A government watchdog is calling for an ethics investigation into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave preferential treatment to her hedge fund millionaire son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky.
In a complaint to be filed on Monday, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), will ask the Office of Government Ethics to look into whether Clinton gave special access to a deep sea mining company called Neptune Minerals after a 2012 email from Mezvinsky.
“It appears that then Secretary Hillary Clinton gave a private company special access to the State Department based upon the company’s relationships with Secretary Clinton’s family members and donors to the Clinton Foundation,” reads the group’s complaint.
As The Daily Caller first reported last week, the latest batch of Clinton’s State Department emails includes a May 25, 2012 message to Mezvinksy from one of his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, Harry Siklas. (RELATED: Hillary Sought To Help Millionaire Son-In-Law’s Friend With State Department Business Meeting)
Siklas told Chelsea Clinton’s husband that he hoped to get a face-to-face meeting with Clinton or another State Department official to discuss Neptune Minerals, in which he had made a private investment.
“I need a contact in Hillary’s office,” Siklas wrote to Mezvinsky.
He said he wanted to “have someone’s ear” to discuss the Law of the Sea convention, a United Nations treaty which governs nations’ and corporations’ use of the world’s oceans for commercial purposes.
Siklas informed Mezvinsky that he had convinced some bankers at Goldman Sachs to invest in Neptune Minerals, which sought to mine off of the coast of New Zealand.
A large donor to Clinton’s various Senate and presidential campaigns, Goldman Sachs executives had also invested in Mezvinsky’s hedge fund, Eaglevale Partners.
Three months after Siklas reached out to Mezvinsky, Clinton forwarded the email to Thomas Nides, then the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, asking him to find someone to follow up on the request.
“Could you have someone follow up on this request which was forwarded to me?”
Though it is unclear what if anything Clinton or the State Department did to accommodate Siklas, FACT asserts that Clinton was willing to accommodate him because of the ties to Goldman Sachs.
“These emails indicate that not only did Neptune Minerals seek special access to the State Department based upon relationships with Secretary Clinton’s daughter and son-in-law, but it also raised its relationship to Goldman Sachs — an entity that is a Clinton Foundation donor and members of which donated to Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign,” the complaint reads.
FACT also cites government ethics rules which state that government employees “shall act impartially and shall not give preferential treatment to any private individual or organization” when performing official duties.
Another question raised by the email is just how Clinton obtained it. There is no record of Mezvinksy or anyone else directly sending Clinton the email. Instead, she sent a copy of the email to Nides. That raises questions over whether Clinton deleted the original copy of the email or if she failed to turn it over to the State Department last year along with her other work-related emails.
Clinton has said that she turned over all of her work-related emails over to the agency.
This post has been updated.