Sen. Charles Grassley doubled down on questions about Huma Abedin’s unusual employment arrangement in the wake of newly-unearthed emails that illustrate potential conflicts of interest between her three employers.
“How can the taxpayer know who exactly [special government employees] are were working for at any given moment?” the Iowa Republican wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry Wednesday, referring to the designation that allowed Abedin to work simultaneously for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and a controversial consulting firm called Teneo Strategies.
Emails obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act show Abedin, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, arranged for Clinton to attend a benefit for a Clinton Foundation donor that was promoted by Teneo during an official trip to Ireland with the State Department in December 2012.
Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed frustration with the State Department’s reluctance to answer past questions about Abedin’s activities.
Although Grassley began asking for emails and records from Abedin’s time at the State Department in July of 2013, the agency did not provide Grassley with emails until last week, and only did so after releasing them to Citizens United.
Grassley’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the State Department’s slow responses.
Two of the emails made public so far show Abedin kept executives at Teneo abreast of Clinton’s plans and even arranged for them to meet while traveling through Dublin and Belfast.
Abedin and Declan Kelly, a former State Department official who left the agency to co-found Teneo in 2011, coordinated a dinner in Dublin that brought together a number of Clinton’s public and private sector friends.
Another email relays a conversation between Clinton and Stella O’Leary, founder of Irish American Democrats, in which Clinton instructed O’Leary to set up a “flexible” nonprofit called Friends of the Clinton Centre that would be structured so “any funding raised could be used in whatever manner [Bill Clinton] and [Hillary Clinton] wish in Ireland and Northern Ireland.”
Grassley said a U.S.-based nonprofit called Friends of the Clinton Centre was registered in April 2013 to the New York address of O’Dwyer and Bernstein, a law firm and Clinton Foundation donor.
Brian O’Dwyer, a partner at the firm and personal donor to the Clinton Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.
Although the nonprofit was not formed until two months after Clinton’s departure from the State Department, the email chain suggests she commissioned its creation while serving as secretary of state.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, noted the alleged meeting between Clinton and O’Leary took place days after the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
“What jumps off the page of the email to me is the disturbing fact that it is dated September 21, 2012 — 10 days after the Benghazi attack that took the lives of four Americans,” Bossie said.
“First of all, it’s unheard of that a member of a cabinet, let alone the secretary of state, would be instructing anyone to form a 501(c)(3),” Bossie added. “The most disturbing thing is, she says she saw her ‘this week,’ which means in the days after the Benghazi attack. This conversation took place while Benghazi was still smoldering, while the American people were demanding answers as to why this happened.”
O’Leary has denied ever discussing Friends of the Clinton Centre with the former secretary of state.
