The Clinton Foundation — and not Donald Trump — might well turn out to be Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem.
According to a report by The Daily Caller, the Clinton Foundation is now the subject of a joint investigation being carried out by the FBI and Preet Bharara, a New York-based U.S. attorney known for his penchant of taking down prominent politicians, hedge funds and Wall Street bankers.
One of the major ways in which the current investigation is different from other probes involving the FBI is that it will utilize the prosecutorial support coming from various U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, also meaning that the probe will be centered in New York, which is where the headquarters of the Clinton Foundation is located. This is a major departure from other centralized FBI investigations which are based in Washington D.C.
A senior law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told The Daily Caller that the involvement of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York “would be seen by agents as a positive development as prosecutors there are generally thought to be more aggressive than the career lawyers within the DOJ.”
The lack of aggressiveness has been one of the overarching criticisms of the now-closed FBI investigation on Hillary Clinton’s private server, which, although pursued vigorously by the agency, failed to find the Democratic nominee culpable of knowingly violating any federal protocols. It was widely believed in conservative circles — and even in some liberal ones — that the real reason that the FBI failed to convict Hillary was because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had already struck a deal with the Clintons to continue in her position if Hillary Clinton is elected the next President of the United States.
A range of accusations against the Clinton Foundation could derail Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the next President of the United States. [Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
“The Civil Frauds Unit has collected close to $500 million in settlements since its inception, including multi-million dollar settlements with Deutsche Bank and CitiMortgage for faulty lending practices and other fraudulent conduct.”
Moreover, his prosecutorial aggressiveness has led to the convictions of some major politicians, including former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who was “convicted of accepting $4 million in exchange for helping a cancer researcher and two real estate developers.”
New York Republican Majority Leader Dean Skelos was also sent to prison for five years after Bharara secured his conviction.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is known for his prosecutorial aggressiveness which has led to the convictions of major politicians, hedge funds and Wall Street insiders. [Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]
Many financial experts investigating the Clinton Foundation for fraud have put forward damning evidence against its operations, with whistle-blower Chales Ortel having previously claimed that it is the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted.”
In a report the Inquisitr published earlier this year, the Clinton Foundation was shown to have ties with many businessmen and politicians overseas who were implicated in the Panama Papers, including the Chagoury family and Frank Giustra.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer told Real Clear Politics as early as this week that the Clinton Foundation was a front of “Clinton Inc.” during her time as the Secretary of State.
“They had $50 million in travel expenses, and this is supposed to be a charity. It was not a charity. It was a sort of headquarters of Clinton Inc., and the fact that they did not draw a strict line between State Department and the foundation is, to me, astonishing not because it’s quite politically amoral, but because it is so stupid. It’s so easy to discover and, in the end, so distasteful that if you know you’re going to run for the presidency, which I assume she did, then it makes no sense. But they did it.”
The allegations against the Clinton Foundation are serious and wholly worthy of a non-partisan investigation into its operations. Only time will tell what the FBI-U.S. Attorney joint investigation will lead to, but it could definitely go a long way in derailing Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the next President of the United States.
[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]