Hillary aide Huma Abedin under investigation for overpayments at State Department
The office of inspector general at the State Department is investigating longtime Hillary Clinton friend and aide Huma Abedin for recieving pay she was not eligible for while she worked for Clinton at the State Department.
The issues surround Abedin's salary being paid while she was on vacation and on maternity leave from her job at State.
In letters sent Thursday to Abedin, Kerry and the Office of Inspector General, Grassley wrote that staff of the inspector general had found “at least a reasonable suspicion of a violation” of the law concerning the “theft of public money through time and attendance fraud” as well as “conflicts of interest connected to her overlapping employment.”
Grassley also raised the possibility that efforts to investigate Abedin’s actions were thwarted because many of her exchanges were sent through Clinton’s private e-mail server.
According to Grassley’s description of the investigation, Abedin’s time sheets indicated that she never took vacation or sick leave during her four years at the State Department, from January 2009 to February 2013. But the investigation, the senator wrote, found evidence that Abedin did take time off, including a 10-day trip to Italy, and that she told colleagues in e-mails that she was out “on leave.”
A spokesman for Clinton’s campaign declined to comment. Attorneys for Abedin said she learned in May that the State Department’s inspector general had concluded that she improperly collected $9,857 for periods when she was on vacation or leave.
Abedin responded with a 12-page letter contesting the findings and formally requesting an administrative review of the investigation’s conclusion, a process that remains ongoing.
Her attorneys say the conclusion that Abedin was overpaid relied on a finding that she had done no work while on the Italy trip and in the weeks after she gave birth in December 2011. However, they wrote that the evidence uncovered by the inspector general made it clear that she had worked extensively during those times.
The pay dispute is only part of the investigation. The potential bombshells come when Abedin's curious arrangement with the United States government regarding her employment at State, as well as with the Clinton Foundation and a private firm closely associated with the Clintons, are examined, along with the probable thousands of emails associated with Abedin's employment that were lost when Hillary's private email server was destroyed:
Since 2013, Grassley has been inquiring about Abedin’s “special government employee” status, which during her final six months at the State Department allowed her to take outside employment with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm led by longtime Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band.
Grassley’s letter to Kerry claimed that Abedin had exchanged 7,300 e-mails that “involved” Band but did not specify how many of those were direct correspondence between the two.
In one instance, Grassley wrote, Band allegedly e-mailed Abedin to request her help in landing a White House appointment for a friend who led a charity that later hired his firm and donated to the Clinton Foundation.
However, Grassley did not release the e-mail in question, nor did he allege any wrongdoing by Abedin. And the timeline of events does not clearly support an allegation of conflict of interest: The Band friend was named to a White House panel in 2010, before her charity hired Teneo and before Teneo hired Abedin.
Gee...it's going to be tough to prove conflict of interest without those emails. Too bad the server was deliberately destroyed. But Huma and Hillary are honest folk, so I'm sure the whole thing is just one gigantic coincidence.
For the Clintons and their cronies, the rules simply don't apply. They will game the system to enrich themselves and each other, buying and selling influence, flouting the rule of law, while maintaining a questionable personal moral and ethical code.
It's sickening to contemplate a Hillary presidency.