Richard Pollock

Reporter

7:26 PM 06/04/2017

Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has launched a new investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s effort to thwart a Bangladesh government corruption probe of Muhammad Yunus, a Clinton Foundation donor and close friend of the Clintons.

The Iowa Republican’s effort is the first new official inquiry of Clinton since her unexpected loss in the 2016 presidential election to President Donald Trump. Trump’s supporters often chanted “lock her up” during his many boisterous campaign rallies.

But upon assuming the presidency, Trump and leaders of the Republican-majority Congress displayed little appetite for reopening investigations of Clinton’s tenure as the chief U.S. diplomat and multiple persistent allegations of “pay-to-play” corruption involving the Clinton Foundation. Until now.

The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF) Investigative Group exclusively reported in May that Clinton sent top U.S. diplomats to pressure Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina and her son Sajeeb Wazed in an effort to kill that country’s corruption investigation of Yunus and Grameen Bank. Yunus was then managing director of the state-owned Bangladesh bank.

In a June 1, 2017, letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Grassley repeated TheDCNF charge that Clinton threatened Wazed with an IRS tax audit if his mother did not back away from the corruption probe. Wazed has lived in the U.S. for 17 years.

“If the Secretary of State used her position to intervene in an independent investigation by a sovereign government simply because of a personal and financial relationship stemming from the Clinton Foundation rather than the legitimate foreign policy interests of the United States, then that would be unacceptable,” Grassley told Tillerson.

“Co-mingling her official position as Secretary of State with her family foundation would be similarly inappropriate. It is vital to determine whether the State Department had any role in the threat of an IRS audit against the son of the Prime Minister in retaliation for this investigation,” Grassley continued.

Grassley described how U.S. ambassadors James Moriarty and Dan Mozena, as well as Jon Danilowica, the Deputy Chief of Mission, met with Wazed in the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, on numerous occasions while the corruption investigation was underway. All three are career diplomats.

Another official, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah also met with Wazed. Shah’s agency awarded $13 million to Yunus organizations and another $11 million to allied Yunus organizations during Clinton’s tenure. The Department of State oversees USAID programs.

As TheDCNF previously reported, Clinton’s aid to Yunus included 18 grants, contracts and loans awarded to two of his America-based foundations, the Grameen Foundation USA and Grameen America, according to USASpending.gov.

Yunus was stripped of his directorship of the state owned Grameen Bank in 2011 as a result of the Bangladesh government’s review of his financial mismanagement of the bank and its “micro-credit” loan program for poor peasants, mainly women.

A Norwegian documentary charging Yunus personally diverted $100 million intended for Grameen Bank and for the poor to his other organizations triggered the initial investigation against him. The pocketing of funds shocked many in poverty-stricken Bangladesh where the annual per capita income is about $3,600, according to the World Bank.

Yunus eventually returned the money to Grameen Bank, but

http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/04/senate-committee-launches-a-new-c...