Newly released emails reveal President Obama’s Justice Department rejected the FBI’s request to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with the State Department.
The FBI asked the DOJ to open an investigation into a potential pay-for-play relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, which spends a very small fraction of its funds on actual charity work, but the DOJ wasn’t interested — saying it had tried and failed to probe the organization in 2015, CNN reports.
Earlier this week, Judicial Watch, a non-profit integrity group, released a batch of emails revealing that top State Department aides did favors for Clinton Foundation bigwigs during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State.
Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills helped Doug Band, a Clinton Foundation advisor who co-founded Teneo Holdings — a secretive company that has enriched Clinton aides — find a job for someone within the State Department as “a favor.” The two also arranged a meeting with a U.S. ambassador to Libya and a Clinton Foundation benefactor who was convicted of international money laundering in 2000.
The DOJ’s refusal to probe the Clinton Foundation’s use of the State Department seems to be more than just a lack of evidence at hand, as U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch has a special relationship with the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton is reportedly planning to keep Lynch as attorney general, if Clinton wins the election. In late June, Bill Clinton secretly met with Lynch aboard a private plane on the tarmac of a Phoenix airport just before she announced the DOJ wouldn’t press charges against Clinton for using a private, unsecured email server while serving as secretary of State. The curious timing of these developments led many to believe there is an underlying conflict of interest at play.
