Emails Renew Questions About Clinton Foundation and State Dept. Overlap

ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — A new batch of U.S. State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.
In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
In another email, the foundation appeared to push aides to Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request.
Clinton’s presidential campaign, which has been shadowed for 17 months by the controversy over the private email server she used exclusively while at the State Department, had no immediate comment on the documents.
The State Department turned over 44 emails to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents were not included with some 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton had previously given to the State Department, which she said represented all her “work-related” emails.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, charged that Clinton “hid” the documents from the public because they appeared to contradict her official pledge in 2009 to remove herself from Clinton Foundation business while leading the State Department.
The newly released documents indicate, he said in a telephone interview, 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.
The FBI spent more than a year examining Clinton’s use of a private email account, but it is not clear how the work of the Clinton Foundation figured into that investigation.
© 2016 New York Times News Service
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