State Department officials are refusing to release all or part of dozens of emails sent by top aides to Hillary Clinton, including internal discussions about Benghazi and records showing a much closer relationship between the agency and the Clinton Foundation than previously reported.
Emails indicating Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, was in regular contact with Clinton Foundation employees are being withheld by the State Department, court documents filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show.
Citizens United, the conservative watchdog group bringing the FOIA lawsuit, specifically requested communications between Mills and foundation officials.
But the agency is resisting disclosure of the foundation-related records, as well as the release of Benghazi emails that have apparently been withheld from members of Congress who are after the same documents.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said the House Select Committee on Benghazi has not received the records outlined in the court documents filed Monday evening by the State Department, despite having subpoenaed the records earlier this year.
The State Department said it found no records, either in paper form or electronic form, in the office belonging to Kris Balderston, who served as Clinton’s special representative for global partnerships.
Balderston had been tasked with fundraising for a major political project under Clinton. He came under scrutiny for tapping the same donor network that supports the Clinton Foundation to foot the bill for the U.S. pavilion at the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai.
The State Department did not immediately return a request for comment about why there are no official records of Balderston’s communications.
Despite the fact that the agency did not find any of Balderston’s records in the office of global partnerships where he worked, State Department officials said in court filings they were withholding three pages of emails between him, former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, and officials at both the Rockefeller Foundation and Teneo Strategies, a consulting firm with close ties to the Clintons.
The Rockefeller Foundation is a major Clinton Foundation donor.
The Balderston emails appear to have been included in a batch of private emails Abedin provided to the State Department between July and August. Abedin used a personal account on Clinton’s private server.
Some of the emails withheld by the State Department concern agency officials’ discussions with attorneys about how to respond to congressional inquiries related to Benghazi.
For example, a seven-page exchange from October 2012 between Mills and other unnamed agency officials details the formation of a strategy to reply to a request from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then a member but now chairman of the House Oversight Committee, about the Benghazi terror attack.
The State Department claimed “attorney-client privilege” over parts of the discussion because Mills also acted as an attorney at the agency.
Several other documents that involved discussions between Mills and officials over how to answer letters from Congress about Benghazi were withheld for similar reasons.
Officials looped into those emails included Richard Verma, former assistant secretary for legislative affairs. However, Verma had left the State Department in 2011 to join Steptoe & Johnson, a top law firm.
Verma was still included in a number of email chains that the State Department deemed unfit for release. For example, he was part of an internal discussion about a proposed public statement on Benghazi in October 2012.
Another undisclosed email apparently contains a conversation between Mills and Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary for management, about what Kennedy would say when he testified before Congress.
Kennedy appeared before the oversight committee three days after the email was written. Verma was among those copied on the email discussion of Kennedy’s upcoming testimony.
Descriptions of the emails withheld by the State Department suggest Clinton may have enjoyed close ties to the foundation while serving as secretary of state.
For example, one undisclosed email chain contains deliberations about Clinton’s trip to Africa between Mills, Hadeel Ibrahim, a Clinton Foundation board member, and other agency officials.
Clinton was supposed to be insulated from her family’s foundation by an agreement with the White House that placed strict requirements on the charity’s foreign donor relations and her own involvement in its operations.
Mills and various Clinton Foundation officials hammered out plans for the Clintons in a number of documents that were fully or partially withheld.
Several of the documents discussed potential speaking engagements for former President Bill Clinton, including an invitation from the Luca International Group, an oil and gas conglomerate.
In July, Luca International Group was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for being a “Ponzi scheme” after its CEO siphoned millions of dollars from investors to buy a luxury home, among other lavish personal expenses.
Mills and Clinton Foundation officials also discussed “invitations to foreign business executives to attend the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.” In another undisclosed chain, Mills and the foundation planned a “possible future conference.”
One email exchange that was not fully disclosed involved a conversation between Abedin and Declan Kelly, co-founder of Teneo.
Abedin and Kelly were discussing plans for a dinner in Dublin in late 2012. Clinton attended the event during her last official trip as secretary of state.
She was honored with a major award by a Clinton Foundation donor at a ceremony promoted by Teneo, but attended the gathering in her official capacity as the nation’s top diplomat, the Washington Examiner reported in May. The event highlighted the potential conflicts of interest created by the fact that Abedin, at the time, worked for the Clinton Foundation, the State Department and Teneo thanks to a controversial employment arrangement.
The State Department’s decision to withhold parts of six pages of emails about the Ireland trip raise questions about how Clinton ended up at an event that benefited two organizations with which she had a personal relationship.
Another four-page email chain from July 2012, in which Abedin discussed meeting with Ken Miller, a Teneo executive, was withheld in part, as was a one-page email in which Abedin and Miller talked about Douglas Band, Teneo’s founder and a longtime Clinton confidante.
Abedin was apparently not the only Clinton aide who received a “special government employee” designation to make room for multiple jobs.
Mills discussed Verma’s status as a special government employee, which allowed him to serve on Clinton’s advisory board, in an email that the State Department refused to release from October 2012.
Verma’s deep involvement with internal preparations for congressional hearings, as well as a vague discussion of “proposed interactions with Congress to be taken by a department official over a several week period,” raises questions about whether Verma or other agency staffers lobbied members of Congress on behalf of the State Department in the wake of Benghazi.
In total, the State Department fully released just nine of the 66 documents it found responsive to Citizens United’s request.
A federal judge expressed frustration with the agency’s sluggish pace in several high-profile FOIA cases during a court hearing about the records Tuesday.
The fact that the newly-identified Benghazi emails have not been provided to Congress could create even more problems for Clinton and the agency she once served. Both have been accused of stonewalling the select committee in its investigation of Benghazi.
