Alleging a “pay-for-play” operation for top donors to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Donald Trump has demanded a full probe by an independent special prosecutor, asserting that the Department of Justice and the FBI “cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially” go about the job.
“No issue better illustrates how corrupt my opponent is than her pay-for- play scandals as Secretary of State,” the Republican presidential nominee said at a campaign event in Ohio, adding: “The amounts involved, the favours done and the significant numbers of times it was done require an expedited investigation by a special prosecutor immediately, immediately, immediately.”
Amid chants of “lock her up” from his supporters crowding the Akron arena, Trump said an independent special prosecutor had become inevitable after the “whitewash” job done by the Justice Department and the FBI on Clinton’s controversial email saga. He accused the Justice Department of having “proven itself to be a political arm of the White House”.
At a time when he has been badly trailing Clinton in a host of polls, Trump eagerly seized upon the right-wing Judicial Watch’s release of 725 pages of new State Department documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges, indicating special access for donors to the Clinton Foundation – the global charitable organization founded by former President Bill Clinton.
Releasing the documents, the group alleged that Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin “apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as Secretary of State”. It said that in more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided “expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation”.
The disclosures prompted Trump to demand that the Clinton Foundation be shut down, dubbing the New York-based foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”. He also asked the foundation to return money reportedly collected from foreign countries with poor human rights records.
His new offensive also came on a day when a federal judge gave the State Department time till September 23 to determine a plan on how to release nearly 15,000 new emails uncovered by the FBI as part of its investigation into Clinton’s private email server. The likely release of emails as per this directive raises the prospect of this controversy shadowing Clinton right up to the day of election in early November.
But Clinton herself sought to make light of the efforts by Trump and his fellow-Republicans. Appearing on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show on Monday night, Clinton remarked: “Jimmy, my emails are so boring. And I’m embarrassed about that. They’re so boring. So we’ve already released, I don’t know, 30,000 plus, so what’s a few moreIJ”
Her campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin put out a statement, saying the Judicial Watch has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s and “distorting facts to make utterly false attacks”. “No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,” Schwerin said.