DOJ has been trying for months to shut down FBI probe of Clinton Foundation

Whatever could be motivating them to do such a thing?

American Politics, News | November 1, 2016

This sounds very much like an X-Files episode, except that I doubt the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Well Manicured Man, the Elder or even the aliens themselves are as corrupt as the Clintons. Whoever our real-life Mulder and Scully might be in this case (and it's surely a lot more than two agents), the task of looking into the Clinton Foundation's dirty dealings is getting one hell of a lot of resistance from the Justice Department, which wants the whole thing to stop immediately. I'll give you three guesses as to why, and the first two don't count. Excellent reporting here by Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal:

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.

Isn't this just classic in terms of how the government treats Clinton-related corruption? You don't have enough evidence! And we won't let you do anything that might allow you to get more evidence! Shut it down! No wonder Hillary wants to keep Loretta Lynch on as attorney general. The very presence of the Clintons causes the nation's system of justice not to work as it's designed to work. Things that would normally not be a big deal - like subpoenas and witness interviews - become a big deal, a subject of major controversy. Even James Comey's July announcement that Hillary was essentially guilty as sin but would not be charged is way outside the norm of how the FBI and its director normally operate. And this week you've got members of the press, who typically crave any information they can get, attacking Comey for providing information.

If you think it's hard for the FBI to do its job now, just wait until Hillary is actually president

As to the question of influencing the election, the FBI really can't win. If there's reason to believe a crime has been committed and you sit on your hands and do nothing, that's just as egregious an example of influencing an election - because you knew a candidate might be a criminal and you hid that information from the voters. The solution to situations like this, as we discussed yesterday, is to not nominate criminals for president. The Democratic Party chose not to go with that option, so here we are. If you think it's hard for the FBI to do its job now, just wait until Hillary is actually president, God forbid. We're always told the FBI operates with a degree of political independence. Say goodbye to that. Even if there are checks and balances in place to ensure politicians can't compromise the FBI, you know perfectly well that the Clintons will find ways to burn those checks and balances to the ground. And that's especially true when it comes to the Clinton Foundation, the full exposure of which represents far too great a danger for these people. And by the way, this is surely the number one reason the Clintons so fear a Trump presidency. A lot of other Republican presidents might have soft-pedaled any look into the Clinton Foundation for fear of upsetting the body politic or whatever. I'm pretty confident John Kasich and Jeb Bush would have believed it was "bad for our democracy" to put a former president and first lady in prison for any reason. I don't think Trump cares. That's the real reason they consider him so dangerous, regardless of what they say.

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