Investigative journalist and editor of Just the News, John Solomon, has released a newly declassified 2017 memo detailing the “extensive political obstruction” FBI agents investigating alleged Clinton Foundation corruption encountered from top officials in the Obama administration’s Justice Department and FBI.
The timeline features a 2016 email in which then–Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told FBI agents to “Shut it down!”
Solomon obtained the memo from FBI Director Kash Patel, who had been tipped off by a whistleblower on the memo’s existence and location. Solomon noted that Patel uncovered additional related documents, which he plans to turn over to Congress.
During the 2016 election cycle, FBI agents in New York City, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., were investigating allegations that donors to the Clinton Foundation made considerable contributions in return for “political favors.”
The predicate for the probe was Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Schweizer reported that during Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation was taking in massive donations from “foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department.”
Solomon reported that the FBI agents approached four U.S. Attorneys’ offices for assistance; three rejected the request outright, effectively saying, ‘You’re on your own.’ He wrote that the timeline and the corroborating internal emails “make clear that both the DOJ and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe placed significant impediments in front of agents who believed they had evidence to justify a public integrity criminal case.”
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 can be viewed at this link: Declassified Timeline on Clinton Foundation Investigation
According to Solomon:
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.”Once the investigation had essentially been delayed for a year and dragged past the November 2016 election, the 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.”
Solomon cites a June 2018 Justice Department inspector general report, which discussed McCabe’s role in both the Midyear [Clinton emails] investigation and the Clinton Foundation investigation, and his curious recusal from them on November 1, 2016. The report “found that McCabe did not fully comply with this recusal in a few instances related to the Clinton Foundation investigation.”
In other words, he continued to meddle. McCabe, you will recall, was ultimately fired from the FBI for what officials described as his “lack of candor.”
According to the memo, FBI agents encountered repeated obstruction from DOJ officials.
Solomon highlighted a meeting “between multiple FBI agents and DOJ officials whose names are redacted, including staff from the Criminal Investigative Division and the Office of General Counsel” at the time the investigation into the Clinton Foundation was opened.
An unnamed official whose identity was redacted “authorized all three field offices to open investigations but to not take any investigative steps until the matter was discussed with DOJ.” The FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division “advised the search/access parameters for their investigation were limited in scope” and that the Criminal Investigative Division “would not be able to share” certain redacted information “with the CF investigative team.”
This makes clear the extent to which Obama administration officials sought to maintain tight control over all facets of the investigation.
Solomon cites the May 2023 Durham report, which said 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.” But, Solomon reports, “Despite that evidence, the FBI timeline stated that DOJ ‘indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation’ on February 1, 2016.”
The Durham report said that during a late February 2016 meeting, “McCabe initially directed the field offices to close their cases, but following objections, agreed to reconsider the final disposition of the cases.”
Paul Abbate, then the assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as “negative,” “annoyed,” and “angry” about the Clinton Foundation cases, with McCabe saying that “they [the DOJ] say there’s nothing here” and with McCabe asking “why are we even doing this?”
Following then-FBI Director James Comey’s egregious July 5, 2016, exoneration of Hillary Clinton in the email probe, the memo said the FBI field offices in Little Rock and Washington were “directed to close their investigations” into the Clinton Foundation. The New York office “was advised no overt investigative action was to take place unless McCabe authorized it.”
Summing up the new information, Solomon wrote:
Kid gloves vs. brass knuckles: Newly-declassified timeline shows how the investigation of the Clinton Foundation was hamstrung by [the] FBI and DOJ while baseless Russia collusion marched forward in both agencies against Donald Trump.
On Wednesday evening, Solomon interviewed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who, along with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), spent years trying to obtain records from a recalcitrant DOJ and FBI. He expressed frustration that, due to the expired statutes of limitations, the “deep state partisan actors complicit” in these frauds on the American people are not likely to be held accountable.
He mentioned the Hillary Clinton-led State Department’s approval of the sale of the Canadian uranium mining company, Uranium One, which had assets in the U.S., to the Russian energy company Rosatom. This deal gave Russia control over approximately 20% of U.S. uranium production.
According to a Congressional report, the deal was considered controversial because Rosatom investors had “reportedly donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.” Additionally, President Bill Clinton “received a $500,000 speaking fee in Russia and reportedly met with Vladimir Putin around the time of the deal.”
Regarding the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, or perhaps better called the non-investigation of the Clinton Foundation, Johnson said, “You’ve got Sally Yates saying ‘shut it down’ while they are ramping up the completely false Russian hoax” against President Donald Trump.
The best we can hope for is exposure, he lamented.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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