Remember how it was first announced that the FBI were investigating into the Clinton Foundation? Neither do I because the whole thing came out in a leak in the last 10 days of the election (Highly unethical)
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In August . . . the F.B.I. grappled with whether to issue subpoenas in the Clinton Foundation case, which . . . was in its preliminary stages. The investigation, based in New York, had not developed much evidence and was based mostly on information that had surfaced in news stories and the book “Clinton Cash,” according to several law enforcement officials briefed on the case.
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Basically, what fueled the investigation was this:
A factually challenged right-wing conspiracy book about the Clinton foundation that was turned into a documentary.
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“Clinton Cash,” the partisan hit job published last year by Breitbart’s editor-at-large, Peter Schweizer, and later adapted into a documentary that was executive produced by former Breitbart chairman and current Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon.
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Even the publisher knew the book was factually challenged
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The publisher had to make revisions to the book’s later editions. Schweizer was forced to admit in both interviews and in the conclusion of his book that he had not quite made the case he was trying to present.
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As, of course, did the FBI.
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The investigation, based in New York, had not developed much evidence and was based mostly on information that had surfaced in news stories and the book “Clinton Cash,” according to several law enforcement officials briefed on the case
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Well, the newest IRS audit of Banon revealed some explosive info about the hypocrisy of the entire probe. It turns out the book and documentary were both illegally funded by a charity.
Quote:
Peter Schweizer, an at-large editor for Breitbart, was paid $778,000 by GAI between 2012 and 2015 as he researched and wrote “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”
That book prompted some FBI agents to resume their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in the days ahead of the presidential election.
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Quote:
IRS rules prohibit tax-exempt 501(c)3 public charities such as GAI from participating in or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for office.
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Clinton Cash was clearly a political tool aimed at Hillary's run for president seeing as it was released during her run and they even used the book to generate some bad publicity for the candidate.
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“What GAI did instead was to reach out to investigative reporters and mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post and others and try and encourage their reporters to take this research that they’d done and to go off and do some digging on their own. And they did, and that wound up resulting in front-page stories in a lot of major newspapers that got this negative information about Clinton in front of a whole different audience than reads Breitbart News or listens to talk radio.”
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All in all,
the FBI started investigating the Clinton Foundation based on an erroneous book that was illegally funded by another foundation.
Sources
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That's the non-partisan FBI for ya