Before proceeding further, go read Cortney and Ed Morrissey's summaries of the latest sketchy developments surrounding the Clinton Foundation. In short, newly-released emails reveal more evidence of influence-peddling within Hillary Clinton's State Department vis-a-vis major donors to her family "slush fund." Senior officials at the foundation were in contact with top Hillary aides seeking favors and special connections on behalf of major-dollar contributors, including a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire who donated between one and five million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Secretary Clinton also went to bat for a foreign banker in her official capacity, eventually leading to quite a payday for her husband and their foundation. Coupled with additional serious improprieties, a chronic lack of required transparency, and sundry instances of apparent corruption, these new revelations help cement a wider pattern of grift and sleaze. Which brings us to this nugget buried deep within an online CNN report:
CNN: FBI wanted a Clinton Foundation investigation opened, but DOJ said no.
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 10, 2016
Excuse me? pic.twitter.com/rMF63RWhyv
Wait, what? First of all, this should be the headline, not an afterthought in the 20th paragraph of the story. Secondly, those last two sentences raise obvious questions: What prompted the FBI's request for a Clinton Foundation probe? And why would DOJ officials rebuff the FBI based on old information? Haven't we learned more and more information about the foundation and its seedy inner-workings over the past year, as the parallel email scandal has unfolded? I'm suddenly reminded of this exchange from last month's Comey hearings:
CHAFFETZ: Did you look at the Clinton Foundation?COMEY: I'm not going to comment on the existence or non-existence of any other investigations.
CHAFFETZ: Was the Clinton Foundation tied into this investigation?
COMEY: I'm not going to answer that.
Hmm. We need more answers on this, as soon as possible. By the way, the latest foundation-related reports linked above are all derived from emails produced by Hillary's top aides, but not her own correspondence. Those haven't been released, raising strenuous and legitimate hackles from Republicans:
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus is calling on the State Department to release recently found emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure before the November elections. “With growing evidence of pay-to-play relationships between Clinton’s State Department and her family foundation, the State Department owes it to the American people to release the thousands of work-related emails she failed to turn over before voters head to the polls,” Priebus said in a statement Wednesday. “If the State Department continues to withhold these emails, Hillary Clinton should demand they be released, or release them herself. Anything less than a full release of these public records before voting begins will only further prove that we have a rigged system that has one set of rules [for] political elites and another for everyone else.” ... The State Department has released thousands of emails from Clinton's private server as part of a court order. The former secretary deleted about 30,000 other messages that she said were personal, but the FBI recovered some additional work-related emails during its investigation of the server, and those have not been set for release. The FBI says it has found “several thousand” such messages, but the department has not committed to a schedule for their release.
Every single Democrat and journalist who has demanded the release of Donald Trump's tax returns should be clamoring for the State Department to makes these Clinton emails public immediately. Remember, she was required by law to maintain her official correspondence, all of which she ran through her improper and unsecure private server. She did not. Her team of lawyers unilaterally deleted tens of thousands of emails, claiming that none of them were work-related. The FBI determined that thousands of those deleted messages did pertain to her public duties, including a handful of classified emails. She's subsequently lied about these facts. Also bear in mind that the contents of thousands of additional emails that were successfully permanently destroyed may never be known -- except, perhaps, to the foreign regimes that hacked her bootleg system. Layer upon layer of misconduct here. It would be an outrage if voters aren't able to see what she's been hiding -- and lying about hiding. These public records must be made public. Now.
Parting thought: Between the non-stop email lies "haunting" her campaign, the Orlando terrorist's pro-Taliban father being seated behind her at a rally (he's endorsed her, citing national security reasons, forcing a delayed disavowal), and the latest stench emanating from the Clinton Foundation, it's be a pretty awful week for Hillary Clinton. She's riding a wave of positive polling taken since the DNC. Will any of this stuff put a dent in her lead by next week? As a reminder, this woman is ethically unfit to be president.