The Usual Suspects: Disclosure On The Scuttled Clinton Foundation Investigation Reveals Familiar Names

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

As the Trump Administration finally releases the underlying documents related to prior scandals and investigations, the public has learned a great deal about the origins of the Russian collusion investigation and other subjects.

This week, another document was released explaining why the investigation into the Clinton Foundation seemed to go nowhere.

What is less surprising are the characters involved in shutting down the investigation.

It is, as Claude Rains would say, “the usual suspects” from former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates to former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

Many of us had written about the allegations of influence peddling by the Clintons.

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the Clintons raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign sources.

Clinton Foundation officials were shown to have intervened for donors at the State Department. Those funds were used not only for the Clinton Foundation programs but also for travel and support for the Clinton family members. (Tellingly, donations reportedly plummeted after Clinton left office).

What is striking is that officials who relentlessly pursued Trump and his associates on little evidence were reportedly opposed to aggressive efforts involving the Clintons.

I was one of the loudest critics of Sally Yates, who ordered the entire Justice Department not to assist Trump on immigration efforts after his inauguration. In my view, Yates’s conduct (just days before she was scheduled to leave the department) was a raw political move that shattered standards of professional conduct. It would also make her a heroine on the left and in the media.

Ultimately, Trump prevailed on the underlying claims of authority raised in the immigration orders before the Supreme Court.

In these documents, Yates is shown in an email shutting down the investigation into the Clintons. Despite findings of good cause for further investigation into these allegations of pay-to-play corruption, Yates (then-Deputy Attorney General) is quoted as saying, “Shut it down!”

FBI Director Kash Patel released a memo showing a timeline of the interference, including the message from Sally Yates, whom Trump fired as acting attorney general. McCabe, who is now a CNN contributor, is again shown intervening in a crushingly predictable way.

The declassified timeline revealed that as early as February 2016, the Justice Department “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation.” The 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 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.”

Special Counsel John Durham found that the FBI’s Little Rock and New York investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”

Nevertheless, the FBI  timeline stated that DOJ “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation” on February 1, 2016.

For those of us who closely followed these investigations and wrote about them, this is hardly surprising but still very valuable for historical purposes. The consistent efforts of figures like McCabe only magnify concerns over the role of key figures in pushing investigations of Trump while discouraging investigations of top Democrats.

Once again, the media is largely ignoring the disclosures. The same reporters who exhaustively pushed the false Russian collusion claims have little interest in these countervailing disclosures. As with the conduct of Yates and McCabe, that is also an all-too-familiar pattern.