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FBI Director Kash Patel found a damning memo written in October 2017 that details the timeline of the probes into twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's alleged pay-to-play scheme.
It is clear from the heavily redacted memo, which was first obtained by Just the News, that the investigations into Clinton's alleged scheme — set in motion following the publication of Governmental Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer's bestselling book "Clinton Cash" — appear to have been brought to a screeching halt by then-Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates with the help of other Justice Department and FBI officials.
Background
Hillary Clinton dealt with two particularly big scandals in 2016 before her humiliating electoral defeat.
One of the scandals concerned her use of a personal email system for official communications during her time as Obama's first secretary of state.
Authorities reportedly found hundreds of emails on her private system — which was vulnerable to hacking and enabled her to go off-the-books with her official engagements — containing classified information. Eight email chains were allegedly found to contain Top Secret information; 36 chains allegedly contained Secret information; and eight allegedly contained Confidential information.
The second scandal, which was brought to the nation's attention thanks to Schweizer's book, concerned the Clintons' alleged pay-to-play and bribery scheme, where big-time donors to the Clinton Foundation reportedly frequently found themselves materially benefiting from actions taken by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state.
The 2017 FBI memo
The memo recently secured by Patel indicates that on Feb. 1, 2016 — just days after FBI agents at field offices in New York, Arkansas, and the District of Columbia launched investigations into the Clinton Foundation regarding the allegations in Schweizer's book — the Obama Justice Department indicated that "they would not be supportive of a FBI investigation."
RELATED: Declassified report: Obama’s FBI failed to search key evidence in Clinton email probe
Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic
The FBI timeline indicates that 16 days later, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe "directed that no overt investigative steps were to be taken on the CF investigation without his approval."
The Durham report previously revealed that in February, McCabe — who had a possible conflict of interest and was described by one former FBI official as being "annoyed" and "angry" at the time — apparently leaned on the field agents to close their cases and that those restrictions on overt investigative activities remained in place for several months.
When speaking on Thursday to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck about the significance of the revelations, Schweizer, who confirmed he worked with the FBI as a confidential informant, expressed his admiration for the FBI field agents who tried to hold Clinton accountable.
"I can't speak highly enough of them," said Schweizer. "They doggedly continued those investigations because they saw how much smoke and fire was actually there."
Despite agents being well-positioned to continue digging — particularly those at the Little Rock field office — FBI leaders continued to set up roadblocks, prohibiting agents from taking additional "investigative steps" or from reaching out to new confidential human sources.
Sally Yates. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The FBI memo indicated that sometime around March 2016, Sally Yates apparently ordered the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern District of Arkansas to "shut it down."
'The deep state is really becoming clear right now.'
Schweizer told Beck that Yates' purported order was "highly, highly, highly unusual because field offices are supposed to organically follow leads and investigate, and to have the headquarters shut down an investigation on somebody as important as the Clintons ... speaks of course of the problems of the deep state that you highlighted for so many years."
Months after Yates allegedly spiked the Arkansas investigation into the Clinton Foundation, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Eastern District of New York made clear they "would not support the investigation" and apparently provided no explanation as to why.
"The deep state is really becoming clear right now," said Glenn Beck.
Additional insights
The Durham annex that was declassified by CIA Director John Ratcliffe last month provided insights into the alleged effort by former President Barack Obama to simultaneously protect his legacy and spare Clinton from accountability.
Russian intelligence services apparently hacked and gained access to the emails of a number of American government entities, nonprofit organizations, and think tanks ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Among the organizations allegedly hacked by Russian actors was Democratic mega-donor George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
A source shared with the FBI some of the intelligence gathered in these hacks — including purported emails between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two individuals at George Soros' Open Society Foundations, Jeffrey Goldstein and Leonard Benardo — the latter of whom just hid his tweets on X.
The source conveyed this information to the feds in two memos, one in January 2016 and the second in March 2016.
The first memo indicated on the basis of alleged communications between Schultz and Benardo that former President Barack Obama apparently sought to torpedo the FBI's investigation into the pay-to-play scheme that Hillary Clinton allegedly ran while secretary of state for fear of the scandal staining his legacy.
According to the second memo, Schultz confided in Benardo that Obama "sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department."
Blaze News reached out to Schultz and to Obama's office for comment.
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