Judge Expands Investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Dealings with Foundation Donors

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors.

Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office. David Bossie, president of Citizens United, hopes to confirm suspicions that Clinton maintained an off-the-books schedule, meeting with Clinton Foundation donors on the taxpayer’s dime. “Citizens United wants to know how many overseas dinners Secretary Clinton attended with Clinton Foundation donors that didn’t make it on her schedule,” he says.

Judge Rosemary Collyer, the federal judge presiding over a public-records case brought by Citizens United, was initially hesitant to allow the release of Valmoro’s e-mails, and asked the group to provide one example of an off-the-books meeting with Clinton Foundation donors. As part of a joint filing with the State Department on Monday, Citizens United presented the judge with several pieces of evidence suggesting Valmoro deliberately struck from the official schedule a December 6, 2012, dinner in Dublin, Ireland, with several Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign donors, organized by Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly. Though Valmoro was made aware of the Dublin meeting through an earlier e-mail chain, neither Clinton’s archived daily calendar nor her detailed official schedule make any note of it.

Citizens United characterizes the State Department’s decision to go along with the filing as an acknowledgement that Clinton did, in fact, maintain a secret schedule. Collyer was apparently convinced, ordering the State Department on Wednesday to produce 500 pages of Valmoro’s e-mails by the end of August. An additional 500 pages will be released every four weeks from that date, until Citizens United obtains all messages relating to the 14 overseas trips specified.

#related#The latest look into Clinton’s potential abuse of her government post to facilitate Clinton Foundation donations comes the same week as new revelations about her use of a private e-mail server. On Monday, Judicial Watch, another conservative nonprofit, published an additional 165 pages of e-mails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Those e-mails — which surfaced only after a court ordered them released — are all work-related in nature, undermining Clinton’s repeated claim that she turned over all work-related e-mails to the State Department after stepping down in 2013.

— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.