State Department officials denied the existence of records that showed Hillary Clinton granted waivers to certain companies or countries while crafting sanctions against Iran.
The allegations first emerged in Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash and again in a report from the Washington Times published Tuesday.
In court documents filed May 22 for a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the State Department said it had searched 11 offices within the agency for “any and all documents that refer or relate in any way to the final decisions to grant waivers to all countries and other interests doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran” under the U.S.-backed sanctions.
Officials stated they had searched the office of the secretary of state and found no records of the sort of waivers described in numerous media reports.
“It is therefore unlikely that any of the emails provided by former Secretary Clinton to the State Department are responsive to the plaintiff’s FOIA request,” State Department legal officials said.
Larry Klayman, president of Freedom Watch, filed the FOIA request for the Iran waivers to both the State Department and the Treasury Department and sued the agencies when neither complied with his request. A federal court later dismissed the Treasury Department from the case.
Bill Clinton had established a separate, previously undisclosed arm of the Clinton Foundation in Sweden just as his wife was shoring up support for sanctions against Iran, the Times reported.
The Swedish Postcode Lottery is one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation, giving more than $25 million to the charity, donor records show.
Sweden was among the countries attempting to convince Hillary Clinton’s State Department not to impose harsh sanctions against Iran ahead of high-stakes negotiations about the country’s nuclear capabilities.
Among its concerns was that Swedish companies would suffer financially if they were severed completely from the Iranian economy.
The sanctions list released by the U.S. government in 2011 and 2012 included no Swedish companies.
Sweden changed its tax laws in 2011 to allow companies to log donations to charities as business expenses, according to the report. The Clinton Foundation soon saw a spike in contributions from the country.
The State Department asked a judge in its May 22 filing to delay ruling on Klayman’s appeal until after it had published 55,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails on its website.
Clinton provided those emails to the agency in November of last year after previously hosting all of her official and personal communications on the same private server in apparent violation of records laws.
Critics have raised concerns that her use of a third-party server provided her too much control over which documents she could shield from the public.
The State Department was recently forced to search again for records it claimed did not exist in an unrelated FOIA lawsuit that had been closed in November.
After news of Clinton’s private emails spread, a judge reopened the case, which was filed by Judicial Watch, and demanded the State Department take a second look given the fact that its archives were apparently incomplete at the time of the lawsuit.
