Emails and other communications exchanged among three of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inner circle of advisers and officials at her family’s foundation and a controversial consulting firm are at the center of the latest transparency lawsuit to hit the Department of State.
Citizens United, a right-leaning activist nonprofit, sued the department March 16 after it ignored a series of Freedom of Information Act requests for written and electronic communications of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Kris Balderston, all longtime Clinton confidantes and close aides at the State Department.
But David Bossie, president of Citizens United, is worried the agency will drag its heels in the court case until Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign heats up so officials can frame his group’s requests as politically motivated attacks.
“Having been intimately involved in the investigations in the ’90s into the Clintons, I knew how they operated back then,” Bossie, who served as a congressional investigator during the Whitewater scandal, told the Washington Examiner.
“We started a process of 19 FOIAs which were really meant to gather information that would give us a behind-the-scenes a look of Clinton, Inc., and how they do business today and while she was at the State Department,” he said.
As an example, Bossie pointed to Abedin’s dual roles in the government and at the Clinton Foundation, an arrangement that required a special waiver to enable her to draw compensation from both employers. Bossie hopes to expose Abedin’s activities more fully through the multiple FOIAs.
Given increasing public scrutiny of Clinton’s tenure at the nation’s chief diplomat and the conduct of her confidantes at the department, Bossie said, courts may put additional pressure for release of documents they might otherwise allow to remain in the dark.
“I do believe that federal judges who have a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to the government or whatever agency is being FOIA-ed now will be looking at it with a little bit more skepticism, which benefits the American people,” Bossie said. “They read the papers and watch television, too. They don’t make these decisions in a vacuum.”
Bossie’s group is best known for a documentary it created — “Hillary: The Movie” — that led to the Supreme Court decision in 2010 that struck down as unconstitutional campaign finance laws that restricted independent expenditures by corporations and labor unions during political campaigns.
The group’s first records request in the lawsuit was filed in May 2014 and sought emails and letters between Balderston and Douglas Band, a co-founder of the boutique consulting firm Teneo Strategies.
Band worked for former President Clinton in the White House from 1995, then continued working for him for years afterwards as a special adviser, a valuable position that enabled him to make multiple contacts that could be leveraged to the benefit of Teneo and its clients.
In June 2011, the State Department approved a partnership agreement between the former president and Teneo after concluding that it posed no conflict of interest with Hillary Clinton’s official duties. Despite that review and the department’s approval, Bill Clinton scrapped the agreement eight months later in the face of a barrage of criticism.
Balderston, who has worked with the Clintons for more than a decade, worked for Hillary Clinton in the State Department as special representative for global partnerships.
A trio of additional Citizens United requests filed in July 2014 for Abedin and Mills’ correspondence also went unanswered after the State Department acknowledged receiving them in August of last year.
The group pressed for personal emails and letters between Abedin and a number of officials with ties to Teneo, including Band, company co-founder Declan Kelly and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
Secretary Clinton appointed Kelly as her economic envoy to Northern Ireland in September 2009. Mitchell was named special envoy to Middle East peace in January of that year.
In addition to any government business conducted on personal channels, Citizens United requested personal communications with a State Department email address or on agency letterhead, court documents show.
The nonprofit’s third FOIA request sought the same types of messages between Mills and individuals associated with the Clinton Foundation, including Eric Braverman, the former foundation president, and daughter Chelsea Clinton.
Braverman served as CEO of the Clinton foundation from July 2013 to earlier this year, when he abruptly resigned his position amid internal tensions.
The fourth Citizens United FOIA asked the State Department to release Abedin’s communications with many of the same Clinton Foundation hands.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is pushing the State Department inspector general to launch a probe of the private email server Mrs. Clinton and a handful of her closest aides used to conduct government business while in office.
In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry March 19, the Iowa Republican also raised concerns about the fact that Abedin was granted permission to collect both a government salary for her work at State and a paycheck for the consulting services she simultaneously offered to Teneo.
