Pay to play? Timeline shows FBI, DOJ efforts to hamstring investigation into Clinton Foundation * WorldNetDaily * by Bob Unruh
Hillary Clinton on PBS’ ‘Amanpour and Company’ on Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022. (Video screenshot)
A newly declassified government document has revealed the active efforts on the part of the FBI and the Department of Justice to shut down an investigation into the alleged pay-to-play scheme assembled by the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state for Barack Obama.
It is Just the News that revealed the actions at the time, heading into the 2016 election, when the family foundation run by the Clintons solicited “contributions” and “donations” – totaling hundreds of millions of dollars – from various groups that had business pending before the federal bureaucracy, which Hillary Clinton ran.
The report explained Kash Patel, now FBI director, found a “bombshell” memo from 2017 that chronicled the “extensive political obstruction that career agents in three cities faced from their own bosses and the Obama Justice Department during the 2016 election as they probed whether Hillary Clinton engaged in a pay-to-play corruption scheme.”
The government documents show Sally Yates, then deputy attorney general, ordered, “Shut it down!”
It was federal agents in New York City, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., who “tried to get the help of federal prosecutors to determine whether or what crimes occurred while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, most notably, because at that time, her family foundation solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department,” Just the News documented.
The timeline is from a Department of Justice lawyer assigned to the FBI by then FBI chief James Comey, who now is under congressional investigation himself for pushing the scandalous, and false, Russiagate conspiracy theory to hurt Trump.
The document was secured by top aides to Patel, along with corroborating internal emails, and was accessed by Just the News.
“Together, they make clear that both the DOJ and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe placed significant impediments in front of agents who believed they had evidence to justify a public integrity criminal case,” the report said.
In fact, the report noted, early in 2016 the DOJ said it would “not be supportive of an FBI investigation.”
McCabe’s own order, the report said, was that “no overt investigative steps” were allowed, and other roadblocks soon surfaced into the issue that the foundation did, in fact, get massive donations during that time period, donations that promptly plunged when Hillary Clinton’s attempt to gain control of the Oval Office failed.
“Patel’s discovery of the memo and related emails comes at a sensitive time as Attorney General Pam Bondi has approved the use of a strike force and a grand jury to investigate whether law enforcement and intelligence abuses over the last decade amounted to a criminal conspiracy to protect Democrats like Clinton and Joe Biden while inflicting harm on Trump and his followers,” the report explained.
The report said there was no explanation over Yates’ order to close it down, or the statement from New York federal prosecutors they would not “support” such an investigation.
The documents show that agents “were thwarted” from their investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s antics, “no matter where” they turned, the report said.
The report noted there was a meeting of multiple FBI and DOJ officials, not identified, and the talk was about opening an investigation. One official authorized three offices to begin looking but “to not take any investigative steps until the matter was discussed with DOJ.”
A report from special counsel John Durham later said one part of that investigation started because of the likelihood an industry was engaged with “a federal public official in a flow of benefits scheme, namely, large monetary contributions were made to a non-profit, under both direct and indirect control of the federal public official, in exchange for favorable government action and/or influence.”
Durham’s conclusion eventually was that all three of the branches were considering investigations on that basis, that foreign governments made, or offered, contributions to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for favors from Clinton.
However, McCabe’s instructions were that nothing happened without his approval, and the orders sent to agents that they were not allowed to look for confidential sources on the issue. The investigations eventually were killed.
Comey also later stepped in to help Hillary Clinton in another dangerous scandal, that of putting government secrets on an unsecure and private computer server in her home, when he called her “careless” but claimed “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue the charges.
Another special prosecutor later found Comey’s actions supporting Clinton were “insubordinate.”
The report charged, “The differences in how the Justice Department and FBI handled cases related to Clinton and Trump were stark — publicly exonerating Clinton for her mishandling of classified information when using a private email server as secretary of state and not even allowing the Clinton Foundation investigation to get off the ground, while launching a sprawling and baseless Russia collusion inquiry into the Trump campaign and the candidate (and then the president) himself.”
Bob Unruh