Sen. Chuck Grassley stepped up pressure in his probe of Hillary Clinton’s private email network last week, blocking the nominations of high-level State Department nominees and blasting Democrats for misrepresenting the identity of his confidential source.
The Iowa Republican, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, turned the investigation’s focus to Heather Samuelson, a former campaign aide who was given unfettered access to Clinton’s emails before the State Department ever saw the documents.
In a letter to Samuelson Wednesday, Grassley pressed the former aide on whether she had security clearance before she separated Clinton’s work-related emails from her personal ones.
“It is not clear what level of security clearance you had at the different stages of this process, if any,” Grassley wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by Politico Monday.
“[I]t is imperative to understand your background in determining what is and what is not a federal record, since you apparently played a major role in assisting Secretary Clinton in making a decision as to which emails to delete,” he added.
Grassley placed a hold Thursday on the nomination of Thomas Shannon for under secretary of political affairs, releasing holds on 20 lower-level appointees at the same time.
Shannon has previously served as ambassador to Brazil and as a senior adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry.
Grassley said the high-level hold was meant to pressure the State Department to respond to nearly a dozen unanswered document requests he has fired off since 2013.
“The Department has failed to comply with its commitments, producing material late, failing to provide all requested material, and even failing to provide material to the Senate Judiciary Committee contemporaneously with providing the same documents to Freedom of Information Act requesters,” Grassley said Thursday.
The latter phenomenon occurred as recently as this month, when the State Department provided nondisclosure agreements Clinton had signed upon taking office to a watchdog group before giving those same documents to the committee. In fact, lawmakers did not receive those records until after media reports about them had surfaced.
Grassley’s inquiries have ranged from the State Department’s “special government employee” program, which allows government staff to work simultaneously for outside groups, to the agency’s failure to prevent its own officials from engaging in human trafficking.
Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, was granted “special government employee” status in 2012, a designation that allowed her to work for the Clinton Foundation and a controversial consulting firm called Teneo Strategies while she collected a government paycheck.
But Grassley noted Thursday his investigation of the program extended far beyond the State Department. The Judiciary Committee chairman said he had written to 16 different federal agencies to inquire about the practice.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called Grassley’s decision to block State Department nominees in order to get answers from the agency “troubling” in floor remarks earlier this month.
“It is time for my friend from Iowa to end these foolish campaigns to undermine Secretary Clinton,” Reid said. “Sen. Grassley should allow all of the Foreign Service lists to be confirmed by the Senate without further delay.”
Reid accused Grassley’s panel of squandering taxpayer money on a politically-motivated probe into Clinton, comparing the Judiciary Committee investigation to the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s controversial probe.
Democrats have united against the Benghazi committee in the days since Clinton appeared before it for a highly-publicized hearing. Although that investigation was the first to uncover Clinton’s private email use — a practice that shielded hundreds of Benghazi-related records from investigators — Democrats have attempted to delegitimize the probe by highlighting aspects of its work that they say stray from its original mandate.
Grassley disputed Reid’s suggestions that the Judiciary Committee had somehow wasted taxpayer resources when probing Clinton’s activities at the State Department, noting Thursday that the inquiry into Clinton-related matters had done little to slow the committee’s work in other areas.
“Back in September, the Justice Department sent me a letter complaining that I’ve sent them almost 100 oversight letters containing more than 825 questions and document requests — in 2015 alone,” Grassley said. “So, perhaps the minority leader should ask the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at DOJ whether my committee is not doing enough DOJ oversight.”
Grassley also fought back Friday against allegations that a former member of his staff was funneling information about Clinton and her allies to the committee.
“Democratic staff for the Senate minority leader and Democratic operatives appear to be circulating a false, misleading timeline with reporters suggesting incorrectly that a former staffer for Sen. Chuck Grassley is the “confidential source” for one of many Grassley inquiries into State Department personnel practices,” Grassley’s office said Friday in a lengthy rebuttal to that narrative.
Instead, Grassley staffers said the source was “well-known to staff for senior Democrats in the House and the Senate.”
The unnamed source was actually a former official in Sen. Diane Feinstein’s office, Grassley’s staff noted.
In an effort to shed more light on the nature of the confidential source in question, Grassley’s office published 11 pages of heavily redacted emails between committee aides and the source’s attorney.
The emails indicate the source had “particular knowledge” of the special government employee program. The records also suggest investigators from the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee teamed up to ask questions of the former Feinstein staffer.
