Clinton Foundation Scandal: A Justice Department Cover-Up Exposed?
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Corruption: Lost in the hurricane of news about the FBI's renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email is a bombshell of possibly greater importance — an apparent attempt by Obama's Justice Department to quash an FBI probe into the troubled Clinton Foundation.
Back in August, the Daily Caller reported that the FBI and several U.S. attorneys offices were conducting a joint investigation of the foundation for financial crimes and influence peddling.
It was a major story that, naturally, other news outlets ignored, until this weekend. In an extensive report on battles within the FBI and Justice Department over how to handle various investigations involving people in Clinton's orbit, the Wall Street Journal revealed deep in the story how senior officials at Justice tried to thwart the FBI from looking too closely at the Clinton Foundation.
"Early this year, four FBI field offices — New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark. — were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling," the Journal reported.
But when these investigators presented their findings to the Justice Department in February 2016, Justice refused to grant them the authority to use more aggressive investigative techniques, such as issuing subpoenas or conducting formal interviews.
Then, on Aug. 12 — the day after the Daily Caller piece ran — a "very pissed off" senior Justice Department official called Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe after learning that FBI agents were nevertheless still pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.
The Journal quotes FBI agents who said they were then told to "stand down" from the probe.
The report also notes that U.S. attorneys refused to let FBI investigators look at devices turned over in the Clinton email scandal to see if they contained evidence of wrongdoing at the foundation. Justice had conveniently agreed to immunity and limited-use deals with Clinton's lawyers.
It's not as if FBI investigators were out in left field in suspecting that the Clinton Foundation was a corrupt organization. Peter Schweizer, in his 2015 book "Clinton Cash," had detailed numerous cases in which decisions made by the State Department while Hillary was in charge just happened to coincide with donations to the charity.
Hacked emails released by WikiLeaks have since made it clear that, despite Clinton's promise to avoid conflicts of interest between her work at State and the foundation, her top aides continued to have close dealings with the foundation, and that donors often received special treatment at State.
A memo leaked last week showed how Bill Clinton repeatedly scored lucrative business deals with businesses after they agreed to be Clinton Foundation donors. And evidence continues to emerge that the foundation's "charity" work was less beneficial than claimed.
Now it appears that Justice has successfully sidelined a critical investigation into the corrupt Clinton Foundation purely for political reasons. If so, then the Justice Department itself is guilty of obstructing justice.
This is the very definition of a "rigged system."
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-foundation-scandal-a-justice-dept-cover-up-exposed/
