With the approach of Labor Day and the start of the political season, Hillary pulled ahead of Donald Trump by several points in most election polls. FiveThirtyEight, a website that uses statistical analysis to predict the outcome in politics and sports, gave Hillary a 78.8 percent chance of winning the election. Many political observers concluded that Trump had inflicted severe wounds on himself by, among other things, insulting a Gold Star family, accusing Hillary and Obama of “founding” ISIS, and urging “Second Amendment people” to go after Hillary (which was interpreted by the mainstream media as encouraging assassination).
But then something totally unexpected happened: the Associated Press ran a bombshell story that was a game changer.
It reported that “more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state gave money—either personally or through companies or groups—to the Clinton Foundation.” What’s more, “at least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs.”
There were several reasons that the AP story had the potential to alter the trajectory of the presidential campaign, making it much more of a horse race.
First, although many of the AP’s reporters are card-carrying members of the liberal mainstream media, the wire service has the reputation of striving for balance and fairness in its political coverage. Unlike the New York Times, it is not a house organ for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, and therefore its Clinton Foundation investigation carried a lot of weight and credibility.
Second, until the AP story, remarkably enough FBI Director James Comey had been unaware of the extent of Hillary’s meetings with non-government individuals; he did not know, for instance, that the eighty-five people mentioned in the AP story had contributed $156 million to the Clinton Foundation.
And third, the AP story lit a fire under the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Hillary’s pay-to-play relationship with the foundation.
“As soon as he got wind of the AP story, Comey called a meeting of his top deputies,” said a retired Justice Department official with unimpeachable sources inside the FBI. “I talked to two men who were at the meeting, and they said that Comey was in high dudgeon, because a wire service had stolen a march on the FBI. He paced the floor as he instructed his deputies to release the thirty-page investigative report on Hillary’s emails that he sent to the Justice Department as well as the twelve-page copy of the notes taken during Hillary’s FBI interview. And he ordered his deputies to redouble their efforts to uncover the link between Hillary and donors to her family foundation.
“In particular,” this source continued, “the FBI is trying to determine if Hillary had a separate and secret schedule of meetings with foreign governments and private industry figures who were making sizable contributions to the foundation. The question wasn’t whether donors sought access to the secretary of state; people who donate money are always given special access to political figures. That’s always been part of our political system and, though it might sound corrupt, it isn’t considered criminal.
“The real question was whether foundation donors were given favors by Hillary that helped put money in their pockets. That kind of quid pro quo is illegal. And under Comey’s prodding, FBI agents started turning up testimony that Hillary offered those quid pro quos on numerous occasions.”
To kick the FBI’s investigation of the foundation into high gear, Comey ordered the release to Congress of nearly 15,000 work-related emails that Hillary had failed to turn over to the State Department. The 14,900 deleted emails—including 30 related to Benghazi—had been forensically recovered from Hillary’s server and other sources. Among other things, the new emails revealed:
- Doug Band, one of Bill Clinton’s closest associates who helped create the Clinton Foundation, wrote to Huma Abedin that Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa of Bahrain, who had donated $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, was seeking a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton. “Asking to see her,” Band wrote Abedin on behalf of the crown prince. “Good friend of ours.” A couple of days later, Abedin informed Band that the crown prince was scheduled to see Hillary. “If u see him let him know,” she emailed. “We have reached out thru official channels.”
- Band asked Abedin to help out a big foundation donor who was trying to secure a visa for a British soccer player facing criminal charges.
- Another Bill Clinton aide, Ben Schwerin, emailed Abedin and Band asking for a favor for U2’s Bono, who had contributed to the Clinton Global Initiative. “Bono wants to do linkup with the international space station on every show during his tour this year,” Schwerin wrote Abedin and Band.
- Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at the State Department, was so intimately involved in Clinton Foundation business that she and Laura Graham, the foundation’s chief operating officer, exchanged 148 telephone messages between 2010 and 2012.
“As I watch Hillary Clinton wish away the fallout of the Clinton Foundation’s unseemly ties with the State Department during her tenure as secretary of state, I can’t help but think that her self-inflicted wound just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds,” wrote Elise Jordan, an NBC News/MSNBC political analyst who previously worked for the Department of State and the National Security Council. “Every day that she fails to seriously address the rotten consequences of her poor judgment, Clinton further erodes the already lacking public trust in her. . . . The fact that Clinton has not given a press conference in 264 days is far more damaging than the seeming corruption itself. If she didn’t do anything wrong, why won’t she defend herself?”
Many Republicans in Congress believed they knew the answer to that question: Hillary couldn’t defend herself because she had lied through her teeth. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, demanded Hillary be charged with perjury for lying to the FBI and lying under oath to Congress.
“The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote in a letter to Channing Phillips, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Comey had not recommended an indictment on the email scandal. But the investigation continued on the Clinton Foundation and the possible corrupt dealings of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
There were reports in the media that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had squelched Comey’s investigation of the foundation and rebuffed the GOP’s call for a criminal inquiry into Hillary’s testimony to Congress. Those reports were wrong. However, in the wake of Comey’s decision not to recommend an indictment on the email server scandal, Lynch made it clear to Comey that if he now decided to recommend an indictment on charges of public corruption, the Justice Department wouldn’t act until well after the November election.
So where does that leave James Comey and his investigation into the Clinton Foundation corruption?
Bill Clinton, still the smartest political animal around, thought he had the answer.
“Comey’s twelve years older [than he was when he threatened to resign under [President Bush] and he’s less brash,” Bill said, according to the recollection of one of his advisers who was interviewed for this book. “He’s not dealing with the legality of a warrantless wiretap program or the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. He’s dealing with the likely first woman president of the United States. His actions will be recorded in history books. Does he want to be remembered for all time as the guy who threw the country into a constitutional crisis? I don’t think so. I’m betting that whatever he does will be measured and legalistic.”
Bill and his adviser thought that Comey would most likely go around Loretta Lynch and take his case to Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara’s jurisdiction extended from the tip of Manhattan north to Westchester County, where Hillary has her home in Chappaqua.
“Bharara runs one of the largest and most respected offices of federal prosecutors in the country,” wrote Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker. “Under his leadership, the office has charged dozens of Wall Street figures with insider trading, and has upended the politics of New York State, by convicting the leaders of both houses of the state legislature. . . . [Bharara] brought a media-friendly approach to what has historically been a closed and guarded institution. In professional background, Bharara resembles his predecessors; in style, he’s very different. His personality reflects his dual life in New York’s political and legal firmament. A longtime prosecutor, he sometimes acts like a budding pol; his rhetoric leans more toward the wisecrack than toward the jeremiad. He expresses himself in the orderly paragraphs of a former high-school debater, but with deft comic timing and a gift for shtick.”
Comey and Bharara were close friends. Bharara visited Comey when he was on business in Washington, and Comey visited him in New York. Bharara frequently called on the FBI for help with his investigations of Wall Street white-collar crimes. And Comey had ordered the FBI field office in New York to work closely with Bharara on his investigations of alleged corruption in the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio. According to informed sources, Bharara and Comey had discussed the Hillary email case on several occasions. It seems likely that they must also have discussed the possibility of Hillary being indicted on charges of public corruption.
If Bharara agreed to prosecute the Hillary case, he would bring it to Loretta A. Preska, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She would assign the case to one of the Southern District’s forty-four judges, who in turn would then empanel a grand jury either in Manhattan or in White Plains, the county seat and commercial hub of Westchester County. The jury would decide whether the case against Hillary should go to trial.
“Of course, we’d do everything in our legal power to prevent the case from going to trial in the first place,” said Bill Clinton’s adviser. “We’d put together a Murderers’ Row of lawyers and have them file a blizzard of motions to stop the case from going forward. But if it went to trial anyway, we’d try to move the case to Manhattan, where the jury pool is more heavily weighted with pro-Hillary African Americans than it is in White Plains.
“We’d file motions to dismiss prejudicial evidence, and we’d tie the case up in knots and stretch it out for as long as possible,” he continued. “If the trial went badly, we’d take it to a federal court of appeals, and if that didn’t work, we’d go all the way to the Supreme Court, which would likely be frozen in a four-to-four tie and send it back to the court of appeals.
“All of this would take months and months. During that time, Hillary would maintain her innocence and fight it out in court and in the court of public opinion.
“Bill agrees. He doesn’t believe that voters will take this case seriously. He insists there’s virtually no chance that [even now] Hillary will be indicted. But even if she is indicted, she has made it perfectly clear that she has no intention of dropping out of the presidential race. She intends to soldier on, under indictment or not, just the way Bill did when he was impeached. No matter what happens, Hillary is in this to the end.”