DOJ again looking into Clinton's email server use, while FBI probes Clinton Foundation
Hillary Clinton/Shutterstock.com.
The Justice Department is once again looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and the FBI says a probe into the Clinton Foundation has been revived and ongoing for months.
The Daily Beast and Washington Examiner have reports about the latest email server investigation, while the Washington Post and CNN have stories about the Clinton Foundation after The Hill was first with the news.
The probe about Clinton’s server use will focus on the amount of classified information; who put the information into an unclassified environment; and how and which investigators knew about it and when, the publication writes, citing an unnamed “ally of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”
President Donald Trump has demanded repeatedly that the Justice Department investigate Clinton for using the private server, and has called for former Clinton aide Huma Abedin to be jailed.
The State Department last week released emails indicating that classified material was on a computer owned by Abedin’s former husband, Anthony Weiner, who is serving a 21-month prison sentence for sexting a teenage girl.
A former Justice Department official told the Daily Beast that leaders face challenges in conducting a probe consistent with department approaches, and avoiding the appearance that they are trying “to put Huma in jail.”
The emails discovered on Weiner’s laptop were among thousands released by the State Department recently in response to a lawsuit by the conservative activist organization Judicial Watch, Politico reported
The Daily Beast noted that the new investigation began before those emails were released. Still, the renewed investigation into Clinton’s email servers drew praise from Tom Fitton, head of Judicial Watch.
“It’s certainly a positive development,” Fitton said. “It’s part of what we’ve been demanding.”
But a former DOJ spokesman sees it as the result of undue influence on the agency.
“The president’s ongoing campaign to tear down the wall between the Justice Department and the White House seems to be working,” says Matt Miller, who worked under former attorney general Eric Holder.
In July 2016, FBI director James Comey said “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton over the emails, though she and her staff were “extremely careless” in handling the data.
Meanwhile, an investigation into the Clinton Foundation is to see if donations are linked to acts by Clinton when she served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, FBI agents in Little Rock, Arkansas, told the Post.
CNN, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reports that possible misuse of tax-exempt funds is also being looked at.
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, told the Post that the investigation is a sham.
“This is a philanthropy that does life-changing work, which Republicans have tried to turn into a political football,” he said. “It began with a long-debunked project spearheaded by (former Trump adviser) Steve Bannon during the presidential campaign. It continues with Jeff Sessions doing Trump’s bidding by heeding his calls to meddle with a department that is supposed to function independently.
“The goal is to distract from the indictments, guilty pleas, and accusations of treason from Trump’s own people at the expense of our justice system’s integrity. It’s disgraceful, and should be concerning to all Americans.”
