Newly released State Department emails shed additional light on the relationships Hillary Clinton and her top aides maintained with her family’s foundation during the years she served as secretary of state.
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In one email exchange, Clinton Foundation official Doug Band asked Mrs Clinton’s top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, to find a job for a foundation associate at the State Department.
The initial news of the Justice Department going against the FBI’s wishes was buried in a CNN story yesterday that detailed the latest release of Clinton’s emails to the public at the hands of the conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch.
In another email, Band asked Mills and Abedin for “a favor” involving securing a job at the State Department for a person who had recently been on a Clinton Foundation trip to Haiti.
In an April 2009 message to Abedin and Mills, Doug Band, who was overseeing the Clinton Foundation at the time, urgently asked for a meeting between a top USA official and Gilbert Chagoury – a major donor to the Clinton family charity.
Abedin responded: “It’s jeff feltman”, referring to Jeffrey Feltman, who was the USA ambassador to Lebanon at the time.
The Clinton campaign is trying to shrug the whole thing off by claiming that Band was simply acting in his capacity as a former personal assistant to Bill Clinton and not in his role with the foundation. Clinton has told the State Department she believes she submitted all work-related e-mails she had in her possession, the department’s Trudeau said in a statement. “I’m sure he knows him”. He had not been seeking official action by the State Department. “Gilbert Chagoury never contacted me”, he said in response to a question Wednesday from The Washington Post. The State Department OIG has been looking into connections between the State Department and Clinton during her term as Secretary of State since earlier this year, but has not said anything about the matter.
The Clinton campaign responds that the emails were regarding a young person who worked for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and who was neither a Clinton Foundation donor nor employee.
That hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign from having fun with the emails’ revelations and CNN’s reporting that the Justice Department had declined to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
According to CBS News, there were several exchanges between Abedin and a top Clinton Foundation worker. Some also expressed concern the request seemed more political than substantive, especially given the timing of it coinciding with the investigation into the private email server and Clinton’s presidential campaign. A longtime donor, Chagoury contributed from $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, and in 1996, donated $460,000 to a voter registration effort benefiting Democrats.
The joint investigation with the U.S. Attorneys office is a departure from how Hillary Clinton’s personal email server probe was handled, which caused an uproar and led to FBI Director James Comey and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch being called before a congressional committee hearing.
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There is a legitimate possibility that the FBI is investigating Hillary and she could become the president before they can conclude their results.
