OPINION:
The Clinton Foundation is under investigation — well, officially, inquiry — and all hail the FBI and Justice Department on this one.
What they’re looking for is whether the multimillion dollar nonprofit run in part by the famed First Family committed any type of pay-to-play schemes during Hillary Clinton’s service at the State Department.
You don’t say.
Feds in Little Rock, Arkansas, have apparently brought at least one in for questioning in recent days — and have plans to do more in the coming weeks.
“The probe may also examine whether any tax-exempt assets were converted for personal or political use and whether the Foundation complied with applicable tax laws,” The Hill reported, citing officials tied to the investigation.
Watch, it’ll be the tax law compliance that gets ’em — if anything gets ’em, that is. That’s what brought down Al Capone, remember. The mafia chief never did get busted for murder or for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Rather, feds sent him to 10 years behind bars for failing to properly file taxes.
There’d be a sort of poetic justice to the fate of a Clinton brought low by the same IRS snare, yes?
Anyhow, Clinton’s spokespeople have previously refuted the idea that Hillary took part, either directly or indirectly, in any type of foundation-tied pay-to-play goings-on while at State. But that’s sort of, kind of how Bill played it, too, while fending off charges of improprieties involving an intern in the White House — deny, deny and deny.
In other words: The Clinton family denials don’t mean a whole lot.
In even other words: It wouldn’t be a shock to discover there were some Clinton family improprieties — heck, illegalities — involving their foundation and their official government business.
The FBI has been collecting information on the Clinton Foundation for a year, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. And this recent announced investigation — er, inquiry — simply advances what President Donald Trump vowed via his Justice Department to look into while in the White House.
Know what else it follows?
Dogged reporting from both left and right sides of the political aisle — from both The New York Times and the Daily Caller — about curious payments made to the Clinton Foundation that coincided with curiously favorable decisions by the Clinton-led State Department. Author Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash” blockbuster raised even more eyebrows about where some of the foundation money led.
Maybe 2018 will be the year we get to the bottom of this?
Honestly, it’s doubtful — and it’s doubtful that even if a Clinton hand were caught in the act of doling out something illegal, that any member of this family would go to jail.
But it’s good to keep the investigation — make that, inquiry — going. It’s good to keep up the heat. Who knows. Maybe Justice really can be blind, even on matters involving a Clinton.
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