Get-Trump Attorney Spiked Clinton Foundation Investigation

Ray Hulser, the then-head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), withheld information from the U.S. Attorney’s office investigating the Clinton Foundation under Trump 1.0. Hulser would later downplay and/or provide inconsistent details concerning the Clinton Foundation probe to both Trump 1.0’s DOJ and Special Counsel John Durham’s office. In spite of — or maybe because of — that history, Special Counsel Jack Smith selected Hulser to help lead the criminal witch-hunt against Trump, with Hulser personally recommending Smith subpoena the toll records of nearly a dozen Congressional Republicans.

Earlier this month, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote Ray Hulser requesting Hulser appear before the House Judiciary Committee for a transcribed interview on Tuesday, December 30, 2025. Jordan’s letter explained that the committee is investigating “former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s partisan investigations into President Trump and his associates following the 2020 election” and that recently released documents raised concerns over Hulser’s involvement and specifically his role in “subpoenaing phone records for several Members of Congress.”

The “recently released documents” to which Jordan referenced consisted of, among other things, a memorandum drafted by Hulser and his colleague in the special counsel office, J.P. Cooney, seeking authorization from Smith to subpoena the toll records of “Senators Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Cynthia Lummis, Ron Johnson, John Kennedy, Tim Scott, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville, and Representative Mike Kelly.” The documents released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in mid-November of 2025 also included Smith’s email approving the subpoenas.

But it would be the documents Grassley released two weeks ago which revealed Hulser’s role in the weaponization of the DOJ was not limited to the “get Trump” efforts of the Biden Administration and Special Counsel Smith: Those documents suggest Hulser sought to thwart the DOJ’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Grassley’s December 15, 2025 release of documents detailed the origins of three separate investigations into the Clinton Foundation. First, during the summer of 2015, the Washington Field Office discussed predicating an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. In the fall of 2015, FBI agents from the Washington Field Office briefly discussed the probe with Hulser, the then-Chief of the PIN. In late January 2016, the Washington Field Office asked PIN to open a preliminary investigation into Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. According to a timeline included in the Grassley release, on February 1, 2016, the PIN Chief refused to support the investigation.

Special Counsel Durham’s report provides more texture to Hulser’s reasoning: According to Durham, whose team interviewed Hulser as part of the Special Counsel investigation, on February 1, 2016, the FBI briefed Hulser and others on the Clinton Foundation matter. “Hulser noted, in sum,” Durham’s report explained, “that the FBI briefing was poorly presented and that there was insufficient predication for at least one of the investigations due to its reliance on allegations contained in a book.”

“Hulser also downplayed the information provided by the NYFO CHS and recalled that the amount involved in the financial reporting was ‘de minimis,’” Durham wrote, referencing the grounds on which the New York and Little Rock field offices had opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation, namely reporting from a CHS and Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) reporting received by the FBI.

Significantly, in a footnote, Durham stressed that his office had reviewed the reporting from the summer of 2015 from the CHS. That reporting, Durham continued, “was a narrative describing multiple funds transfers, some of which involved international bank accounts that were suspected of possibly facilitating bribery or gratuity violations.”

“The transactions involved occurred between 2012 and 2014, and totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the Special Counsel’s report explained.

Not quite the “de minimis” amounts Hulser suggested to Special Counsel Durham.

Soon after the February 2016 meeting at which Hulser refused to support the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, the then-FBI Special Agent in Charge in the Little Rock office learned from individuals working out of headquarters “that the DOJ was implying this case was just based on open source reporting and fishing through a book.” The timeline memorializing details of the Little Rock investigation noted that the then-SAC responsible for the FBI’s probe into the Clinton Foundation in Arkansas corrected that misrepresentation, explaining that Little Rock opened the investigation into the Clinton Foundation “based on Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) reporting and investigative work, in addition to open source reporting – a source often used to open PC cases, as appropriate.”

Unaware of Hulser’s supposed hostility to the Clinton Foundation investigation, the then-Special Agent in Charge of the Little Rock FBI office, in early February of 2016, briefed the Eastern District of Arkansas’s U.S. Attorney, the first assistant U.S. Attorney, and the Criminal Chief on the Clinton Foundation matter. The then-U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Chris Thyer, agreed to move forward with the investigation. The New York field office had also initiated a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation, according to the newly released documents.

A few weeks later, on February 22, 2016, then-Deputy Director of the FBI, Andy McCabe, chaired a meeting at FBI Headquarters to discuss the Foundation investigations. According to the Durham’s report, “McCabe initially directed the field offices to close their cases, but following objections, agreed to reconsider the final disposition of the cases.” McCabe, according to Durham, stated the Department “says there’s nothing here” and “why are we even doing this?” While McCabe allowed the investigation to continue, Durham’s report noted that FBI agents needed the Deputy Director’s approval before taking any overt investigative steps.

Months later, on November 1, 2016, McCabe recused himself from the Clinton Foundation investigation, as well as the Midyear Exam investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. McCabe only recused from the investigation after the Wall Street Journal in late October 2016 reported that a political-action committee run by the then-“Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and the Virginia Democratic Party (over which the article reported McAuliffe ‘exerts considerable control’) collectively donated nearly $675,000 to the 2015 unsuccessful state Senate campaign of the wife of Andrew McCabe.” The Wall Street Journal explained that McAuliffe was “a longtime ally of the Clintons and . . . a Clinton Foundation Board member” and reported that agents “further down the FBI chain of command” had been told to “‘[s]tand down’ on the Clinton Foundation investigation with the understanding that “the order had come from the deputy director — Mr. McCabe.’”

Both Durham’s report and the documents recently released by Senator Grassley likewise reveal blatant interference by the Obama Administration’s DOJ and FBI into the investigation into Clintons and the Clinton Foundation. As Sen. Grassley explained: “According to emails obtained by my office, on July 20, 2016 — 111 days before the 2016 election — an agent with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division (CID) stated that, ‘based on the sensitivities surrounding the Clinton Foundation,’ agents were prohibited from ‘subpoena[ing] additional records related to the Foundation, the Clintons’; ‘conduct[ing] any interviews related to the Foundation or the Clintons’; and ‘shar[ing] any of the Foundation bank account info with any other offices.’” The declassified timeline released by Grassley also revealed that in July of 2016, FBI headquarters “walled off” the collateral investigation into an individual connected to the Clinton Foundation. By October of 2016, the Obama Administration’s FBI directed Little Rock to close its investigation.

Apparently, had the former head of the PIN Section, Hulser, had his way, no one would have ever known of the wide-spread interference into the investigations into the Clinton Foundation. The timeline included in Grassley’s mid-December release of documents related to the DOJ’s “yearslong efforts to shut down [the] investigation into the Clinton Foundation,” revealed that reality.

According to that timeline, after Trump’s election in 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Arkansas, known as EDAR, and the FBI’s Little Rock field office, reopened the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Then-U.S. Attorney Cody Hiland asked Hulser, who was the then-head of the PIN Section “who made the decision to shut the [original] case down.” According to the timeline, Hulser responded, “that never happened,” even though the Little Rock investigation had clearly been closed.

The timeline further stated that Hulser was “dismissive of the merits of the investigation,” but “promise[d] to provide Hiland with documentation on the case.” However, according to the recently released internal documents, Hulser merely provided then U.S. Attorney Hiland with the opening Electronic Communication “and a 2-page FBI Timeline on the history of the investigation.” 

According to the documents, the timeline Hulser provided then-U.S. Attorney Hiland, was “a stark contrast” from the 6-page FBI timeline the Office of Inspector General would provide Hiland’s Little Rock team in September of 2018. In contrast to the unedited FBI timeline Hiland received from the OIG, Husler’s 2-page version “had omitted ALL references to interference from DOJ and FBI leadership.”

While U.S. Attorney Hiland would not learn of Hulser’s efforts to hide the prior Administration’s interference into the Clinton Foundation investigation until he received the complete FBI timeline from the OIG in September of 2018, the then-U.S. Attorney (and others) apparently already had concerns about Hiland. Specifically, according to the timeline summary of U.S. Attorney Hiland’s investigative steps, during an early-November 2017, meeting with the then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Rob Hur, Hiland expressed concern over “the lack of information currently available, what happened with the case originally being shut down by Main Justice and the lack of resources available to conduct the investigation.” 

Rosenstein directed “Hiland to contact [the] head of Public Integrity Ray Hulser to obtain information on the case.” Soon after U.S. Attorney Hiland spoke with Husler, then-PADAG Hur asked about the meeting. When Hiland noted that “it did not go very well and that Hulser was very dismissive of the investigation,” “Hur instruct[ed] Hiland to exclude Public Integrity and Hulser from the Clinton Foundation Investigation going forward.”

That the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General would direct a U.S. Attorney to cut out the Public Integrity Section from the corruption investigation into the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation speaks volumes. Sidestepping Hulser proved insufficient, however, as the recently released documents, which includes then-U.S. Attorney Hiland’s summary of the obstruction, revealed.

These details are only now coming to light, first because Trump won re-election and second because he put in place officials such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. And unlike their predecessors, these individuals are cooperating with Congressional oversight committees, providing responsive documents to Sen. Grassley, Rep. Jordan, and others.

Following his re-election, Trump has also begun to clean house of the deep state resistance hiding behind the “career employee” label. And one of those fired? Ray Hulser.

At the time of his firing in February, Hulser’s involvement in the Clinton Foundation (non-) investigation was not a focus of public attention, with him instead portrayed as one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s “top deputies” who was fired “after 34 years of service prosecuting public corruption cases.” Hulser himself pushed that narrative in a Letter to the Editor published by the Washington Post earlier this year, under the caption: “I’m a career prosecutor. Trump fired me, but I know what I did for the U.S.”

Hulser’s letter then proceeded to highlight his career of supposed unbiased prosecution of Democrats and Republicans alike, before claiming that for more than 30 years he served the public, treating everyone with respect, while prosecuting “countless people based on a simple formula: the facts and the law.” “Many of those people admitted their guilt, some shook my hand, and one of them fired me,” Hulser wrote, a not-so-subtle proclamation of Trump’s guilt and Hulser’s own supposed purity in pursuing the criminal cases against Trump as one of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s top deputies.

The recently released documents concerning Hulser’s conduct during the Clinton Foundation investigations tells a much different story about this supposed unbiased career civil servant. And revisiting Durham report’s discussion of Hulser’s branding of hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential bribes as de minimis, seems to confirm that perspective.

Hulser’s involvement in the thwarting of the Clinton Foundation investigation and his efforts to secret from then-U.S. Attorney Hiland the “interference from DOJ and FBI leadership,” should raise alarms over Hulser’s role as one of Special Counsel Smith’s top deputies. While we already know Hulser played a key role in the decision to subpoena Congressional Republicans’ phone records, what other steps the former “public integrity” head took in the get-Trump investigations remains to be seen.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.