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Hillary Clinton broke federal law, ‘FEC finally woke up,’ former National Security Advisor says

April 1, 2022 | | Print Article

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Kash Patel, a former national security adviser to the House Intelligence Committee, is hopeful that the Federal Election Commission’s decision to fine the Democrat National Committee and failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign is just the beginning.

“The biggest takeaway is the Hillary Clinton campaign broke federal law by taking political contributions and paying a foreign asset to gin up dirty Russian information that was fake that they funneled into the FBI to falsely surveil President Trump under illegal warrants issued by the Federal Surveillance Court,” he said Thursday.

“When I was leading the Russiagate investigation we had to get a subpoena from Congress to get the bank records to show that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Dems paid for the Steele dossier. And three years later, the FEC finally woke up and said, ‘Yes, that’s illegal and we need to fine them.”

“Had any other campaign done it, they would have fined them to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. But I’ll take this as a start,” Patel added.

He made the remarks on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” hours after CBS News confirmed the veracity of the story, which was originally reported by the Washington Examiner.

As previously reported, Paul Bedard, a journalist with the Washington Examiner, published a “scoop” earlier this week claiming to have viewed an FEC memo that was recently sent to the organization that had filed a complaint against Clinton over her false rhetoric.

“The election agency said that Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm,” Bedard reported on Wednesday.

“A combined $1,024,407.97 was paid by the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign to law firm Perkins Coie for Fusion GPS’s information, and the party and campaign hid the reason, claiming it was for legal services, not opposition research.”

Both the DNC and Clinton gave Perkins Coie roughly $1 million, and that entire sum of money reportedly wound up being funneled to Fusion GPS, which then used the money to hire disgraced former British spy Christopher Steele to write the smear-filled dossier.

When pressed by the FEC, both the DNC and Clinton tried to evade responsibility by claiming the $1 million had gone toward procuring “legal advice and services.”

The FEC did not fall for their shtick, though neither party is willing to fess up. But likewise, neither party is willing to challenge the FEC’s conclusions either.

“[F]or the purpose of settling this matter expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs, respondent[s] does not concede, but will not further contest the commission’s finding of probable cause to proceed,” the memo reportedly reads.

Below is a purported copy of the memo:

 

The bad news for those hoping to see Clinton be thrown in jail is that, according to Bedard, the punishment for these lies will be nothing more than an $8,000 fine for Clinton’s treasurer and a $105,000 fine for the DNC’s treasurer. That’s it.

This is nevertheless a massive victory, according to Dan Backer of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, the organization responsible for filing an FEC complaint against both parties in 2019.

“This may well be the first time that Hillary Clinton — one of the most evidently corrupt politicians in American history — has actually been held legally accountable, and I’m proud to have forced the FEC to do their job for once,” he said in a statement to the Examiner.

“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation proved that with pluck and grit, Americans who stand with integrity can stand up to the Clinton machine and other corrupt political elites.”

A day after Bedard published his report, CBS News confirmed his findings and also obtained a quote from the DNC regarding them.

“The Federal Election Commission has fined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign $8,000 and the Democratic National Committee $105,000 for obscuring their funding of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a 2016 opposition research report that sought to highlight alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia,” the establishment outlet confirmed.

“A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee acknowledged that it agreed to pay the FEC’s fine, but said it had ‘settled aging and silly complaints from the 2016 election about ‘purpose descriptions’ in our FEC report.'”

In other words, the DNC still refuses to fess up, despite the FEC’s findings, and despite its own decision to go ahead and pay off the fine.

Responding to the DNC’s blasé rhetoric, Paul Kamenar, a member of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation’s advisory board, called it “appalling.”

“It’s outrageous that the DNC would minimize the serious violation that took place by calling campaign disclosure laws ‘silly’ violations,” he said to CBS News.

He reportedly added that he personally believes the FEC should have referred the whole case to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.

Backer, for his part, is hopeful that the FEC’s fines are just “the beginning.”

“Hillary Clinton and her cronies willfully engaged in the greatest political fraud in history — destroying our nation’s faith in the electoral process, and it’s high time they were held accountable. I hope this is only the beginning,” he told the Examiner.

Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

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