Only days before the presidential election, the FBI released an archive of documents from a long-closed investigation into Bill Clinton’s 2001 presidential pardon of a fugitive financier prompting questions from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign about its timing.
The release comes amid the bureau’s controversially timed review of emails from a Hillary Clinton aide. The 129 pages of heavily censored material about Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon of Marc Rich were published Monday on the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act webpage and noted by one of the bureau’s Twitter accounts Tuesday.
Earlier in October, the FBI unit published historical files as far back as 1966 about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The Ms Clinton campaign questioned the bureau's decision to make the file public so close to Tuesday’s election. “Absent a (Freedom of Information Act) deadline, this is odd,” Ms Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted. “Will FBI be posting docs on Trumps’ housing discrimination in ’70s ” Fallon’s reference was to news accounts of a 1973 federal housing discrimination lawsuit, later settled, against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In response to questions Tuesday from AP, the FBI said that the Marc Rich documents “became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI's public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.” The bureau said that under law, documents requested three or more three times are made public “shortly after they are processed.”
That processing, the bureau said, is on a “first in, first out basis.” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he saw the FBI tweet shortly before he boarded Air Force One with President Barack Obama.
