Category Archives: Hillary Clinton email

Foreign Money Fundraisers to Obama Clinton DoJ Probe

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$4000 bar tabs, meetings, bundling, foreign access, access, White House parties and advisory groups, it is all how the Obama elites roll.

Hat tip to FP and Bill Allison:

Elite Fundraiser for Obama and Clinton Linked to Justice Department Probe
n FP investigation shows that Imaad Zuberi, who has bundled hundreds of thousands of dollars for leading Democrats, failed to disclose the extent of his ties to a foreign government.

FPMagazine:

Imaad Zuberi, age 45, is a private equity fund manager, venture capitalist, and an elite political fundraiser. He was among the top tier of bundlers for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, meaning he delivered $500,000 or more in contributions. He’s already among Clinton’s “Hillblazers,” bundling $100,000 for her presidential campaign in its first months.

Among the perks of delivering that much money to candidates is access to them, and advertising that access caught the eye of those who wanted some of it for themselves.

Bundlers

The Sri Lankan government, long under fire for official corruption and at a low point in its relations with Washington, did just that. Over a five-month period in 2014, it paid Zuberi $4.5 million directly — plus another $2 million to a company he co-owns — for consulting services which included influencing the U.S. government, according to documents obtained by Foreign Policy. Zuberi’s windfall was not disclosed to the Justice Department, as required under federal law, and the lobbying and public relations firms hired through his company to influence the U.S. government on Sri Lanka’s behalf have all received DOJ subpoenas, according to a senior government official. Justice is seeking public assets allegedly stolen from Sri Lanka. None of the firms is a target of the investigation, which is focused on members of the family of the country’s former president and has not been previously reported.

According to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, paid representatives of foreign governments — even if they outsource the actual lobbying to other organizations — must disclose those relationships to Justice “within ten days” of acquiring a foreign client, according to the statute. WR Group, the company that held the contract with Sri Lanka, never registered with the Justice Department. Zuberi, who billed the government on May 5, 2014, for his services and received his first payment of $3.5 million from Sri Lanka on May 9, 2014, didn’t register as a consultant until Aug. 14 of that year, well beyond the 10-day deadline. Violating the act carries maximum penalties of a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

“[W]e are not a lobbying firm, law firm, nor PR firm, therefore we do not engage in these activities because these are not our core competencies,” Zuberi wrote in response to detailed questions from FP. “I registered not as a lobbyist but as a consultant because that was the extent of my involvement.”

Zuberi’s Sri Lankan payments and the investigation they’ve spawned could raise troubling questions for Clinton’s candidacy. Not only is he a major fundraiser for her campaign, but he also donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which has already come under fire for accepting money from donors — many of them foreign — with interests before the U.S. government while she was secretary of state.

It’s another indication that when it comes to chasing donations for their political campaigns, the Clintons aren’t too careful about how they get the checks. In addition to the 1996 fundraising scandals of President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign that included foreign contributions — illegal under U.S. law — Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign benefited from two fundraisers who ended up being convicted of violating election law. Both Sant Singh Chatwal, a New York hotelier, and Norman Hsu, whose investment fund turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, used “straw donors,” allowing them to contribute amounts far greater than the maximum contribution for an individual.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment, and the Clinton Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Zuberi “typifies how elite influencers operate today,” said Janine Wedel, a George Mason University professor who studies governance and corruption through the lens of social anthropology. “He plays overlapping roles, builds up his public image, and uses it to help others launder theirs.”

In May 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Sri Lanka to pledge U.S. support for the administration of President Maithripala Sirisena, who came to power this past January, unseating former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose government is alleged to have stolen as much as $10 billion over the decade he was in power. In prepared remarks, Kerry promised assistance from U.S. investigators and prosecutors to find money transferred to the United States. According to a government official familiar with the case, the U.S. team sent to Sri Lanka noted the payments to Zuberi and WR Group; the subpoenas to the lobbying firms are part of the effort to trace money misappropriated by the Rajapaksa regime.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan authorities are conducting their own crackdown on corruption. The official who directed the U.S. lobbying campaign, Sajin de Vass Gunawardena, was arrested May 11, 2015, on unrelated charges of misusing state assets. Two law enforcement agencies there are examining a network of 28 companies for stealing state assets and money laundering, according to J.C. Weliamuna, a Sri Lankan attorney and anti-corruption activist who has led official investigations into that country’s public corruption.

This story is the result of dozens of interviews with government officials in Sri Lanka and the United States, lobbyists, campaign officials, and an analysis of documents filed with the Justice Department under FARA and from multiple agencies in Sri Lanka. FP also mined social media sites and analyzed campaign finance and lobbying data. Additionally, the reporting relied on the assistance of Namini Wijedasa, a journalist from the Sri Lanka Sunday Times, who secured documents from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.

***

Even in the era following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that opened the door to million-dollar contributions to super PACs, bundlers like Zuberi remain critical to politicians. Under federal election law, candidates must still raise money for their campaigns from individuals in amounts of no more than $2,700. Bundlers induce members of their social and professional circles to write those $2,700 checks, turning them over to campaigns in “bundles” of anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 or more. By July 1, 2012, Zuberi had bundled $685,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign, according to an internal Democratic National Committee document. And in the first months of the 2016 presidential contest, Zuberi was among the 125 bundlers who’d already passed the $100,000 mark for Clinton’s campaign in its first three months.

Zuberi was born in Albany, New York; his father was Pakistani, and his mother is Indian. He studied finance and business economics as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, then took a job with Transamerica in 1996. He stayed with the insurance and investment firm holding company after it was acquired by the Dutch conglomerate Aegon in 1999. Zuberi invested in insurance firms in Asia and the Middle East, and earned an MBA from Stanford University in 2006. He also kept up with the Pakistani community in Los Angeles, his home base, and as early as 2004 was raising money from them for John Kerry’s presidential campaign that year, to which he made his first contribution, a modest $1,000 donation.

“When he likes someone, he likes them,” said Waqar Khan, the founder and chairman of the Pakistan American Chamber of Commerce, who first met Zuberi during his 2004 fundraising forays into the Los Angeles Pakistani community.

Warm and expansive, Zuberi’s conversation ricochets from references to family — he’s married and has a 3-month-old son — to high-level analysis of the finances of companies like Uber, to the names of his powerful friends, including sitting members of Congress and other movers and shakers in the world of politics. But these displays are reserved for those he’s courting. Khan, who wasn’t active in politics in 2004, was a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Zuberi kept his distance: “He was close to me when he needed my services.”

That’s because in January 2007, Zuberi joined the fledgling Obama presidential campaign, getting in on the ground floor of a phenomenal fundraising operation that was the first to forgo federal matching funds in a general election since Richard Nixon’s 1972 effort.

Though he personally raised less than $50,000 in the 2008 campaign, Zuberi ranked among the top 100 suppliers of political contributions during Obama’s 2012 reelection effort. That group’s members also included studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, fashion editor Anna Wintour, and Chicago Cubs co-owner Laura Ricketts. Zuberi became a big donor in his own right, contributing $106,000 to candidates and party committees. He tripled that amount for the 2014 congressional midterm elections after the Supreme Court removed the aggregate limit individuals can contribute to federal campaigns, parties, and PACs in a single election.

 

Zuberi also had a new job outside of politics. After leaving Aegon, he launched Avenue Ventures, a boutique private equity and venture capital fund that, according to his biography on LinkedIn, manages money for sovereign wealth funds, Fortune 500 firms, and startups. Unlike other major players in the world of private equity, like Bain Capital, Elliott Management, or Goldman Sachs, neither Avenue Ventures nor Zuberi is registered as an investment advisor with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of Zuberi’s investing is done abroad, including a $700 million investment in a luxury resort in Bahrain.

With his high-dollar fundraising, he became a frequent visitor to the White House, publicly released visitor logs show. His very first visit was in December 2011, when he had about two minutes to get his picture taken with Obama before joining 586 other guests at a White House holiday party. Since the 2012 election, Zuberi has visited the White House 13 times at both large receptions and meetings in small groups.

When Obama for America, the president’s campaign committee, morphed in 2013 into a nonprofit organization that advocates for the president’s agenda, Zuberi was named to its advisory board. He’s also a donor to the group, called Organizing for Action, and has given it $240,000 since its launch. He serves on the executive committee of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces; in April 2013, Avenue Ventures planned to set up a fund to aid in the reconstruction of Syria once the regime of Bashar al-Assad had fallen.

***

In addition to the photographs Zuberi posts of himself side by side with Washington’s powerful, he frequently uses Facebook to map his far-flung travels. The venture capitalist and private equity fund manager trots the globe, meeting with the likes of retired Gen. Wesley Clark in Geneva; dining with the House Republican leadership in New York; watching sports with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe in London; and walking the corridors of power in Washington. Zuberi’s Facebook postings also show that he was in Sri Lanka from April 1 to April 7, 2014. He had a meeting at Beira Lake, the swanky business district of the capital Colombo, a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, and then toured the country.

“We focus on emerging markets and frontier markets,” Zuberi wrote to FP. “The country’s GDP was growing at a decent clip and we had some ideas such as resorts, tea plantation, refinery project, real estate development, [and an] IT outsourcing/call center.”

At the time of his visit, the government of then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa was facing a low point in its relations with Washington. The United States won a vote in the U.N. Human Rights Council on Feb. 5, 2015, calling for an independent investigation into possible crimes against humanity committed during the government’s bloody suppression of the Tamil Tigers, a violent separatist movement that was finally defeated in 2009. Two of Rajapaksa’s brothers, both government ministers, are among those suspected of ordering the killing of as many as 70,000 unarmed civilians. Additionally, the country was mired in allegations of official corruption, with journalists exposing scandals involving public money siphoned off in offshore accounts or pilfered through inflated contracts and kickbacks in everything from the procurement of MiG fighter jets to the management of the national cricket team. Rajapaksa and his ministers were in need of someone with access to the highest levels of the U.S. government to improve their standing.

Enter Zuberi. A month after his trip to Sri Lanka, Avenue Ventures issued a May 5, 2014, invoice on company letterhead, requesting a $3.5 million payment for a single line item: the “Sri Lanka project May 2014 invoice per contract.” The invoice included a Bank of America account number and specified the recipient of the funds: Imaad Zuberi. Four days later, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka wired the money to Zuberi’s account.

In response to a question about the $4.5 million in payments to his personal account, Zuberi wrote, “There were many pieces to the [Sri Lanka] project and various entities were involved. How to allocate what to whom may have been complex at the outset but if there were any errors they were corrected.”

While Sri Lankan procurement regulations show that consultants must be hired by cabinet members or their designated deputies, Zuberi’s agreement was with the office of the president. The Sri Lankan officials whose names appear on the payment documents are either being questioned, under investigation, or behind bars. Lalith Weeratunga, the secretary to the former president who authorized the payments, was questioned about 600 million Sri Lankan rupees, or roughly $4.5 million, in funds taken from the state telecommunications regulator. Ajith Cabraal, former head of the Central Bank, had to surrender his passport as his actions in a bond deal were probed.

Vass Gunawardena was a member of parliament in the inner circle of the president. He gave instructions to make at least one of the payments to Zuberi and directed the work of the U.S. lobbying and PR firms. His office was listed as their client. He has been in prison since May and under investigation for money laundering.

“Our work was for the government of Sri Lanka,” Zuberi wrote to FP, “not Mr. Vass Gunawardena as a person.”

As far as the Justice Department knew at the time, though, Zuberi wasn’t working for Sri Lanka either. He didn’t disclose the payments he received from the government. Neither did WR Group, which received the last two transfers of $1 million each from the Central Bank in July and September 2014.

While neither Zuberi nor WR Group registered under FARA, Mark Skarulis, a business associate of Zuberi, did. On May 23, 2014, Skarulis incorporated a firm, Beltway Government Strategies, in California; six days later, he filed a registration with the Justice Department listing Sri Lanka as its client.

Skarulis had accompanied Zuberi on his April trip there, but had little in the way of Washington connections in his own right. Unlike most lobbyists, he had no experience on Capitol Hill or in the executive branch. Nor was he a prodigious donor or fundraiser; he made his first political contributions in January 2014 to Royce.

“Mark’s forte — well, he didn’t have a political background,” Sean Tonner, president of the Denver office of R&R Partners, a large PR firm and one of the registered foreign agents for Sri Lanka, told FP. “That’s why they augmented with firms like ours.”

By the middle of June, Beltway Government Strategies had also hired PR and lobbying firms Burson-Marsteller, Madison Group, and Vigilant Worldwide Communications as subcontractors.

Skarulis declined to comment.

Beltway paid the firms it hired, while the Central Bank paid Zuberi. “As such deliverables have been performed by WR Group to the satisfaction of the Government of Sri Lanka,” one payment authorization dated June 11, 2014, reads, “I hereby authorize the payment of $1,000,000 to Imaad Zuberi.” Though WR Group did not receive its first payment until July 17, Beltway Government Strategies began issuing checks to the firms it hired on July 4. Sri Lanka Central Bank records show no payments to Beltway Government Strategies.

While he remained unregistered, the lobbyists hired by Beltway and initially funded by money sent to Zuberi set about the work of influencing Washington. They made hundreds of contacts with government officials, think tanks, and journalists, and arranged meetings on Capitol Hill when their client was in town. On July 14, 2014, for example, Vass Gunawardena and his delegation met with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) in the afternoon to discuss the U.S. relationship with Sri Lanka. A staffer in Tonko’s office said that they had a meet and greet with the Sri Lankan delegation and discussed the country’s strategic importance to U.S. policymakers.

That night Vass Gunawardena entertained members of Congress and staffers at Morton’s Steakhouse on Connecticut Avenue, which boasts that its patio “overlooks Washington’s infamous K Street Corridor, while the dining room caters to DC’s powerful elite.” Congressional ethics rules, which severely restrict the amount most outside interests can spend on food and drink for lawmakers and staff, exempt foreign embassies and their representatives — and the Sri Lankan official’s party of 15 made the most of it. They ordered 63 drinks — mixed, on the rocks, or straight up — plus two beers and three bottles of $150 wine, according to expense vouchers for the night obtained by FP. That included 40 Grey Goose vodkas on the rocks totaling some $520, two Grey Goose martinis, two tumblers of Johnnie Walker Black, and three Tanquerays with tonic. The final bill topped $4,000.

On Aug. 14, 2014 — 97 days after the Sri Lanka government paid him the initial installment of $3.5 million — Zuberi finally became a registered foreign agent for the country. Beltway filed on his behalf, listing his job as a consultant. The registration came just in time for him to use his access to arrange meetings between Vass Gunawardena’s delegation and members of Congress, as well as attend some of the lavish dinners the Sri Lankans had arranged.

“I registered for a short time because I was included in some conversations about the lobbying efforts,” Zuberi wrote to FP, “but I was not directly lobbying.”

Participating in a lobbying campaign without registering with the Justice Department carries legal peril. A former Republican member of Congress, Mark Siljander of Michigan, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison in 2012 for failing to register. In another case, Ben Israel, a Chicago man who shared $3.4 million in payments to provide public relations support to Zimbabwe, received a seven-month sentence in 2014.

On Sept. 10, 2014, Zuberi’s WR Group received its last $1 million payment for work done in August. According to a report filed with the Justice Department, Zuberi stopped working as a foreign agent for Vass Gunawardena and Sri Lanka on Sept. 30, 2014 — about six and a half weeks after he registered. Skarulis and Beltway listed that date as their last day as well.

The entire lobbying campaign cost $850,000, a fraction of the $6.5 million Zuberi and his company received. Zuberi would not say how the rest of the money was spent, only that “WR’s work was economic development, business development and attracting U.S. businesses to [Sri Lanka]. Most of the money you refer to was allocated to these efforts.” In any event, the end of the lobbying contract coincided with the termination of WR Group’s contract to provide consulting services to Sri Lanka.

 

“When we realized we weren’t going to make any major impact we wound down and [the government of Sri Lanka] stopped paying for the project,” Zuberi wrote to FP, adding that Sri Lanka “did not keep their payment commitment. There are still outstanding invoices to be paid.”

Among those outstanding invoices is one from a Beltway subcontractor. Madison Group disclosed on its last filing with the Justice Department that “Beltway Government Strategies is 6 months of arrears in payments and is in breach of contract.”

Unfortunately for Beltway, Zuberi, and the other lobbyists, unpaid invoices aren’t the biggest problem they face. In July, the lobbyists involved in Zuberi’s Sri Lanka project were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. In addition to requesting each firm’s financial records, the subpoena asks for information on relatives of Rajapaksa, the former president, as well as the government of Sri Lanka and its embassy in Washington.

Asked about the subpoenas, Zuberi wrote, “It is our policy not to discuss any legal matters which might or might not be,” adding that he had no business with the Rajapaksas while in Sri Lanka.

“Perhaps we were lucky that we didn’t encounter corruption,” Zuberi wrote, “but we only explored opportunities and didn’t really make any investment.”

The Sri Lanka experience hasn’t deterred Zuberi from seeking new business abroad. He continues to post on Facebook pictures of himself side by side with the powerful, most recently with Hillary Clinton. He documents his far-flung meetings as well — Geneva in May, Istanbul in July. Zuberi has had contacts in Turkey for some time; he accompanied members of Musiad, a Turkish business association close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to a meeting with the director of the White House Business Council in 2014.

That meeting was more of a meet and greet than a substantial discussion, plus an opportunity to get their pictures taken.

“We are always looking [for] good investment opportunities,” he said.

 

Hillary’s Pay for Weapons State Department

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There is not much we can point to when it comes to tangible and valuable achievements within the Hillary Clinton State Department of 4 years. Perhaps she and her deputies were busy processing orders and depositing checks.

Further, if the world was not so unbalanced and in complete turmoil due to civil wars, terror groups and evacuations of those fleeing their home countries, would countries really need to increase their weapons arsenals? This unto itself is a failure of Barack Obama’s lack of leadership and strategy, that lil miss Hillary exploited.

Too bad she could not find time to approve the Keystone XL pipeline…

Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department

IBTimes: Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.

The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton also accused some of these countries of failing to marshal a serious and sustained campaign to confront terrorism. In a December 2009 State Department cable published by Wikileaks, Clinton complained of “an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” She declared that “Qatar’s overall level of CT cooperation with the U.S. is considered the worst in the region.” She said the Kuwaiti government was “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks.” She noted that “UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups.” All of these countries donated to the Clinton Foundation and received increased weapons export authorizations from the Clinton-run State Department.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation did not respond to questions from the IBTimes.

In all, governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible.

Click here to get the interactive chart data.

Winning Friends, Influencing Clintons

Under federal law, foreign governments seeking State Department clearance to buy American-made arms are barred from making campaign contributions — a prohibition aimed at preventing foreign interests from using cash to influence national security policy. But nothing prevents them from contributing to a philanthropic foundation controlled by policymakers.

Just before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation signed an agreement generally obligating it to disclose to the State Department increases in contributions from its existing foreign government donors and any new foreign government donors. Those increases were to be reviewed by an official at the State Department and “as appropriate” the White House counsel’s office. According to available disclosures, officials at the State Department and White House raised no issues about potential conflicts related to arms sales.

During Hillary Clinton’s 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., urged the Clinton Foundation to “forswear” accepting contributions from governments abroad. “Foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the secretary of state,” he said. The Clintons did not take Lugar’s advice. In light of the weapons deals flowing to Clinton Foundation donors, advocates for limits on the influence of money on government action now argue that Lugar was prescient in his concerns.

“The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the Clintons was to give to this foundation,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group that seeks to tighten campaign finance disclosure rules. “This shows why having public officials, or even spouses of public officials, connected with these nonprofits is problematic.”

Hillary Clinton’s willingness to allow those with business before the State Department to finance her foundation heightens concerns about how she would manage such relationships as president, said Lawrence Lessig, the director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics.

“These continuing revelations raise a fundamental question of judgment,” Lessig told IBTimes. “Can it really be that the Clintons didn’t recognize the questions these transactions would raise? And if they did, what does that say about their sense of the appropriate relationship between private gain and public good?”

National security experts assert that the overlap between the list of Clinton Foundation donors and those with business before the the State Department presents a troubling conflict of interest.

While governments and defense contractors may not have made donations to the Clinton Foundation exclusively to influence arms deals, they were clearly “looking to build up deposits in the ‘favor bank’ and to be well thought of,” said Gregory Suchan, a 34-year State Department veteran who helped lead the agency’s oversight of arms transfers under the Bush administration.

As Hillary Clinton presses a campaign for the presidency, she has confronted sustained scrutiny into her family’s personal and philanthropic dealings, along with questions about whether their private business interests have colored her exercise of public authority. As IBTimes previously reported, Clinton switched from opposing an American free trade agreement with Colombia to supporting it after a Canadian energy and mining magnate with interests in that South American country contributed to the Clinton Foundation. IBTimes’ review of the Clintons’ annual financial disclosures also revealed that 13 companies lobbying the State Department paid Bill Clinton $2.5 million in speaking fees while Hillary Clinton headed the agency.

Questions about the nexus of arms sales and Clinton Foundation donors stem from the State Department’s role in reviewing the export of American-made weapons. The agency is charged with both licensing direct commercial sales by U.S. defense contractors to foreign governments and also approving Pentagon-brokered sales to those governments. Those powers are enshrined in a federal law that specifically designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In that role, Hillary Clinton was empowered to approve or reject deals for a broad range of reasons, from national security considerations to human rights concerns.

The State Department does not disclose which individual companies are involved in direct commercial sales, but its disclosure documents reveal that countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation saw a combined $75 billion increase in authorized commercial military sales under the three full fiscal years Clinton served, as compared to the first three full fiscal years of Bush’s second term.

The Clinton Foundation has not released an exact timetable of its donations, making it impossible to know whether money from foreign governments and defense contractors came into the organization before or after Hillary Clinton approved weapons deals that involved their interests. But news reports document that at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary: Algeria, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Thailand, Norway and Australia.

Under a presidential policy directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, the State Department is supposed to specifically take human rights records into account when deciding whether to approve licenses enabling foreign governments to purchase military equipment and services from American companies. Despite this, Hillary Clinton’s State Department increased approvals of such sales to nations that her agency sharply criticized for systematic human rights abuses.

In its 2010 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department inveighed against Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption,” and a “lack of judicial independence.” The report said the Algerian government “used security grounds to constrain freedom of expression and movement.”

That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and its lobbyists met with the State Department officials who oversee enforcement of human rights policies. Clinton’s State Department the next year approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The increase included authorizations of almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment” after the State Department did not authorize the export of any of such items to Algeria in the prior year.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department authorized at least $2.4 billion of direct military hardware and services sales to Algeria — nearly triple such authorizations over the last full fiscal years during the Bush administration. The Clinton Foundation did not disclose Algeria’s donation until this year — a violation of the ethics agreement it entered into with the Obama administration.

The monarchy in Qatar had similarly been chastised by the State Department for a raft of human rights abuses. But that country donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. During the three full budgetary years of her tenure, Qatar saw a 14-fold increase in State Department authorizations for direct commercial sales of military equipment and services, as compared to the same time period in Bush’s second term. The department also approved the Pentagon’s separate $750 million sale of multi-mission helicopters to Qatar. That deal would additionally employ as contractors three companies that have all supported the Clinton Foundation over the years: United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.

Clinton foundation donor countries that the State Department criticized for human rights violations and that received weapons export authorizations did not respond to IBTimes’ questions.

That group of arms manufacturers — along with Clinton Foundation donors Boeing, Honeywell, Hawker Beechcraft and their affiliates — were together listed as contractors in 114 such deals while Clinton was secretary of state. NBC put Chelsea Clinton on its payroll as a network correspondent in November 2011, when it was still 49 percent owned by General Electric. A spokesperson for General Electric did not respond to questions from IBTimes.

The other companies all asserted that their donations had nothing to do with the arms export deals.

“Our contributions have aligned with our longstanding philanthropic commitments,” said Honeywell spokesperson Rob Ferris.

“Even The Appearance Of A Conflict”

During her Senate confirmation proceedings in 2009, Hillary Clinton declared that she and her husband were “committed to ensuring that his work does not present a conflict of interest with the duties of Secretary of State.” She pledged “to protect against even the appearance of a conflict of interest between his work and the duties of the Secretary of State” and said that “in many, if not most cases, it is likely that the Foundation or President Clinton will not pursue an opportunity that presents a conflict.”

Even so, Bill Clinton took in speaking fees reaching $625,000 at events sponsored by entities that were dealing with Hillary Clinton’s State Department on weapons issues.

In 2011, for example, the former president was paid $175,000 by the Kuwait America Foundation to be the guest of honor and keynote speaker at its annual awards gala, which was held at the home of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Ben Affleck spoke at the event, which featured a musical performance by Grammy-award winner Michael Bolton. The gala was emceed by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. Boeing was listed as a sponsor of the event, as were the embassies of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar — the latter two of which had donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

The speaking fee from the Kuwait America Foundation to Bill Clinton was paid in the same time frame as a series of deals Hillary Clinton’s State Department was approving between the Kuwaiti government and Boeing. Months before the gala, the Department of Defense announced that Boeing would be the prime contractor on a $693 million deal, cleared by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, to provide the Kuwaiti government with military transport aircraft. A year later, a group sponsored in part by Boeing would pay Bill Clinton another $250,000 speaking fee.

“Boeing has sponsored this major travel event, the Global Business Travel Association, for several years, regardless of its invited speakers,” Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesperson, told IBTimes. Johndroe said Boeing’s support for the Clinton Foundation was “a transparent act of compassion and an investment aimed at aiding the long-term interests and hopes of the Haitian people” following a devastating earthquake.

Boeing was one of three companies that helped deliver money personally to Bill Clinton while benefiting from weapons authorizations issued by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The others were Lockheed and the financial giant Goldman Sachs.

Lockheed is a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to speak at an event in 2010. Three days before the speech, Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved two weapons export deals in which Lockheed was listed as the prime contractor. Over the course of 2010, Lockheed was a contractor on 17 Pentagon-brokered deals that won approval from the State Department. Lockheed told IBTimes that its support for the Clinton Foundation started in 2010, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

“Lockheed Martin has periodically supported one individual membership in the Clinton Global Initiative since 2010,” said company spokesperson Katherine Trinidad. “Membership benefits included attendance at CGI annual meetings, where we participated in working groups focused on STEM, workforce development and advanced manufacturing.”

In April 2011, Goldman Sachs paid Bill Clinton $200,000 to speak to “approximately 250 high level clients and investors” in New York, according to State Department records obtained by Judicial Watch. Two months later, the State Department approved a $675 million foreign military sale involving Hawker Beechcraft — a company that was then part-owned by Goldman Sachs. As part of the deal, Hawker Beechcraft would provide support to the government of Iraq to maintain a fleet of aircraft used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Goldman Sachs has also contributed at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to donation records.

“There is absolutely no connection among all the points that you have raised regarding our firm,” said Andrew Williams, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs.

Federal records show that ethics staffers at the State Department approved the payments to Bill Clinton from Goldman Sachs, and the Lockheed- and Boeing-sponsored groups without objection, even though the firms had major stakes in the agency’s weapons export decisions.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international affairs, told IBTimes that the intertwining financial relationships between the Clintons, defense contractors and foreign governments seeking weapons approvals is “a vivid example of a very big problem — the degree to which conflicts of interest have become endemic.”

“It has troubled me all along that the Clinton Foundation was not being more scrupulous about who it would take money from and who it wouldn’t,” he said. “American foreign policy is better served if people responsible for it are not even remotely suspected of having these conflicts of interest. When George Marshall was secretary of state, nobody was worried about whether or not he would be distracted by donations to a foundation or to himself. This wasn’t an issue. And that was probably better.”

UPDATE (7:38pm, 5/26/15): In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office told IBTimes: “Taiwan’s 2003 donation was for the fund to build the Clinton Presidential Library. This was way before Mrs. Clinton was made the U.S. Secretary of State. We have neither knowledge nor comments concerning other issues.”

$$ is Behind Senator’s Yes Votes on Iran Deal

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Traitor Senators Took Money from Iran Lobby, Back Iran Nukes

The Democrats are becoming a party of atom bomb spies.

Daniel Greenfield: Senator Markey has announced his support for the Iran deal that will let the terrorist regime inspect its own Parchin nuclear weapons research site, conduct uranium enrichment, build advanced centrifuges, buy ballistic missiles, fund terrorism and have a near zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb.

There was no surprise there.

Markey had topped the list of candidates supported by the Iran Lobby. And the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC) had maxed out its contributions to his campaign.

After more fake suspense, Al Franken, another IAPAC backed politician who also benefited from Iran Lobby money, came out for the nuke sellout.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Iran Lobby’s third Dem senator, didn’t bother playing coy like her colleagues. She came out for the deal a while back even though she only got half the IAPAC cash that Franken and Markey received.

As did Senator Gillibrand, who had benefited from IAPAC money back when she first ran for senator and whose position on the deal should have come as no surprise.

The Iran Lobby had even tried, and failed, to turn Arizona Republican Jeff Flake. Iran Lobby cash had made the White House count on him as the Republican who would flip, but Flake came out against the deal. The Iran Lobby invested a good deal of time and money into Schumer, but that effort also failed.

Still these donations were only the tip of the Iran Lobby iceberg.

Gillibrand had also picked up money from the Iran Lobby’s Hassan Nemazee. Namazee was Hillary’s national campaign finance director who had raised a fortune for both her and Kerry before pleading guilty to a fraud scheme encompassing hundreds of millions of dollars. Nemazee had been an IAPAC trustee and had helped set up the organization.

Bill Clinton had nominated Hassan Nemazee as the US ambassador to Argentina when he had only been a citizen for two years.  A spoilsport Senate didn’t allow Clinton to make a member of the Iran Lobby into a US ambassador, but Nemazee remained a steady presence on the Dem fundraising circuit.

Nemazee had donated to Gillibrand and had also kicked in money to help the Franken Recount Fund scour all the cemeteries for freshly dead votes, as well as to Barbara Boxer, who also came out for the Iran nuke deal. Boxer had also received money more directly from IAPAC.

In the House, the Democratic recipients of IAPAC money came out for the deal. Mike Honda, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Iran Lobby backed the nuke sellout. As did Andre Carson, Gerry Connolly, Donna Edwards and Jackie Speier. The Iran Lobby was certainly getting its money’s worth.

But the Iran Lobby’s biggest wins weren’t Markey or Shaheen. The real victory had come long before when two of their biggest politicians, Joe Biden and John Kerry, had moved into prime positions in the administration. Not only IAPAC, but key Iran Lobby figures had been major donors to both men.

That list includes Housang Amirahmadi, the founder of the American Iranian Council, who had spoken of a campaign to “conquer Obama’s heart and mind” and had described himself as “the Iranian lobby in the United States.” It includes the Iranian Muslim Association of North America (IMAN) board members who had fundraised for Biden. And it includes the aforementioned Hassan Nemazee.

A member of Iran’s opposition had accused Biden’s campaigns of being “financed by Islamic charities of the Iranian regime based in California and by the Silicon Iran network.” Biden’s affinity for the terrorist regime in Tehran was so extreme that after 9/11 he had suggested, “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran”.

Appeasement inflation has since raised that $200 million to at least $50 billion. But there are still no strings worth mentioning attached to the big check.

Questions about donations from the Iran Lobby had haunted Kerry’s campaign. Back then Kerry had been accused of supporting an agreement favorable to Iran. The parameters of that controversial proposal however were less generous than the one that Obama and Kerry are trying to sell now.

The hypothetical debates over the influence of the Iran Lobby have come to a very real conclusion.

Both of Obama’s secretaries of state were involved in Iran Lobby cash controversies, as was his vice president and his former secretary of defense. Obama was also the beneficiary of sizable donations from the Iran Lobby. Akbar Ghahary, the former co-founder of IAPAC, had donated and raised some $50,000 for Obama.

It’s an unprecedented track record that has received very little notice. While the so-called “Israel Lobby” is constantly scrutinized, the fact that key foreign policy positions under Obama are controlled by political figures with troubling ties to an enemy of this country has gone mostly unreported by the mainstream media.

This culture of silence allowed the Iran Lobby to get away with taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times before the Netanyahu speech asking, “Will Congress side with our President or a Foreign Leader?”

Iran’s stooges had taken a break from lobbying for ballistic missiles to play American patriots.

Obama and his allies, Iranian and domestic, have accused opponents of his dirty Iran deal of making “common cause” with that same terror regime and of treason. The ugly truth is that he and his political accomplices were the traitors all along.

Democrats in favor of a deal that will let a terrorist regime go nuclear have taken money from lobbies for that regime. They have broken their oath by taking bribes from a regime whose leaders chant, “Death to America”. Their pretense of examining the deal is nothing more than a hollow charade.

This deal has come down from Iran Lobby influenced politicians like Kerry and is being waved through by members of Congress who have taken money from the Iran Lobby. That is treason plain and simple.

Despite what we are told about its “moderate” leaders, Iran considers itself to be in a state of war with us. Iran and its agents have repeatedly carried out attacks against American soldiers, abducted and tortured to death American officials and have even engaged in attacks on American naval vessels.

Aiding an enemy state in developing nuclear weapons is the worst form of treason imaginable. Helping put weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists is the gravest of crimes.

The Democrats who have approved this deal are turning their party into a party of atom bomb spies.

Those politicians who have taken money from the Iran Lobby and are signing off on a deal that will let Iran go nuclear have engaged in the worst form of treason and committed the gravest of crimes. They must know that they will be held accountable. That when Iran detonates its first bomb, their names will be on it.

*** How can any senator vote yes, when as of early this week:

Iran Tracker: Rouhani: “We will buy and sell weapons whenever” we want. President Hassan Rouhani discussed Iran’s military capabilities during a speech for “Defense Industry Day” in Tehran on August 22. Rouhani emphasized that Iran pursues a defensive strategy of deterrence and added, “Our policy of détente, ‘convergence,’ and confidence-building does not conflict with the defensive power of military industries in the country; if a country does not have strength, independence, or stability, it cannot pursue real peace.” Rouhani also stated:

  • On cultural power: “If a country is not prepared, dedicated, or strong with respect to cultural power, we cannot call that country strong or resisting. If a country does not have political capabilities and does not have strong diplomats for negotiating and understanding, it will be defeated.”
  • On the arms restrictions in the nuclear agreement: “The only thing that was in the [UN Security Resolution 2231] was not to build any missiles with the ability to carry nuclear warheads; we have never pursued this goal anyway.”
  • Rouhani emphasized that there are no “military-related issues that will limit the armed forces” in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
  • “We will sell and buy weapons whenever and wherever we deem it necessary… we will not wait for permission from anyone or any resolution.”
  • On strengthening Iran’s defense capabilities: “We must strengthen the defensive power of the country in order to ensure the stability of the nuclear deal and security in the country.”
  • “Before the [Islamic] Revolution, we were only consumers of weapons and foreign equipment…praise be to God, in recent years, we have made huge steps in design, construction, and equipment; we are moving towards complete self-sufficiency; every day there is a new achievement.”
  • “Today in the defense and military field our country must be strong. However, our capabilities are not against any country. We are not seeking intervention or aggression against any other country; we are equipping ourselves for defense of our country.”
  • “We [the government] must be the buyer and willing to cooperate; we must transfer this industry to sectors outside of the Ministry of Defense, especially to the non-governmental sphere.” (President.ir) http://president.ir/fa/88788

The Email Ghost Account, Toby Miles at the IRS, AKA Lois Lerner

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It is an epidemic now in the Federal government known as alias accounts with fake names.

Given the patterns of the EPA, the Department of Justice, the State Department and now the IRS, it is a sure bet these email accounts are throughout government and we must add in those still other accounts still unknown that operate on platforms outside of government, where Hillary is a master.

So, how about one of those pesky Barack Obama executive orders, demanding all alias accounts be turned over to the FBI now, all of them and then termination orders on those who violated law? Heh…yeah…for sure, it would likely include POTUS himself and just about everyone at the White House….Yet this is our weapon to use against this administration, you know the most transparent in history.

IRS find yet another Lois Lerner email account

WashingtonTimes: Lois Lerner had yet another personal email account used to conduct some IRS business, the tax agency confirmed in a new court filing late Monday that further complicates the administration’s efforts to be transparent about Ms. Lerner’s actions during the tea party targeting scandal.

The admission came in an open-records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that has sued to get a look at emails Ms. Lerner sent during the targeting.  IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency.  “In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.

It is unclear who Toby Miles is, but Mr. Klimas said the IRS has concluded that was “a personal email account used by Lerner.”

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said it was stunning the agency was just now admitting the existence of the address.  “It is simply astonishing that years after this scandal erupted we are learning about an account Lois Lerner used that evidently hadn’t been searched,” he said, accusing the IRS of hiding Lerner-related information throughout — including the existence of the backup tapes of her official email account, which the agency’s inspector general easily found once it went looking for them.

Mr. Klimas didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Monday evening, and a spokeswoman for the tax agency didn’t respond to an email and phone call.

But in his court filing Mr. Klimas argued that the IRS had previously hinted there may be other personal email accounts, pointing back to a footnote in a letter attached to a June 27, 2014, brief that mentioned “documents located on her personal home computer and email on her personal email account.”

He altered that wording in his filing Monday, saying the database of Lerner emails turned over to Congress included messages from her “‘personal home computer and email on her personal email’ account(s).”

The use of secret or extra email accounts has bedeviled the Obama administration, which is has tried to fend off a slew of lawsuits involving former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her top aides, the White House’s top science adviser, top Environmental Protection Agency officials and the IRS.

Those cases have flooded the federal district court in Washington. Indeed, Judge Sullivan, who is handling the current IRS case, is also presiding over Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Last week, Judge Sullivan ordered the State Department to talk to the FBI about trying to recover messages that Mrs. Clinton may have kept on the email server she ran out of her home in New York.

Mr. Fitton said just as Mrs. Clinton is facing questions over whether she kept classified information on her non-secure email account, Ms. Lerner should face questions about whether she exchanged protected taxpayer information from personal email accounts.

Ms. Lerner’s emails became an issue after she was singled out as a key figure in the IRS’s treatment of tea party and conservative groups who sought tax-exempt status. The IRS improperly delayed hundreds of applications and sent out intrusive questionnaires asking what the agency now says were inappropriate inquiries.  In the wake of the scandal Ms. Lerner retired from the agency. She declined to testify to Congress, citing her right against self-incrimination, but also said she did not break the law.

The Obama administration has declined to pursue the contempt of Congress case that the House brought against her.

The House Ways and Means Committee also approved a criminal referral asking the Justice Department to look into Ms. Lerner’s conduct, but its status is not clear.

Mr. Obama has said the problems at the IRS stemmed from bad laws and lack of funding, not from political bias, and a bipartisan report from the Senate Finance Committee could not reach any firm conclusions about the extent of targeting.

Curiously, the Ways and Means Committee criminal referral mentioned the Toby Miles email address, identified as [email protected]. The address came to light because it was included on an email that also had Ms. Lerner’s official account on the chain of recipients.

An email sent to the msn.com address Monday night went unanswered.

At the time of the referral in April 2014, the committee linked the Toby Miles address to Ms. Lerner’s husband, Michael R. Miles, but said, “The source of the name ‘Toby‘ is not known.”

 

Another Day of Hillary Email Disarray

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No Mandated Audit

DHS has no record of State Dept. giving info for Clinton server audit, despite rules

FNC: The State Department does not appear to have submitted legally required information regarding Hillary Clinton’s secret computer server to the Department of Homeland Security during her term as secretary, FoxNews.com has learned.

All federal government agencies are mandated to submit a list of systems, vulnerabilities and configuration issues to DHS every 30 days. The department then performs a “cyberscope audit” to ensure security, a responsibility the agency has had since 2010.

FoxNews.com learned of the lapse as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted June 11. It is not clear if State Department officials in charge of compliance with the DHS audits knew of their boss’s server, which has been shown to have included “top secret” information in emails.

Clinton headed the agency from 2009-2013. The DHS established the “Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation” program in 2010, amid growing concerns government systems could be vulnerable to cyber attack. But Clinton’s computer server, through which she and key aides sent and received tens of thousands of emails, was apparently never audited, according to DHS, which conducted a comprehensive search of Office of Cyber Security and Communications records after FoxNews.com lodged its request.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records,” wrote Sandy Ford Page, chief of Freedom of Information Act operations for DHS.

The revelation means DHS never audited Clinton’s server, and the State Department allowed Clinton to operate outside the federal mandate aimed at hardening defenses in federal networks, one cyber expert told Fox News.

The State Department has not provided a substantive response to a similar FOIA submitted by FoxNews.com in early June.

The State Department did not comment on media requests about why it did not comply with the DHS security review requirement.

“There are reviews and investigations under way, including by the IG and Congress,” said State Department Spokesman Alec Gerlach. “It would not be appropriate to comment on these matters at this time.”

Denver-based Platte River Networks upgraded and maintained the server Clinton shares with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, after she left the State Department.

The company is not on the list of contractors approved by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service, the only federal agency with the authority to review and approve private contractors. The department administers the National Industrial Security Program on behalf of the Pentagon and 30 other federal agencies, including the State Department. About 13,000 companies have received clearance.

“But Platte River is not one of them,” a spokesman for the DSS told Fox News. “As Platte River Networks is not a cleared facility under the National Industrial Security Program, DSS has no cognizance over the facility and cannot comment further.”

Clinton, the leading contender for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and the State Department have been under fire in recent months after it was revealed Clinton had a “homebrew” server and private Blackberry system that could have left classified or sensitive government data open to hackers.

Clinton maintains her use of a private email server was allowed under government regulations and her system was secure.

But this followed the news Clinton wiped her server of some 31,000 private email messages, turning over just 30,000 hard copies of her emails to the State Department amid a congressional investigation into her actions during the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where four U.S. personnel including the U.S. ambassador to Libya were killed.

While Clinton has maintained that she neither sent nor received information marked classified on her private server or Blackberry, Reuters reported last week that dozens of emails that passed through Clinton’s server while she was secretary of state, under the U.S. government’s own regulations, were automatically considered classified.

That includes 30 email threads starting as early as 2009, which contained information on foreign governments, Reuters said.

The FBI has opened an investigation to determine whether or not Clinton’s private email server was secure and if classified material was improperly shared or stored on the Clintons’ private email account.

A federal court hearing last week only added to the intrigue. The State Department asserted in a court filing that it did not give personal electronic devices to Clinton and may have destroyed the smartphones of her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

“If the State Department was not providing secure email devices to Mrs. Clinton, who was? Best Buy? Target? Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who took the State Department to court over its lack of disclosure on the email and server issues.

Huma Lawyers up to Fight Back

Lawyer for Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton Aide, Strikes Back at Accuser

A lawyer for Huma Abedin, a top adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton, has accused Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of damaging Ms. Abedin’s reputation through “unfounded allegations” about her time at the State Department.

The lawyer, Miguel Rodriguez, sent a letter to the State Department on Friday responding forcefully to two sets of questions posed by Mr. Grassley, Republican of Iowa: whether Ms. Abedin, while a department official, had been overpaid during her maternity leave and a vacation, and whether she had demonstrated a conflict of interest by aiding one of her part-time employers through her work at the State Department.

Ms. Abedin was granted permission by the State Department to work as a “special government employee” while also performing work for certain outside clients. Mr. Grassley has focused recently on her consulting work in 2012 for the firm Teneo, which was founded by Douglas J. Band, a longtime adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Grassley has suggested that emails existed showing that Mr. Band had asked Ms. Abedin to press Mrs. Clinton to seek a White House appointment for Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, a Teneo client. Ms. Rodin is a longtime friend of the Clintons.

But Mr. Rodriguez, in his letter on Friday, cited a Washington Post article pointing out that Ms. Rodin, a longtime friend of Mr. Clinton’s, received that White House appointment in 2010, before the Rockefeller Foundation had retained Teneo “and before Teneo hired Abedin.”

Mr. Grassley has also recently disclosed that the State Department’s inspector general had found that Ms. Abedin received nearly $10,000 in excess pay during her maternity leave. But Mr. Rodriguez wrote that Ms. Abedin was contesting that finding because she “extensively worked” during those periods, as the inspector general’s “report itself found.”

“Chairman Grassley also has asked about Ms. Abedin’s 2011 trip to France and Italy,” the letter said. “That trip was intended to be a vacation, and Ms. Abedin personally paid for it.” But, he added, Ms. Abedin — who is married to former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, who resigned from Congress in June 2011 — worked during that trip as well.

Mr. Rodriguez, in his letter, alluded to a recent report that Mr. Grassley had received information from a confidential source about an internal investigation into Ms. Abedin that was completed in May by the State Department inspector general.

“We are deeply concerned that Chairman Grassley’s letter has unfairly tarnished Ms. Abedin’s reputation by making unsubstantiated allegations that appear to flow from misinformation that Chairman Grassley has been provided by an unnamed — and apparently unreliable — source,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote. Those allegations, he wrote, included the “suggestion that Ms. Abedin has violated any criminal statute.”

He also noted Mr. Grassley’s assertion that there were about 7,300 emails mentioning both Ms. Abedin and Mr. Band, but he said that this was because the two remained on many of the same mass email distribution lists thanks to their longstanding ties to the Clintons.

“These are but two examples of the unfortunate and unfounded allegations that have been made about Ms. Abedin,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote. “No staffer — indeed, nobody at all — should be subject to such unfounded attacks based on ill-informed leaks, much less someone who has made countless personal sacrifices in distinguished service to the country she loves.”

Mr. Grassley, who also serves on the Senate Finance Committee, has been aggressive in questioning Ms. Abedin’s status as a special government employee since it was revealed in 2013.

A former investigator on the Finance Committee who worked with Mr. Grassley there and was at one point expected to work for him on the Judiciary Committee, Emilia DiSanto, is now a deputy inspector general at the State Department.