Emails show links between State Department and Clinton Foundation
Despite denials that the State Department and the Clinton Foundation had any significant ties to each other while Hillary Clinton served as the nation's chief diplomat, a new batch of emails sheds new light on the seemingly close relationship between the two entities.
The latest email release, obtained by the group Judicial Watch from a State Department Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, included several exchanges between a top foundation worker and State officials working under Clinton.
In one back-and-forth from April 2009, Doug Band, who worked for the Clinton Foundation (including its Clinton Global Initiative) as well as serving as a personal aide to Bill Clinton, appeared to push then-State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mill for "a favor" on behalf of a foundation associate.
Band said in his email that it was "important to take care of [redacted]," and Abedin responded "We have all had him on our radar" and that "Personnel has been sending him options."
Band, in another email to Abedin and Mills in April of that year, asked for the State Department's "substance person" in Lebanon to contact Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire philanthropist who was one of the Clinton Foundation's top donors.
"As you know, he's key guy there and to us and is loved in lebanon," Band wrote. He added it was "Very imp."
Abedin responded that the "substance person" was "jeff feltman" -- a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. "I'm sure he knows him," she said. "Ill [sic] talk to jeff."
Band insisted to Abedin: "Better if you call" Chagoury and "now preferable."
"This is very important," he wrote. "He's awake I'm sure."
In a separate 10-page email batch uncovered by Judicial Watch, State Department spokesman Brock Johnson flagged in 2012 a "significant" FOIA request to Mills from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
CREW had asked for "the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton." Mills had responded "thanks" in her email back to Brock.
Mills testified earlier this year in a deposition with Judicial Watch that she didn't have a "specific recollection of" the 2012 FOIA request.
During an interview with the New York Times, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the emails were proof positive that "the State Department and the Clinton Foundation worked hand in hand in terms of policy and donor effort."
"There was no daylight between the two under Mrs. Clinton, and this was contrary to her promises," he added.
Clinton -- whose private email controversy continues to plague her presidential campaign even after the Justice Department decided it would not press criminal charges over her use of a home-brewed server -- had sworn before becoming secretary of state that her dealings with the Clinton Foundation would be cut off if she worked for the president's cabinet.
"If confirmed as Secretary of State, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect upon this foundation, unless I first obtain a written waiver or qualify for a regulatory exemption," Clinton wrote in a 2009 letter to the State Department's legal adviser and designated agency ethics official.
On Tuesday evening, Trump's campaign slammed the emails as "yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton lacks the judgment, character, stability and temperament to be within 1,000 miles of public power."
"She views public office as nothing more than a means to personal enrichment - and every dollar she takes comes at the expense of the public welfare," Trump's national policy director, Stephen Miller, said in a statement.
The Clinton campaign, however, has pushed back against those implications, saying that the emails never involved Clinton herself or the Foundation's work, according to a New York Times report.
Band, they said, had been operating as an aide to former President Bill Clinton and not as a Foundation official.