A top prosecutor on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team recommended that the FBI shut down an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016, despite ample evidence of suspicious activity related to hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign transactions, Fox News reported.
In his May 2023 report on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Special Counsel John Durham identified Ray Hulser, the former chief of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), as the official who “declined prosecution” of the Clinton Foundation. Hulser now serves on Smith’s team currently prosecuting former President Donald Trump for alleged crimes related to January 6.
According to Durham’s report, in late 2014, the FBI began investigating a “well-placed” confidential source’s claims that two foreign governments had attempted to make illegal donations to buy influence with Hillary ahead of her presidential campaign.
By early 2016, three different FBI field offices, in Washington, D.C., Little Rock, Arkansas, and New York, had opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation for “possible criminal activity,” but Hulser shut them down, claiming there was “insufficient predication” for opening the investigations. He reportedly declined to prosecute during a meeting on February 1, 2016.
An individual present for the meeting told Durham that the Justice Department’s reaction to the Clinton Foundation briefing was “hostile.”
According to Durham’s report, the investigation out of Washington was opened as a “preliminary investigation, because the case agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate allegations in a recently-published book, ‘Clinton Cash’ by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation.”“Hulser downplayed information provided by the New York Field Office CHS [confidential human source] and recalled that the amount involved in the financial reporting was ‘de minimis,’” the report states.
Durham asked Hulser about his decision to shut down the Clinton Foundation probes as part of his investigation. Hulser told Durham that he thought the “FBI briefing was poorly presented and that there was insufficient predication for at least one of the investigations due to its reliance on allegations contained in a book.”
However, the New York and Little Rock investigations included predication “based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton,” according to the special counsel’s report.
Durham included the incident to show “the contrast” between how the FBI handled Clinton investigations in comparison to the Trump-Russia probe, in which members of Trump’s campaign team were improperly surveilled, legally harassed and some prosecuted for unrelated financial crimes and process crimes.
The Durham report revealed that because three different FBI field offices opened investigations related to the Clinton Foundation, there was a “perceived need to conduct coordination meetings between the field offices, FBI Headquarters, and appropriate U.S. Attorney’s offices,” as well as “components” from main Justice Department.
“These meetings likely were deemed especially important given that the investigations were occurring in an election year in which Clinton was a declared candidate for President,” the report states, including details from those meetings.
One meeting detailed in the report took place on Feb. 1, 2016. Present for that meeting were several FBI officials, as well as Criminal Division Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell and Hulser, who, at the time, was Public Integrity Section chief.
However, Durham’s team reviewed the financial reporting to better “understand the allegations”—and found otherwise.
“The reporting, which in itself is not proof of wrongdoing, was a narrative describing multiple funds transfers, some of which involved international bank accounts that were suspected of...
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