House Republicans sent a letter to the Justice Department on Wednesday demanding the agency create a counsel to determine whether Clinton Foundation donors were provided special access to the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Rep John Ratcliffe (R., Texas), the report’s main author, asked the Justice Department to investigate "alleged ‘pay-to-play’ tactics where donors to the Clinton Foundation were able to obtain inappropriate access to and influence over then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."
Ratcliffe cited an Associated Press report published last week finding that at least 85 of 154 people outside of government who met or had phone conversations with Clinton while she headed the State Department donated to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton campaign disputed the report, charging the Associated Press based its findings on a limited schedule. While half of the private citizens in that sample had donated to the foundation, those citizens represented only a fraction of all people Clinton met with, the campaign said.
"You would think after the House Benghazi Committee backfired on them so badly, House Republicans would think twice before making more nakedly partisan calls for investigations," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told the Washington Post. "Voters see through this as reflexive partisanship from House Republicans who are just looking for anything else to talk about besides their own party’s nominee."
Ratcliffe said Bill Clinton’s recent announcement that the Clinton Foundation will stop accepting foreign donations after the November election provided evidence that the foundation acted as a "slush fund."
"This begs the obvious question about why an inappropriately cozy relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its donors with the president of the United States is deemed unethical, but the same relationship between the secretary of state and candidate for president were not," he wrote in the letter.
Donald Trump has seized on recently leaked State Department emails underling overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the department while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Trump has dubbed the foundation "the most corrupt enterprise in political history," demanding that a special prosecutor investigate the organization.