A top Republican senator has provided Just the News a timeline written by FBI investigators laying out the repeated political obstruction those agents faced from their own bosses and the Justice Department during the 2016 election and beyond as they probed whether Hillary Clinton engaged in a pay-to-play corruption scheme involving her family foundation.
“Field agents were frustrated. But HQ would not let it go forward,” the newly-released and lengthy investigative timeline reveals. “We were trying to explore the [Clinton] Foundation, and we were told ‘NO’ by FBI HQ.”
Not the first timeline showing interference
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley made therecords produced to him by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi available to Just the News this weekend. Grassley’s office said the senator’s request for these records was prompted by whistleblowers who first brought the issue to his attention.
This follows Patel unearthing a shorter timeline, written in 2017, which also chronicled the extensive stonewalling that bureau investigators in three cities faced from the Obama-era DOJ and FBI during the 2016 election.
FBI agents 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.
"Shut it down!" then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates is quoted as demanding in the shorter timeline of the politicized barriers that agents in New York City, Little Rock, Ark., and Washington D.C. reported.
The shorter timeline — written by a DOJ lawyer assigned to the FBI under former bureau Director James Comey — was secured by top aides to Patel and was obtained by Just the News earlier this year. The newly-released and longer timeline was handed over to Grassley’s office by the FBI along with a host of corroborating internal emails and was recently provided to Just the News.
The final entry in the shorter timeline came in August 2017. The longer timeline continued to lay out the slow-walking and interference by the FBI up through early 2020.
You can read the new and lengthier timeline and newly-public internal records here:
Clinton Foundation - Investigative Timeline
Altogether, the evidence makes clear that the DOJ, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and other officials within the FBI placed hurdles in front of agents who believed they had evidence to justify a public integrity criminal case.
Grassley: DOJ can't pick "winners and losers"
“The mainstream media smeared any investigation into Hillary Clinton as unfounded nonsense, but in reality, line agents and federal prosecutors seeking to follow up on legitimate leads were sidelined by partisan leadership looking to save Clinton’s reputation. That’s a night-and-day departure from how the Biden Justice Department handled the Arctic Frost investigation against President Trump,” Grassley told Just the News. “For too long, our Justice Department has chosen winners and losers instead of enforcing the law without regard to power, party or privilege. That must never happen again. I thank Attorney General Bondi and Director Patel for turning over these records, so the American people finally know how their Justice Department failed in the Clinton investigations.”
The Clinton Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Agents struggled for years to investigate Clinton Foundation
The longer timeline indicated that questions about the Clinton Foundation’s potential criminality were raised as early as April 2010, when there was a “consensually-monitored call between [Redacted] Sant Singh Chatwal” during which there was a “description of conversations with foreign donors (Amar Singh, Lakshmi Mittal, Deepak Chopra, Praful Patel, Subhash Chandra) about giving to HRC.”
The lengthier timeline noted that there was an investigation by the FBI’s New York Field Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York “regarding campaign finance violations” which “included use of CHS [confidential human sources], consensual recordings, and Title Ill intercepts.” The timeline’s notes pointed out that Chatwal was a “Democratic fundraiser. Long-time friend of the Clintons. [Clinton] Foundation donor and Board Member.”
Chatwal, an Indian-American businessman and wealthy hotelier, was a close Clinton ally. The Justice Department announced in April 2014 that Chatwal had “pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Federal Election Campaign Act by making more than $180,000 in federal campaign donations to three candidates through straw donors who were reimbursed, and to witness tampering.” He received only probation.
Chatwal did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through his hotel.
The longer timeline states that, according to Martin Coffey, the now-former assistant U.S. attorney for EDNY, “case agents sought to expand investigation to include CF [Clinton Foundation], but FBI-HQ would not allow.”
The longer timeline also stated that, in July 2015, a redacted person or entity “files Suspicious Activity Report regarding Clinton Foundation and related entities, specifically foreign transactions from 6/10/11 to 5/10/15” in response to “negative news reports."
The lengthier timeline also stated that, in July or August 2015, then-Washington Field Office special supervisory agent Timothy Thibault “has brief discussion with USAO-DC Criminal Chief John Malis regarding allegations raised in Clinton Cash” and that Thibault was allegedly “attempting to predicate an investigation based on the allegations.” The timeline said “Malis reportedly expressed interest in the matter and requested they meet to review supporting information sometime in the future” but “no meeting took place.”
It was later revealed that Thibault, whom Republicans argue showed extreme anti-Trump bias, demonstrated a willingness to target Trump early in his first term, attempted to slow walk or block the FBI’s investigation into Hunter Biden, and in April 2022 helped spark the investigation dubbed "Arctic Frost" — later carried on by special counsel Jack Smith — which led to criminal charges against Trump related to the Capitol riot.
McCabe stops the Clinton Foundation investigation from moving forward in 2016
The shorter timeline revealed that as early as February 2016, the Justice Department “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation.” The shorter timeline also shows that, in mid-February 2016, McCabe ordered that “no overt investigative steps” were allowed to be taken in the Clinton Foundation investigation “without his approval” — a command he allegedly repeated numerous times over the coming months.
The roadblocks just kept coming, both timelines show, to the great frustration of the agents and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Little Rock, which had gathered enough information to move on a fully predicated criminal investigation.
The shorter timeline detailed how Yates ordered one of the federal prosecutors to “shut it down” likely in the March 2016 timeframe. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and Eastern District of New York (EDNY) purportedly said in August 2016 that they “would not support the investigation” into the Clinton Foundation, according to the timeline, and that “no explanation was given.”
Yates did not immediately respond to a request sent to her via her law firm email, and McCabe did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through George Mason University.
Once the investigation had essentially been delayed for a year and dragged past the November 2016 election, the shorter timeline shows that DOJ officials under Trump then began to raise their “concerns regarding the statute of limitations” around the investigation, with one still unnamed official saying that they “wanted to close this chapter and move forward.”
McCabe was the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, but he soon ascended to Deputy Director of the FBI under Comey, where the Justice Department's Inspector General said he “had an active role in the supervision of the Midyear [Clinton emails] investigation, and oversight of the Clinton Foundation investigation, until he recused himself from these investigations on November 1, 2016” — just days before the election. By that time, most political fallout against Hillary Clinton from the FBI's probes had been neutralized.
Inspector General Horowitz noted that his investigation “found that McCabe did not fully comply with this recusal in a few instances related to the Clinton Foundation investigation.”
No matter where agents turned to get support to investigate Clinton's alleged corruption, they were thwarted, both timelines show.
Three offices investigate, and three get sqaushed
The shorter timeline stated that, in July or August 2015, an FBI supervisory special agent at the Washington Field Office “had a brief discussion” with a member of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia “regarding the Clinton Foundation allegations” which had been focused on by the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer. At the time, an investigator whose name remains redacted “was in the process of attempting to predicate an investigation based on the allegations.”
The longer timeline revealed that — on January 21, 2016 — then-FBI Executive Assistant Director Randall Coleman held a meeting “to discuss the opening of the Clinton Foundation investigation” and that “Coleman authorized all three field offices to open investigations but to not take any investigative steps until the matter was discussed with DOJ.”
Posts
