Hillary Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham was born in Chicago on October 26, 1947, to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham and grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and enrolled at Yale Law School, where she met Bill Clinton, and she married him in 1975.¹ She took her law degree in 1973 and in 1974 served as counsel on the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary.² The same year she moved to Arkansas, where she taught as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, which she later chaired.³ During the twelve years her husband was Governor of Arkansas she practiced law in Little Rock.¹

Systematics and the BCCI Takeover of Financial General

In 1978 Financial General Bankshares sued the Little Rock investment banker Jackson Stephens, his firm Stephens Inc. and the bank data processor Systematics over the accumulation of its stock for clients of Agha Hasan Abedi of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a campaign that ended with BCCI's secret control of the bank, renamed First American Bankshares. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, then reporters for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in 1992 that Stephens's firm had given "substantial legal work" to the Rose Law Firm, that "Mrs. Clinton even represented one of Stephens's companies in a case related to BCCI," and that "in 1978, she did legal work for Systematics Inc. when it was sued for its role in Abedi's scheme to collect stock in First American." They based the statement on a court filing and noted that she then practiced under the name Hillary Rodham. The same writers recorded that Stephens backed George H.W. Bush in 1992 while employees of Stephens Inc. gave more money to the Clinton campaign than the employees of all but two other firms in the country.⁴

Whitewater

In 1978 Attorney General Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and Jim and Susan McDougal bought land near the White River in Marion County as equal partners, and in 1979 they transferred it to the Whitewater Development Company. The Clintons contributed about 36,862 dollars and the McDougals about 80,076 dollars; the company lost more than 80,000 dollars, and in 1992 McDougal bought the Clintons' share for 1,000 dollars. McDougal bought the Bank of Kingston in October 1980 and renamed it Madison Bank & Trust; on December 16, 1980, it lent Mrs. Clinton 30,000 dollars at 20 percent interest, secured by Lot 13, of which she was the record owner. When bank regulators objected to her construction loan and to a Whitewater loan, the first was replaced by a loan to Governor Clinton from the Security Bank of Paragould and the second by a Madison Guaranty loan in his name, which was later retired through a nominee loan to Chris Wade and a chain of transfers that ran through a McDougal company's loan at Stephens Security Bank.⁵

The independent counsel found that the McDougals held substantially all managerial control until 1986 and that Mrs. Clinton took a more active part afterward. Madison Guaranty failed in 1986 at a cost to taxpayers of 73 million dollars. On September 1, 1992, in the presidential campaign, the Resolution Trust Corporation office in Kansas City sent Criminal Referral No. C-0004 on Madison Guaranty to the United States Attorney in Little Rock and the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Jim and Susan McDougal were convicted of felonies in May 1996, and Wade pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud in March 1995. The office concluded that "insufficient evidence exists to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in the criminal financial transactions Jim McDougal engaged in to benefit Whitewater Development."⁵ The matter passed from the Justice Department's Criminal Division to the regulatory independent counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr., who served from January 20 to August 5, 1994, and then to Kenneth Starr.⁶⁷

Madison Guaranty and the Securities Department

Madison Guaranty's principal counsel was Mitchell, Williams, Selig, Gates & Woodyard, the firm of McDougal's business partner Jim Guy Tucker. The Arkansas Securities Commissioner, nominated by the Governor, also served as Arkansas Savings and Loan Supervisor and regulated state-chartered thrifts. In January 1985 Governor Clinton appointed Beverly Bassett, who had worked on Madison Guaranty matters as an associate at the Mitchell Williams firm. McDougal told investigators that at the request of the former commissioner John Selig he recommended Bassett to the Governor, and a message slip records that he telephoned Clinton on December 22, 1984, to do so. Bassett testified that she did not know McDougal had recommended her and would not have asked him to; President Clinton said he did not remember whether McDougal had.⁸

Rose's representation began on April 23, 1985, with two matters before the Arkansas Securities Department: a plan for Madison Guaranty to raise its net worth by issuing preferred stock, which no state-chartered Arkansas thrift had done, and a broker-dealer subsidiary. The Rose associate Rick Massey billed the most hours, and Mrs. Clinton billed more than any other Rose partner. On April 29 and 30 she billed one hour for a "telephone conference with B. Bassett, Securities Commissioner" and one with Massey. The next day Rose sent the department supervisor Charles Handley, who had told Madison Guaranty that Arkansas law did not permit the stock, a two-page opinion letter arguing that it did; the letter closed, "Should you require further information or assistance, please advise Hillary Rodham Clinton or Richard Massey of this firm." Massey testified that he drafted it and named her because she was the billing partner. Handley maintained his position, and the staff attorney Bill Brady advised Bassett to refer the question to the Arkansas Attorney General; Bassett did not.⁹

On May 14, 1985, Bassett wrote, "Dear Hillary: I agree with your analysis and conclusion," and that "as the Savings and Loan Supervisor, I concur in your opinion that Madison's proposed capitalization plan is not inconsistent with Arkansas law." On May 23 Mrs. Clinton forwarded the letter to McDougal: "We appreciate the opportunity to work for you and look forward to continuing success in resolving whatever questions arise as you continue your plan for growth." McDougal wrote on Bassett's letter, "John: Be sure we keep their $2,000 a month retainer paid. Jim." The independent counsel agreed that Bassett's analysis appeared consistent with Arkansas law. Madison Guaranty never met the net worth conditions for issuing the stock; by December 1985 it had acquired the property known as IDC, and the independent counsel found that the fraudulent Castle Grande sales to insiders "achieved the same result the stock offering was intended to achieve." The retainer checks drawn on Madison Guaranty's account were made out to "Rose Law Firm, Attn: Hillary Clinton," in amounts from 2,000 to 2,018 dollars between May 1985 and October 1986.⁹

The Retention Dispute

How Rose was hired was disputed. McDougal said Governor Clinton jogged into his office early one morning in August or September 1984, complained about his wife's earnings, and that McDougal then put Rose on a retainer of 2,000 dollars a month. Mrs. Clinton said Massey brought the client in and that her own role was to collect an old bill owed by Madison Bank & Trust; she stated that on April 23, 1985, she arranged for the bill to be paid so that Massey could take the new client. President Clinton said he could not remember asking McDougal to give his wife business but did not say McDougal's recollection was false. Massey did not remember bringing Madison Guaranty to Rose.¹⁰

The independent counsel "conclusively established that the old bill had been settled in October 1984, six months before Mrs. Clinton's supposedly having arranged for it to be paid," when Madison Bank & Trust paid 5,000 dollars of a 5,893 dollar balance and Rose never pursued the rest. The independent counsel found the statement "factually incorrect" but not shown to have been knowingly false. "On balance, the weight of evidence supports McDougal's version of events," it concluded, but the evidence was insufficient to warrant prosecution, and McDougal, "the most important percipient witness," had died in March 1998.¹⁰

Castle Grande and the Billing Changes

Before Rose's billing records surfaced, Mrs. Clinton testified in April 1995 that she was to be the billing partner with no substantive role and that she did not remember what the IDC matter was. A 1993 Rose fee recap showed her receiving 2,731.25 dollars for "Madison Guaranty/Stock Offering and IDC" in January 1986, several times her largest allocation on any Madison Guaranty matter. On January 30, 1986, Rose sent five bills under her name as billing partner. The computerized memorandum for the IDC matter showed 912.50 dollars of her work; she raised it by hand to 2,731.25 dollars, adding 14.5 hours of work with no indication of what it was, and no supporting entry was ever made in the Rose billing computer. Her time sheets for 1985 and 1986 were never found. In 1992, during the presidential campaign, her secretary requested those time sheets from Rose storage; no investigation located them afterward.¹¹

The records show twelve unspecified conferences with the landowner Seth Ward, the father-in-law of the Rose partner Webster Hubbell and a Madison Financial employee, between November 14, 1985, and January 7, 1986. On November 20, 1985, McDougal sent Ward a memorandum about a brewery and tasting room on the property: "I have spoken with the Governor on this matter and expect that it will be approved. We must be very careful to not mention that there will be a 'tavern' in the location." On April 7, 1986, the day Madison Guaranty and Ward executed two "cross notes" on Ward's commissions, she billed the IDC matter for a telephone conference with a Madison Guaranty officer; the independent counsel found that significant evidence corroborated the officer's account that they discussed the notes, while she said the call concerned another matter. She also billed for drafting a May 1, 1986, option agreement between Ward and Madison Guaranty's subsidiary, which federal examiners concluded had misled them about sham loans between Ward and the thrift.¹¹¹²

The Billing Records

The billing records for 1985 and 1986 were produced to the Office of the Independent Counsel on Friday, January 5, 1996, by her personal lawyer David Kendall, with a cover letter to the associate independent counsel John Bates; they had been subpoenaed eighteen months earlier.⁷ The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation inspector general reopened the Rose investigation and on September 20, 1996, issued a supplemental report. Its counsel Patricia Black, who had told the House that Rose's involvement was "minor and brief," testified before the grand jury in 1998: "As evidenced by the billing records, it was neither. My testimony, in short, was wrong." The independent counsel found that the regulators had given Congress materially incomplete testimony about her role and that "partially as a result of Hubbell's actions, the United States Congress was misled." Hubbell, her former partner and then Associate Attorney General, resigned in March 1994 and pleaded guilty in December 1994 to mail fraud and tax evasion for defrauding Rose and its clients of at least 394,000 dollars; the independent counsel later prosecuted him for concealing Rose's Madison Guaranty conflicts, and he pleaded guilty to one further felony.¹²¹³

The independent counsel's table of contents for the part on the records lists sections titled "Huber Testified She Found the Records in Room 319A," "Evidence Relating to Mrs. Clinton's Conduct in July 1995," "Fingerprint Analysis Disclosed Mrs. Clinton's and Vince Foster's Prints," "Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster Had the Billing Records in 1992," "Attempts to Locate Mrs. Clinton's Time Sheets," and "Billing Records Found in Foster's Attic, July 1997," the last a second set of Madison Guaranty and Madison Bank & Trust records. The body of that part is not among the published volumes on the Government Publishing Office site.¹⁴ The analysis in the published volume records that an FBI laboratory report of March 21, 1996, found her fingerprints on the copy produced from the White House, that she testified she may have handled the records during the 1992 campaign but not after they were subpoenaed, and that Hubbell reviewed the records in 1992 and discussed with her "her numerous conferences with Seth Ward."¹⁵

The independent counsel found "substantial evidence" that she did "more than an insubstantial amount of legal work on the IDC matter," "significant evidence" that her testimony about it was "incomplete and factually inaccurate," and three motives to minimize her role: political embarrassment over work "representing the thrift before state agencies regulated under her husband's authority as Governor," possible civil claims against Rose, and possible criminal exposure. It concluded that there was "no substantial evidence to support the conclusion that Mrs. Clinton was a knowing participant in the criminal conduct of McDougal or others," that her statements could not be proven knowingly false beyond a reasonable doubt, and that prosecution was declined.¹⁵

Foster's Office

On the evening of July 20, 1993, after the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, the First Lady's chief of staff Maggie Williams and Patsy Thomasson entered Foster's office; before going to the White House Williams spoke by telephone with Mrs. Clinton. A uniformed Secret Service officer later said he thought he saw Williams leave with documents; Williams passed a polygraph on the question. On July 22 Nussbaum reviewed Foster's files himself and told the Justice Department attorneys David Margolis and Roger Adams that he would turn over only what investigators were entitled to have; they and Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann said he broke an agreement, which Nussbaum denied. There was a series of calls that morning among Mrs. Clinton, Susan Thomases and Williams, and between Thomases and Nussbaum, all of whose participants denied trying to influence the search.¹⁶

After the search, Williams collected the Clintons' personal files and, she testified, called Mrs. Clinton to ask where to put them in the residence; she said Mrs. Clinton told her, "I think Carolyn has a closet up on the third floor that you could use to store them. You should call Carolyn." Williams and a White House Counsel's office intern entered the residence at 7:25 p.m., and Carolyn Huber put the box in a locked closet in Room 323, the room in which she and Mrs. Clinton stored the family's personal papers. The files went to Williams & Connolly on July 27; the firm's index shows that one file in the box was titled "Whitewater Development." On July 26 an associate counsel found a torn note in Foster's briefcase; Nussbaum showed it to Mrs. Clinton, and it was not reported to investigators for about thirty hours, until Attorney General Janet Reno told Nussbaum to hand it over. No complete index of Foster's office was made, and the independent counsel found the evidence insufficient to establish that anyone obstructed justice or that the Clintons withheld documents from the grand jury.¹⁶

Health Care Task Force

On January 25, 1993, President Clinton established the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform with his wife as chairman and as members the Secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Labor and Commerce, the budget director and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. A separate working group of about 300 permanent federal employees, about 40 "special government employees" and an unknown number of consultants was headed by the presidential adviser Ira Magaziner, the only Task Force member who attended its meetings. The Task Force held one public hearing and met behind closed doors at least 20 times in April and May 1993. In Association of American Physicians and Surgeons v. Clinton, decided June 22, 1993, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the Task Force was exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act because 3 U.S.C. 105(e) could be read as treating the President's spouse as "a de facto officer or employee," so that the panel was composed wholly of full-time government officials; it remanded the question of the working group. The district court had held that she was not an officer or employee "merely by virtue of her status as 'First Lady.'"¹⁷

Travel Office and the FBI Files

On May 19, 1993, the seven employees of the White House Travel Office were dismissed; its director, Billy Dale, was later prosecuted and acquitted. On January 4, 1996, the White House produced a 1993 draft memorandum by the management chief David Watkins stating that "Foster regularly informed me that the First Lady was concerned and desired action, the action desired was the firing of the Travel Office staff." Watkins's notes record her telling him on May 14, 1993: "We need those people out. We need our people in. We need the slots." The independent counsel found that the Clintons' friend Harry Thomason was "the impetus for Mrs. Clinton's concerns," and that Mack McLarty, Watkins, Foster and Thomason met on at least three occasions to discuss them. The confidential FBI background report of Billy Dale was requested by White House officials on December 20, 1993, seven months after his dismissal.⁷

In the final report, filed June 22, 2000, and released October 18, 2000, Independent Counsel Robert W. Ray wrote that "the evidence is overwhelming that she in fact did have a role in the decision to fire the employees," that her sworn testimony that she had no input or role "is factually inaccurate," and that the evidence was nevertheless "insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Clinton knowingly made a false statement." The independent counsel "fully and completely" discharged Watkins and Mrs. Clinton "from all criminal liability." Kendall, in a letter of September 28, 2000, appended to the final report, called the "factually inaccurate" finding "highly unfair and misleading."⁷

When the report on the White House acquisition of about 900 FBI background files of former Reagan and Bush administration staff was unsealed on July 28, 2000, Ray stated that "there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation background reports." He found no personal relationship between her and Craig Livingstone, the director of the White House personnel security office, and no corroboration for an FBI document recording that Nussbaum had told agents Livingstone came highly recommended by her and that she knew his mother. She and Livingstone had denied any such relationship under oath.¹⁸

Senate

She served as a senator from New York from January 3, 2001, until her resignation on January 21, 2009, and sat on the Armed Services Committee.²³ On October 11, 2002, she voted yea on House Joint Resolution 114, the authorization for the use of military force against Iraq, which passed 77 to 23.¹⁹

The Clinton Foundation and the State Department

She was sworn in as Secretary of State on January 21, 2009, and her appointment terminated on February 1, 2013.³ At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on January 13, 2009, the ranking member, Richard Lugar, said that "the main issue related to Senator Clinton's nomination that has occupied the Committee" was how her service could be reconciled with the activities of Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, that "foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the Secretary of State," and that "the only certain way to eliminate this risk going forward is for the Clinton Foundation to forswear new foreign contributions." The Obama transition and the Foundation had instead signed a memorandum of understanding requiring disclosure of past donors, annual disclosure thereafter, and a State Department ethics review of donations from foreign governments and government-controlled entities. Lugar called it "a beginning, not an end" and proposed that all foreign gifts of 50,000 dollars or more be reviewed, since "conflicts of interest could arise from a donation from a Gazprom executive or a member of the Saudi Royal family as easily as from the governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia."²⁰

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation (EIN 31-1580204) reported revenue of 57.1 million dollars for 2011 and 54.7 million for 2012. For 2013, the year she left the department, it reported revenue of 148.9 million and contributions of 144.4 million; for 2014, 177.8 million and 172.6 million; for 2015, 116.1 million and 108.9 million; and for 2016, 70.8 million and 62.9 million. Revenue for 2017 was 38.4 million.²¹

Uranium One

On June 30, 2015, Senator Chuck Grassley wrote to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, citing reporting by Jo Becker and Mike McIntire in the New York Times, that in September 2005 Frank Giustra won a uranium deal in Kazakhstan for his company UrAsia days after visiting the country with Bill Clinton, and then gave 31.3 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation; that UrAsia merged into Uranium One; that Uranium One and former UrAsia investors gave 8.65 million dollars between 2008 and 2010 while the company's Kazakh mining licenses were in doubt; that the Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer gave 1 million dollars in 2009 through his family's Fernwood Foundation and 250,000 dollars in 2010 as Rosatom, through its subsidiary ARMZ, sought a majority of the company; and that in June 2010 Bill Clinton was paid 500,000 dollars for a speech in Russia funded by a Russian investment bank. Uranium One and ARMZ notified the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, on which the Secretary of State sits and which Treasury chairs, in the first week of August 2010 and were told on October 22, 2010, that "there were no unresolved national security concerns." Grassley wrote that "Secretary Clinton's involvement in the decision-making process needs to be more closely examined."²²

Dan Friedman of Mother Jones reported that the State Department's representative on the committee, Assistant Secretary Jose Fernandez, told the Times that Clinton "never intervened with me" on any matter before it, that the approval was unanimous among the committee's member agencies, and that a second approval in 2013, when Rosatom bought the remaining shares, came after she had left the department; Giustra said he had sold his interest three years before the Russian purchase.²³ In November 2017 Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the Utah United States Attorney John Huber to review the Foundation and Uranium One matters. Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post reported in January 2020, citing current and former officials, that Huber had conferred with FBI agents in Little Rock handling "a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation," had largely finished and had found nothing worth pursuing, with no criminal charges.²⁴

The Private Email Server

She used a personal email account on a private server for official business throughout her tenure. The State Department inspector general reported in May 2016 that she had not sought approval to do so, that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Information Resource Management "did not, and would not, approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account," and that she "did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act." On January 9, 2011, the outside adviser to Bill Clinton who supported the system shut the server down because he believed "someone was trying to hack us," and later that day wrote, "We were attacked again." Her production omitted the first months of her tenure, and through her counsel she declined the inspector general's request for an interview.²⁵

The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General reported in June 2018 that in the summer of 2014, after the department told her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills that it could not locate her emails for requests from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, she asked Mills and Kendall to oversee their production. Mills, Kendall and the former department lawyer Heather Samuelson devised a method by which Samuelson culled the work-related messages, and in December 2014 she produced about 55,000 pages, about 30,000 emails. The committee sent preservation orders on March 3, 2015. Later that month Paul Combetta of Platte River Networks, the company administering the server, realized he had not applied a retention change Mills had requested months earlier, had what he told the FBI was an "oh shit" moment, and used BleachBit to delete the emails from the server; according to FBI documents her attorneys had advised him of the preservation order before he did so. In all, 31,830 emails her lawyers had deemed personal were deleted from the laptops of Mills and Samuelson and from the server. The Intelligence Community inspector general referred the matter to the FBI on July 6, 2015.²⁶

On June 27, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton met for 20 to 30 minutes aboard Lynch's aircraft at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport; Lynch publicly denied discussing the investigation. Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at FBI headquarters on July 2, 2016, with Mills and Samuelson present as her lawyers. On July 5 FBI Director James Comey described her and her aides as "extremely careless" in handling classified information, a phrase that earlier drafts had rendered "grossly negligent," and said "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case. His statement reported that 110 emails in 52 chains among the 30,000 had contained classified information when sent, eight chains at Top Secret, that the FBI had recovered several thousand more work-related emails, and that "we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them." Lynch accepted the recommendation to decline prosecution on July 6.²⁶

The 2016 Campaign, Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS

In the spring of 2016 the law firm Perkins Coie, counsel to Hillary for America and the Democratic National Committee, retained Fusion GPS, whose co-founder Glenn Simpson in mid-May 2016 retained the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his firm Orbis Business Intelligence; Steele was then also a confidential human source for the FBI.²⁷ Perkins Coie paid Fusion GPS 1,024,407.97 dollars in 2016. Between July 15 and August 26, 2016, the DNC paid Perkins Coie 849,407.97 dollars, of which it reported 782,907.97 dollars as "legal and compliance consulting," and the campaign paid Perkins Coie 175,000 dollars, which it reported as "legal services." On a complaint by the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, the Federal Election Commission voted 4 to 0 on July 23, 2019, to find reason to believe that both committees had misreported the purpose of funds paid to Fusion GPS through Perkins Coie, after deadlocking 2 to 2 on whether they had also misreported the payee. It found probable cause by votes of 4 to 2 on December 16, 2021, and on February 17, 2022, accepted conciliation agreements with civil penalties of 105,000 dollars for the DNC and 8,000 dollars for the campaign. Each committee stated that it "does not concede" the finding and contended that Fusion GPS worked at the direction of Perkins Coie, including in anticipation of litigation. On March 25, 2022, the Commission voted 6 to 0 to dismiss the allegations under the foreign national provision against Steele, Marc Elias, Perkins Coie, the campaign and Fusion GPS.²⁸

The report of Special Counsel John Durham, dated May 12, 2023, records that in late July 2016 American intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that she had approved "a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services," a document the intelligence community said it did not know to be accurate and that "may reflect exaggeration or fabrication." CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on it on August 3, 2016, and on September 7 the intelligence agencies sent an investigative referral on it to Comey and Peter Strzok. The Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann gave the FBI's general counsel data purporting to show a covert channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, telling him he was not acting for any client; Durham found that he was representing the campaign, as shown by Perkins Coie billing records, and the technology executive Rodney Joffe. A jury acquitted Sussmann of making a false statement. At his trial Elias and the campaign manager Robby Mook testified that the campaign did not authorize Sussmann to go to the FBI, and Mook testified that senior campaign officials favored giving the Alfa Bank allegations to the media and that Clinton approved doing so, before their accuracy had been resolved.²⁷

The Hillary Victory Fund

The Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee first registered with the Federal Election Commission on September 10, 2015, with the campaign treasurer Elizabeth Jones as its treasurer, reported 530.0 million dollars in receipts and 529.6 million in disbursements for the 2016 cycle. Its itemized disbursements include 165.9 million dollars to Hillary for America, 108.9 million to the DNC, 68.6 million to the digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive, 29.0 million to the direct-mail firm Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and 11.3 million to Financial Innovations, with transfers of between about 2.5 million and 3.4 million dollars to each of 38 state Democratic parties.²⁹ In the same cycle many of those parties reported disbursements of comparable size to the DNC. The Missouri Democratic State Committee received 3,043,700 dollars from the fund and reported 3,033,700 dollars in disbursements to the DNC; the Mississippi party received 3,025,700 and reported 3,015,700; Wyoming received 3,023,500 and reported 3,013,500; New Jersey, Delaware, Kansas and South Dakota each reported disbursements to the DNC equal to the amounts they received from the fund. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party, which received 3,110,348 dollars, reported 412,626 dollars to the DNC, and the North Carolina party, which received 3,423,484 dollars, reported 379,614.³⁰

House Oversight and Jeffrey Epstein

On July 23, 2025, the Federal Law Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved by voice vote subpoenas to ten people, including both Clintons, in its inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and Chairman James Comer issued them on August 5. Her deposition, first set for October 9, was moved to December 18, 2025; she declined that date, citing a funeral, did not propose a January date, and did not appear on January 14, 2026, under a further subpoena. On January 21, 2026, the committee voted with members of both parties to recommend that the House hold both Clintons in contempt, and on February 3 Comer announced that they had agreed to appear.³¹

She was deposed on February 26, 2026, at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center in Chappaqua, New York. Her opening statement said: "I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices." Afterward she said she had "never met Jeffrey Epstein" and knew Maxwell "casually as an acquaintance," and that Maxwell had attended her daughter's wedding as the guest of an invited guest. Comer said the times she answered "I don't know. You'll have to ask my husband" numbered "more than a dozen," and Representative Scott Perry said questions about the Clinton Global Initiative or the Clintons' relationship with Epstein and Maxwell had to go to Bill Clinton. Representative Lauren Boebert gave a photograph of the closed session to the commentator Benny Johnson, and the deposition was briefly paused.³²

In video released on March 2, 2026, each Clinton is questioned for about four and a half hours. Representative Nancy Mace asked how she had known Howard Lutnick in the early 2000s and said she had an email in which Lutnick invited Epstein and his associates to an "intimate event" on Clinton's behalf at his New York offices; Clinton said she knew nothing about it. Boebert asked her about Pizzagate.³³