FBI investigators are building a case around alleged “pay to play” tactics at the Clinton Foundation, according to a report, and two sources cited in a separate account say they are confident in the increasing body of evidence. But the news comes amid tales of personnel conflict, both within the FBI and among the Bureau and other agencies, as senior officials and investigators disagreed on the merits of conducting a probe.
Fox News’s Bret Baier first reported on Wednesday and stated Thursday morning that investigators “are going to continue to push for an indictment,” based on interviews with two sources closely familiar with the “inner workings” of the investigation.
“They believe they have a lot of evidence. But, as in any case, you have to build the evidence, and it continues to come in. You eventually have to get some people to sign on or cooperate and testify. So this is all building evidence to a case that has to be made by a prosecutor,” Baier said during an interview on Fox’s morning programming. The previous day, Baier seemed to imply that an indictment was forthcoming, but he clarified that investigators are rather assured they’ll be able to obtain one.
“That’s why the jumping to ‘likely indictment’—they are going to continue to push for an indictment, and that’s what I should have said, but there is a confidence of the evidence that is coming in on this case,” he continued. “The bottom line is, if anybody says the Clinton Foundation investigation is over, it’s not. It’s wide, it’s widespread, four different FBI offices have taken part in it, it is aggressively being pursued.”
Baier also mentioned the existence of FBI and interagency infighting amid these claims. A Wall Street Journal article published Wednesday provided a rough timeline of the budding turmoil, which began last year after the publication of the book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by Peter Schweizer, a former speechwriting consultant for President George W. Bush. FBI officials, public-integrity prosecutors, and the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division eventually met in February of this year to discuss a way forward. The prosecutors weren’t persuaded by what the FBI had to say, leading to tension within the FBI and among law enforcement agencies, the Journal reports:
Officials were unconvinced by the evidence gathering and continued to oppose their efforts, the Journal wrote. The resistance has continued to this day—the time the information about the investigators’ activities has been disclosed.
Some of the latest evidence coming into the FBI’s possession is Anthony Weiner’s laptop, on which agents have found emails believed to have originated on Clinton’s private server, and the laptops of Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.
