Thread: Clinton Foundation Investigation Roiling the FBI

Clinton Foundation Investigation Roiling the FBI

October 31, 2016


FILE - In this April 5, 2016 file photo, FBI Director James Comey speaks in Detroit. Comey hinted at an event in London
on Thursday, April 21, 2016, that the FBI paid more than $1 million to break into the locked iPhone used by one of the
San Bernardino attackers. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the various investigations by the FBI involving the Clintons -- including the Clinton Foundation -- have spawned serious disagreements at the bureau, with some agents believing the agency is dragging its feet and not looking hard enough for evidence of wrongdoing.

As it turns out, the Abedin email controversy is related to this internal spat over the Clinton Foundation, with the same agents who investigated Clinton's emails last summer now engaged in looking into the new evidence.

New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.

It isn’t unusual for field agents to favor a more aggressive approach than supervisors and prosecutors think is merited. But the internal debates about the Clinton Foundationshow the high stakes when such disagreements occur surrounding someone who is running for president.

Recall last week it was revealed that the same Mr. McCabe's wife was the recipient of a large donation for her campaign for state senator in Virginia from Governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton crony and former member of the Clinton Foundation board of directors.

The Wall Street Journal reported last weekthat Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 from the political-action committee of Virginia Gov.Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member.Mr. McAuliffe had supported Dr. McCabe in the hopes she and a handful of other Democrats might help win a majority in the state Senate. Dr. McCabe lost her race last November, and Democrats failed to win their majority.

A spokesman for the governor has said that “any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would help
pass his agenda is ridiculous.”

It's never "ridiculous" to speculate about corruption where the Clintons are concerned.

McCabe eventually headed up the Clinton email server investigation when he became deputy director of the FBI earlier this year.

But other Clinton-related investigations were under way within the FBI, and they have been the subject of internal debate for months, according to people familiar with the matter.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, according to people familiar with the matter.

Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public-corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said.

The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity.
Clinton Foundation officials have long denied any wrongdoing, saying it is a well-run charity that has done immense good.

The FBI field office in New York had done the most work on the Clinton Foundation case and received help from the FBI field office in Little Rock, the people familiar with the matter said.

In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well.
Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case.

“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter.

Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said.

Note that the career prosecutors didn't think the case was strong enough but resisted giving the FBI the authority to pursue the case more aggressively, which might have uncovered more substantial evidence of wrongdoing.

Did DoJ even want to know if the foundation was being used for corrupt purposes? It certainly tracks that way.

I don't doubt that there are some officials at Justice and the FBI who want to protect Hillary Clinton, just as there are some who wish to throw her in jail. This kind of partisan politics is destroying the DoJ, which should be a department independent of the executive branch -- above the political fray.

But under the last two AGs, politics has trumped all and justice has suffered because of that.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/10...ing-the-fbi/2/

LOL!!!! So it's not even about "her damn emails", it's about the CLINTON FOUNDATION pay to play scheme.

Hilarious!! GO GET 'EM FBI!!!

LOCK HER UP!!

LOCK HER UP!!

The FBI Agents Who Stood Up for Rule of Law Make Me Proud to be an American

October 31, 2016



One hears a lot of talk about America turning into a Third World kleptocracy. I've worked in a lot of Third World kleptocracies, back in the days when the Reagan Revolution was fresh and the Reaganauts thought we could export free markets and democracy to the rest of the world. We didn't, of course. But I had the opportunity to see first-hand what separates a banana republic from the land of the free and the home of the brave. It comes down to the grit of a few people willing to do their job come hell or high water--not look the other way, not accept the stuffed envelope or its equivalent in post-government employment, but to treat a job as a sacred trust given by the people.

Somewhere there are a handful of FBI agents who decided to do their jobs--to end the coverup of the Clinton private email server which was there to let Hillary turn high office into a cash cow. I don't know who they are or just how it happened, but some men and women told FBI Director James Comey that if he didn't step forward, they would--and they clearly had enough evidence to put Comey in a vise. We know this from Devlin Barrett's reporting at the Wall Street Journal.

As Barrett wrote:

The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.

The unsung heroes of the FBI put everything on the line. They knew that they risked their careers, perhaps even their pensions. Their downside is that their kids may go to community college instead of a private university, and they rent an apartment rather than buy a house. Those are the stakes for mid-level officials who go up against the system. But they did it, because they had their jobs to do. It was their job and no-one else's; if they didn't do it, it wouldn't get done, and they wouldn't stand for someone telling them not to do their job to protect the public.

"High Noon" comes to mind. The Western sheriff portrayed by Gary Cooper faced down an outlaw gang for no other reason than it was his job to do so. It was his last day on the job, and the townsfolk urged him to flee rather than fight. It's not an existential gesture out of Hemingway. He's scared and he hurts. He feels no affection for the cowardly locals. But he won't walk away from his job.

If you want to keep a republic, you have to sacrifice personal interest for the public good if you're called on to do so. Those who choose to enforce the law, or to fight fires, or to serve in the military know that it may be their job one day to put their lives on the line. But the same is true for every citizen in small ways. In Latin American kleptocracies, the fellow whose job it is to turn off your gas when you fail to pay your gas bill takes a bribe instead, and passes most of the bribe up the line to his superiors. The secretary in a government office takes a bribe to hand you a form that you have to fill out to ship wood from Michoacán to Mexico City, which you then take to the office next door with another bribe, and so forth. Everyone is on the take. The system corrupts everyone. If you want to be honest, you emigrate.

The rule of law rests on the moral equivalent of a thin red line. At any given moment the fate of a country hangs on the handful of its citizens who happen to take the incoming: the front-line troops, the Marines at Iwo Jima, the pilots at the Battle of Britain. Those whose job it is to uphold the law must do so even at personal risk. What distinguishes a great nation from a banana republic is its ability to find enough of those people so that when the moment comes, they will do their job. In a banana republic, no-one fights the system, with rare exceptions, and they almost always get killed, like Luis Donaldo Colosio in Mexico in 1994.

I have been waiting for a long time to hear a presidential contender stand up and tell the truth about corruption in Washington. Donald Trump's New Hampshire address did so last Friday afternoon. Trump is doing his job. His job is to come in with a big pump and drain the swamp, and he's doing it--and deserves the support of every American. But he couldn't do it without the brave men and women in the middle ranks of the FBI who stood their ground. I don't know their names. But they make me proud to be an American.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/10...inglepage=true

Former FBI Asst. Director: FBI Has 'Intensive, Ongoing' Investigation into the Clinton Foundation

October 30, 2016

A former FBI assistant director told CNN Saturday night that the FBI has for months been conducting an "intensive" investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The former G-man, Tom Fuentes, also contradicted CNN's reporting from earlier this year that said the FBI's attempts to open a public corruption case into the Clinton Foundation were quashed by the DOJ. CNN reported back in August that three field offices wanted to launch an investigation, but DOJ officials had pushed back against opening a case because "the request seemed more political than substantive." There were conflicting reports at the time, however, which said a joint FBI-U.S. Attorney probe was indeed underway.

Fuentes said, "The FBI has an intensive investigation, ongoing, into the Clinton Foundation." He added that "the reports that three divisions came in with a request to Washington to open cases, and that they were turned down by the Department of Justice -- that's not true."

"What was turned down was that they be the originating office," Fuentes explained. "Headquarters at the FBI made the determination that the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive, unified case, and be coordinated. So that investigation is ongoing and Huma Abedin, and her role in the foundation and possible allegations concerning the activities of the secretary of state, the nature of the foundation and possible pay to play -- that's still being looked at."

Fuentes continued, saying that "now you have her emails on a computer where the FBI already has a separate case going for Anthony Weiner's alleged activities with a minor girl -- so in a sense it's almost turned into a one-stop shopping for the FBI. They could have implications affecting three separate investigations on one computer."

Fuentes said that last week the team looking at Weiner's computers went to the team that worked on the Clinton email case and showed the emails to them.
"And that team said, 'this is really significant, we need to take this to the director, maybe we need to take another look at the email case,'" he explained.

According to Fuentes, Comey sent out the letter to the congressional leaders the very next day.

Fuentes seemed to want to stress the importance of the Clinton Foundation investigation: "Intermixed with all of this is still the ongoing foundation investigation

... so three separate cases," he said.

Fuentes told CNN that several "senior officials" in and out of the bureau had been apprising him of what was going on with the investigations.



https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/10...inglepage=true

Somewhere there are a handful of FBI agents who decided to do their jobs--to end the coverup of the Clinton private email server which was there to let Hillary turn high office into a cash cow. I don't know who they are or just how it happened, but some men and women told FBI Director James Comey that if he didn't step forward, they would--and they clearly had enough evidence to put Comey in a vise. We know this from Devlin Barrett's reporting at the Wall Street Journal.

AMERICA IS RISING!!

This is the United States,
And we are The Americans.
We not only decide what happens here,
We control what happens here. -- Judy

United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

AMERICA IS BACK!!!