Joint investigations by the FBI and various U.S. Attorneys of Clinton Foundation activities are most likely underway in Little Rock, Arkansas, Washington, D.C. and New York, according to a former assistant director of the FBI.
“To me, those would be the three most logical cities,” Ron Hosko told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Discrete information has made its way to local field offices and is being shared with their counterparts at the U.S. Attorney offices.”
Hosko is a 30-year veteran of the FBI and was the second highest ranking official behind director James Comey when he left the bureau in 2014.
Hosko was responding to TheDCNF report Friday that multiple FBI field offices and U.S. Attorneys in various cities are leading investigations about possible corrupt practices among Clinton Foundation officials, foundation donors, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and inner circle of aides during her years as America’s chief international diplomat.
The lead U.S. Attorney is said to be Preet Bharara who runs a tough prosecutorial office in the Southern District of New York, according to a former senior law enforcement official who first told TheDCNF about the multi-pronged investigations.
Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told TheDCNF that the Southern District is one of the most independent prosecutorial offices in the country. The U.S. Attorneys there are fiercely independent and often thumb their noses at the Justice Department in Washington, he said.
One of the most memorable independent probes by the Southern District was its indictment of former Attorney General John Mitchell in the early 1970s against the wishes of the Justice Department under President Richard M. Nixon.
“The Southern District of New York is frequently known as ‘DOJ North’ and has always been extremely independent and has chafed at supervision by the Justice Department,” DiGenova said.
A Justice Department spokesman on Friday conspicuously did not deny TheDCNF story, saying only to Fox News “we’re declining to comment” on it. FBI spokesman Samantha Shero told TheDCNF Thursday that “we do not have a comment on investigative activity.” Similarly, a spokesman for Bharara’s office declined comment.
DiGenova read those responses as non-denials. “They didn’t say there wasn’t such an investigation. They basically confirmed that there’s an investigation and they’re not going to talk about it.”
The general public doesn’t realize that, while the Justice Department in Washington may not be proceeding with any formal Clinton Foundation investigation, that does not rule out authorized probes by FBI field offices and their counterparts at the U.S. Attorney’s offices, according to Hosko.
The former senior FBI official said the existence of Clinton Foundation multi-city investigations “appear credible” adding that the FBI handling of Clinton’s email server scandal was an “outlier” — highly unusual for being exclusively run out of FBI headquarters.
“That case was unusual,” he told TheDCNF. “The Clinton email case was worked by a group of individuals at FBI Headquarters. Cases by and large, tens of thousands of them, are almost exclusively worked in the field offices.”
The motivation for outside FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys to launch their own probes into the Clinton Foundation may reflect dissatisfaction with the decision by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to meet privately with former President Bill Clinton in a parked aircraft at a remote part of the Phoenix, Arizona, airport on June 28.
“I think she lost a lot of people in the department when she got on that plane and talked to that President. She hurt herself severely with the people within the department, certainly with the people with the FBI,” the former U.S. Attorney said.
“I think she’s been locked out. To me, it shows the lack of confidence that the U.S. Attorneys offices have in her as a law enforcement official,” DiGenova said.
The New York focus most likely is related to the fact that the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation main offices are in New York and the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glittering gathering of the rich and powerful, occurs every September in New York.
A Washington investigation could center on Hillary Clinton and her aides during their time at the State Department. The Clinton Foundation was initially established in Little Rock to build the Clinton Presidential Library.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
