A watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Office of Government Ethics over a recently-disclosed email that suggested Hillary Clinton intervened in a business deal for a friend of her son-in-law.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a right-leaning ethics group, filed the letter Friday in response to an Associated Press story about the apparent exchange of favors, which took place in the fall of 2012.
In an email to Clinton’s son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky, Harry Siklas asked for help getting in touch with Clinton’s State Department office so he could lobby for a deep-sea mining company in which he had invested. That firm, Neptune Minerals, had also recently become a client of Goldman Sachs, where Siklas worked.
Matthew Whitaker, executive director of FACT, noted executives at Goldman Sachs had supported Clinton’s past political campaigns and donated extensively to her family’s foundation.
“[T]hese emails indicate that not only did Neptune Materials seek special access to the State Department based upon relationships with Secretary Clinton’s daughter and son-in-law, but it also raised its relationship to Goldman Sachs,” Whitaker wrote in the ethics complaint.
“Unfortunately, it appears that these relationships led to access not available to the general public, and a violation of ethics rules,” he added.
Whitaker formally requested an investigation into the emails, which were made public by the State Department at the end of last month.
While Clinton has largely put to rest concerns about the fact that she used a private server to shield her communications while serving as secretary of state, she has faced continued scrutiny of the content of those emails. The messages, which are released at the end of every month by the State Department and will continue on a rolling basis until January 2016, indicate she kept in regular contact with donors, lobbyists and friends for whom she occasionally offered preferential treatment.
