Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released a 12-page FBI document that contained enough information for the bureau to open a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
Describing his long investigation into the Clinton Foundation, Grassley wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel that in August 2016, he wrote to the Department of Justice (DOJ) asking it to “explain its reported decision to drop reported inquiries into Clinton Foundation and State Department interactions; specifically, allegations that the State Department, during Secretary Clinton’s tenure, took favorable actions for Clinton Foundation donors.”
Some of the troubling details of the letter pertain to Grassley’s concern about the Clinton Foundation’s links to Uranium One, a company acquired by a subsidiary of the Russian energy company Rosatom. “My work noted that there were also concerns related to potential conflicts of interest between the State Department and the transacting parties specifically, that the Chairman of Uranium One at the time, Ian Telfer, had made donations to the Clinton Foundation in the millions of dollars while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State,” Grassley wrote.
Other foreign donor influences described by Grassley involve activities in Bangladesh, Colombia, and a Russian deal made with Boeing. After reaching a more than $3 billion deal with Russia, Boeing pledged to donate $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton’s brother also obtained a “rare ‘gold exception permit’ (the first issued in 50 years)…during the same time period in which ‘billions of U.S. tax dollars had been spent in Haiti, following the Haitian earthquake in 2010,'” Grassley noted.
Details surrounding what the FBI did to investigate the matter are unknown.
Last year, Grassley revealed that federal investigators aimed to obstruct the probe into the Clinton Foundation during the Obama administration. Emails obtained by his office found that FBI agents were prohibited from “subpoena[ing] additional records related to the Foundation, the Clintons” in 2016, 111 days before the election,” he wrote in a letter to former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Patel. Emails further indicated that the FBI “[did] not want to create any impression we are investigating the Clinton Foundation or the Clintons.”
Other documents suggest that prosecutors in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas “recommended in July 2019 that a referral be made to the DOJ OIG regarding the ‘manner in which the investigation had been conducted,’ and that they did what they could do ‘about the interference by DOJ and FBI leadership at the time with the FBI’s [Clinton Foundation] investigation.’”
