passionate defense of Hillary Clinton’s conduct, calling the charges against her “the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard”.
The FBI reportedly asked the Justice Department earlier this year about possibly having its public integrity unit investigate the Clinton Foundation, but the agency declined to do so, according to a report.
“This is very important”, replied Band.
A senior Clinton campaign official tells NPR that the email exchanges between Band and Abedin did take place, but did so as top personal aides to the Clintons, not as officials carrying out business related to the foundation. Abedin responded, “We have all had him on our radar” and that “Personnel has been sending him options”.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, “No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress”.
A 2011 exchange, released by the State Department this year, showed that Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk, who has pledged more than $10 million to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, met that year with a top State Department official.
Still, that doesn’t mean these emails should be dismissed, nor should the general concern about overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton-run State Department.
Clinton had made no bones that she was shortsighted in using her private email server as secretary of state.
‘If he wasn’t concerned about Hillary Clinton and her scandal about the email he wouldn’t have had to have that secret meeting’.
Of course, Clinton’s campaign claims that Band was acting at Bill Clinton’s assistant, not as a Foundation executive. The Republican Party has said that Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, sought to help contributors to the foundation in a “pay-for-play” scheme.
Clinton went on to say that while the classification system of sensitive emails was “too complicated to explain to people”, what is clear is that Clinton and her colleagues were never being careless with national security. It does not matter that Mr. Band may have been acting as a “personal aide” to former president Bill Clinton rather than as a Clinton Foundation official, as the campaign now claims.
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Mills’ trip from Washington, D.C., to NY by a top Clinton aide in 2012 seems to raise the same potential issues.
