On Thursday, Matthew Whitaker, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, told SiriusXM host Matt Boyle of Breitbart News Daily that he has always believed “this pay-to-play, Clinton Foundation, State Department situation is much more serious” than the original Clinton email scandal.
“James Comey, the director of the FBI, stood up and talked about the emails, and the emailing of classified information. That was serious, but the real ballgame is the situation you’re describing, and that is where Clinton Foundation donors were given preferential treatment,” Whitaker told Boyle. He added:
It’s very interesting to watch the Clinton camp try to explain away these meetings. But, like you said, 50 percent of the meetings she took with people that were not essentially employees or representatives of countries or the like, just sort of individuals that wanted to meet with the Secretary of State, 50 percent of those – as the AP has reported, more than 50 percent – were Clinton Foundation donors.
“It is not possible for them to explain away that Clinton Foundation donors were given preferential treatment when it came to seeing the Secretary of State. It’s just the way business was done,” Whitaker declared, continuing:
The frustrating thing for me continues to be, she had the private email server to avoid public disclosure of her emails. She didn’t turn over any emails until two years after she was supposed to, in 2012, from the illegal server. And yet, we are now almost four years since she finished serving, and we’re still gonna see another 15,000 – what the State Department is calling “documents,” and that’s a very interesting term to me, so I think there’s more to it than just the emails.
“And then Judicial Watch continues to have their litigation with the State Department, and we continue to have revelations of more emails, that are really, quite frankly, more concerning than the initial flood that we got, that dripped out over the past year as part of the Benghazi investigation,” he said. “This is kind of a big deal, and my group, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, has been pressing hard on the State Department to try to get to the bottom of this, together with groups like Judicial Watch.”
“It’s going to be very interesting,” Whitaker anticipated, “if this can all be, or is, revealed, before the beginning of November.”
He said the demise of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s activities is “one of the reasons that a special counsel is required.”
“The President of the United States has given a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has also said that she would more than likely keep on the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, in that position,” he noted. “Don’t forget the tarmac meeting, for half an hour, that preceded all of these things being swept under the rug, the FBI director deciding that he was the judge, jury, and executioner in giving Hillary Clinton, essentially, an FBI pardon.”
“We need somebody that is independent to look at these facts,” he urged. Continuing, Whitaker stated:
I did hear reports, or at least one report, that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York is investigating the Clinton Foundation, and these public corruption allegations, and that the FBI is investigating it. But, like you and many of your listeners, I was concerned when I heard that the Attorney General and the politicals at the Department of Justice had determined not to open an investigation into what is clearly a pay-to-play situation where, if you gave money to the Clinton Foundation, you got preferential treatment, if you had business from the State Department.
Boyle noted that in Breitbart News Daily interviews Wednesday, both Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton predicted more damaging documents would emerge from the latest trove of Clinton emails. He asked if mounting political pressure could force President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor, a step he clearly does not wish to take.
Whitaker said Schweizer and Fitton were “two people that would have knowledge of what else is out there.” He said, “Based on what I’ve seen, that’s in the public domain currently, I think there’s enough to have a special prosecutor that can look into this, that can have the ability to subpoena documents and interview witnesses and do the kind of things and have the independence separate from this administration.”
He noted that when the independent counsel law that covered Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation expired, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it wasn’t renewed, “but there still is an ability of the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel, and to give a tremendous amount of latitude, and authority, and responsibility.”
“One of the examples I would point to is when Pat Fitzgerald investigated, and ended up convicting, Scooter Libby, he was a special counsel with broad discretion,” Whitaker recalled, adding:
That would be sort of the model I would expect, as this continues to come out. There is so much here, so much smoke, so many unanswered questions. All you have to do is open up your – whether it’s Breitbart News, or The Washington Post, or New York Times – and you can see all of the unanswered questions regarding this.
He castigated the mainstream media for being “uninterested” in covering such a clearly important story, leaving groups like Judicial Watch to “carry the torch and do the investigation.”
“Old-time newspaper men are rolling in their graves at the pass Hillary Clinton is getting currently from newspapers that used to hold politicians accountable and used to do these types of investigations,” Whitaker said.
He agreed with Boyle that the Clinton Foundation’s announcement that it would no longer accept foreign donations, if Hillary Clinton became president, was “too little, too late.”
Said Whitaker:
I’ve always thought the Clinton Foundation is a very sophisticated way to get around the campaign finance laws and to allow for unlimited donations and an ability to curry favor with a presidential candidate that, quite frankly, is unprecedented in the history of our country – where they can take more than the $2,700 that’s the limit on individuals and use it for sort of whatever they want; that’s plausible within the charitable contribution laws.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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