Senate Examining Prior DOJ Effort To Shut Down Probe Into Hillary’s Anti-Trump Dossier

The Senate Judiciary Committee is now digging into new allegations that the Justice Department under previous leadership may have quietly shut down an investigation into the Clinton campaign’s financing of the infamous Steele dossier — the same political operation that helped trigger the Russia hoax against Donald Trump.

According to new disclosures reported by the Washington Times, a whistleblower has come forward claiming that two top DOJ officials who later helped drive the Biden-era “Arctic Frost” prosecution of President Trump were previously involved in blocking an FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the concealed funding that produced the discredited dossier.

Committee Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) released internal emails from June 2019 showing correspondence between an unnamed FBI agent and two senior Justice Department figures at the time: Richard Pilger of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section and J.P. Cooney, then a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.

The emails reveal Pilger and Cooney dismissing the FBI agent’s concerns about what he described as the “unambiguous concealment” of the Clinton campaign’s and DNC’s funding of the Steele dossier through Fusion GPS. Those payments — more than $1 million — were disguised as mere “legal services” through the Clinton-aligned law firm Perkins Coie, a move critics say was designed to hide the political nature of the dossier operation.

The FBI agent wrote that Pilger responded with remarks that “were intended to have a chilling effect and stop me from asking questions,” adding:
“In my [redacted] years of being an agent, a successful agent with a great reputation, I have never been met with such suspicion or response intended to have me go away.”

Pilger, who later played a central role in greenlighting Jack Smith’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump after the 2020 election, appeared openly hostile to the inquiry. Cooney would go on to serve as Smith’s deputy during that same probe, which the whistleblower argues shows a pattern of partisan decision-making inside the DOJ.

Grassley, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, demanded records, communications, and internal documentation relating to why the FBI’s Clinton/DNC inquiry was halted — and by whom.

“These records show the same partisans who rushed to cover for Clinton rabidly pursued Arctic Frost, which was a runaway train aimed directly at President Trump and the Republican political apparatus,” Grassley wrote.

Among the newly released records is a June 21, 2019 email in which Pilger chastised the FBI agent for seeking to open a probe into the concealed payments, accusing the agent of “bias” and “a rush to judgment.” One week earlier, Cooney had attempted to shut the matter down by arguing the case was “not a good candidate to open for a false reporting case” because the payments flowed through Perkins Coie rather than directly from the Clinton campaign.

“Although not typically what we think of as legal services, I think we would have an exceedingly difficult time proving it was a willfully false report,” Cooney wrote.

But the political project funded by those payments — the Steele dossier — has since been widely discredited as a collection of unverified and false allegations. Yet it was still used by James Comey’s FBI as a basis to justify a secret counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign.

No criminal charges were ever brought against the Clinton campaign or the DNC for the concealed funding. Instead, watchdog complaints eventually led the FEC to impose small civil fines: $8,000 for the Clinton campaign and $105,000 for the DNC — minor penalties given the magnitude and impact of the scheme.

Grassley’s inquiry now lays bare the growing evidence that the same DOJ officials who looked the other way for Democrats aggressively moved against Trump — raising fresh questions about politically motivated enforcement inside the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.