A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look into concerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing — though the assignment has not formally ended and no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, these people said.
The effective conclusion of his investigation, with no criminal charges or other known impacts, is likely to roil some in the GOP who had hoped the prosecutor would vindicate their long-held suspicions about a political rival.
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Clinton and her family have been subjected to significant law enforcement and other scrutiny over the years — though the various probes have mostly delivered reputational blows, rather than legal ones. When she ran against Trump in 2016, the FBI investigated her use of a private email server to determine whether she had mishandled classified information when she was secretary of state. Officials ultimately determined the case should be closed without charges. The State Department more recently concluded a multiyear probe of its own into the matter, but concluded there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information by employees.
The Clinton family foundation has separately faced investigation over the years on vague corruption allegations, though so far those probes have not produced any charges.
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Republicans questioned whether there was misconduct in the U.S. government’s decision to not block a 2010 acquisition in which Russia’s atomic energy agency, Rosatom, acquired a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Toronto-based company. The deal meant that Rosatom received rights to about 20 percent of the uranium extraction capacity in the United States.
That transaction had a tenuous connection to Clinton, who was running the State Department at the time.
Under obscure government rules, the deal required approval from a multiagency board because it involved giving a foreign government control of an American business commodity with national security implications. The board, called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is composed of representatives from nine agencies, including the State Department. Clinton herself was never on the CFIUS board.
In rare cases, CFIUS can decide to intervene and block a corporate merger or acquisition if the board feels the risk to U.S. national security is too great.
Conservatives questioned whether Clinton may have manipulated CFIUS to let the acquisition proceed, but current and former officials have denied that, saying such a decision was handled well below the level of the secretary of state.
