Former FBI Assistant Director Tom Fuentes revealed on Saturday that his sources at the FBI had told him of a possible link between emails uncovered in the Anthony Weiner investigation and the Bureau’s ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Now, another report published Sunday evening appears to provide additional information about the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation and how its leading to a feud between the FBI and top officials at the Justice Department.
“FBI Director James Comey’s surprise disclosure Friday, less than two weeks before the election, that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare tensions that have built for months inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate someone who could soon be elected president,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Nowhere is this tension between the FBI and DOJ reportedly more apparent than with the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock had all been working various angles of investigations into possible financial crimes and pay to play allegations at the Clinton Foundation.
The Clintons have always denied any allegations of wrongdoing at their family charity.
According to the Journal report, a meeting was held in February of this year where FBI officials met with DOJ officials to provide an update on the Clinton Foundation investigation. The meeting did not go well, but there are two different versions of why this happened, according to the report:
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 public integrity 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.
While DOJ officials did not formally shut down the investigation, some inside the FBI reportedly thought that was the intended message because the DOJ declined to authorize requests for subpoenas or even to allow formal witnesses interviews. Furthermore, a senior DOJ official is said to have called a top FBI in official in August 2016 to express his extreme displeasure with learning the Clinton Foundation probe was still underway.
The frustration of FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation then deepened in September 2016 when a request to review emails obtained during the Clinton email server investigation was denied by DOJ prosecutors. The agents were reportedly told the emails were off limits pursuant to the terms of immunity agreements handed out in the email server investigation.
However, the Journal says the discovery of the emails on the Weiner computer may now give those agents the opportunity to review at least some of the emails they’ve hoped to get their hands on after all.
[image via Mark Van Scyoc/shutterstock]