This morning Sen. Chuck Grassley released the FBI Washington Field Office’s 12-page “electronic communication” (EC) that opened a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Its extensive evidence of potential pay-to-play criminality among the Clinton family confirms the politicalization and weaponization of the Department of Justice.
Late last year, another trove of documents—also released by Grassley—summarized the origins of three separate FBI investigations into the Clinton Foundation, opened respectively out of the New York, Little Rock, and Washington D.C. field offices. As The Federalist reported at that time, those documents indicated that Ray Hulser, then head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), did not support the investigations into the Clinton Foundation and withheld information from the U.S. attorney’s office running the probe out of Little Rock.
Special Counsel John Durham would later question Hulser about the Clinton Foundation investigations, and the former PIN section chief told Durham’s team that although he had “declined prosecution on behalf of the Public Integrity Section, he told the Office he ‘made it clear, however, that his decision was not binding on the various U.S. Attorneys’ Offices or FBI field divisions.”
Hulser explained his reasoning to the special counsel by claiming, “[I]n sum, that the FBI briefing was poorly presented and that there was insufficient predication for at least one of the investigations due to its reliance on allegations contained in a book.” According to another section chief, the Department of Justice’s “reaction to the Clinton Foundation briefing was ‘hostile.’”
Hulser’s refusal to open an investigation out of PIN, and his excuse that the FBI presented the case “poorly,” just cannot be reconciled with the detailed summary contained in the EC that is now public. As Grassley highlighted in a letter sent today to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, “Included in the FBI’s EC are numerous allegations of foreign influence concerns that arose ‘from speaking fees and donations to the [Clinton] Foundation.’”
The Iowa senator then pulls a few examples from the Washington Field Office’s opening communication, beginning with donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling $2.35 million from the then-head of the Russia government’s uranium company, Uranium One.
The EC is not limited to evidence about Uranium One. It also details evidence of donations to the Clinton Foundation from an executive of Polo Resources. Eight weeks later, it says, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh persuaded the prime minister to reauthorize pit mining, including one in which Polo Resources had an interest. Another section of the EC highlights evidence suggesting a pay-to-play scheme involving Colombian timber and another Clinton Foundation donor.
The FBI EC also notes that Hillary Clinton traveled to Russia, where she allegedly prompted “Russian officials to enter into a $3.7 billion aircraft purchase with Boeing,” then two months later Boeing pledged $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The EC further discussed the Haitian government awarding Hillary Clinton’s brother a “rare ‘gold exception permit’ (the first issued in 50 years)…during the same time period in which ‘billions of U.S. tax dollars had been spent in Haiti, following the Haitian earthquake in 2010.’”
What—if anything—the FBI did to investigate these additional potential pay-to-play schemes before the Department of Justice closed the investigations in 2016 is unclear. What we do know, though, is that after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Little Rock was able to reopen its investigation, but Hulser and the Department of Justice continued to interfere in the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
The documents released today show just how extensive that interference was. The lead assistant U.S. attorney noted in a March 6, 2020, “Investigative Update” memorandum that he still had three “Initial Requests” for investigative activities outstanding some two years after first seeking the information. And these delays followed after the PIN chief refused to support the investigations into the Clinton Foundation and, along with other DOJ players, sought to thwart them.
The contrast between how the DOJ and FBI headquarters handled the Clinton Foundation investigation and their investigations into Trump and Trump supporters couldn’t be any more stark. Here, we had a 12-page EC the Washington D.C. Field Office used to open a “preliminary investigation” into the Clinton Foundation, while the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on Trump as a “full investigation” based solely on ambiguous comments allegedly made by George Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary.
The same pattern repeats itself time and again, with the deep state also protecting the Biden family while launching investigation upon investigation into Trump and supporters of the president. As Grassley said when he revealed the first tranche of documents showing the DOJ’s efforts to shut down the Clinton Foundation investigation, “For too long, our Justice Department has chosen winners and losers instead of enforcing the law without regard to power, party or privilege.”
Whether the current DOJ and FBI take heed—and follow the evidentiary trails the Senate Judiciary Committee and Grassley are laying out of potential obstruction of justice—remains to be seen.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press.
She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
