A mostly dormant FBI Twitter account suddenly started releasing...
A mostly dormant FBI Twitter account suddenly started releasing information related to Trump and Clinton
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The FBI Records Vault
Twitter account released documents on Tuesday about Bill
Clinton's controversial 2001 presidential pardon of hedge fund
manager Marc Rich.
Sean Rayford/Getty
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A mostly dormant Twitter account operated by the FBI has in recent days released files about Donald Trump's father and records from a 15-year-old investigation into the Clinton Foundation that was closed in 2005.
The account, which is verified and tweets as "FBI Records Vault," drew attention after sharing files around noon Tuesday related to former President Bill Clinton's 2001 presidential pardon of hedge fund manager Marc Rich on his last day in office.
Hillary Clinton's campaign and other observers questioned whether it was appropriate for the FBI to begin releasing documents related to Bill Clinton one week before the presidential election.
Some called it a "November surprise" and said it suggested further evidence of FBI meddling, especially given the bureau's surprise announcement on Friday that it would examine more documents related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation that had been closed in July.
"Absent a FOIA" — Freedom of Information Act — "litigation deadline, this is odd," Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. "Will FBI be posting docs on Trump's housing discrimination in '70s?"
Two days earlier, the account shared documents related to Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father, calling him "a real estate developer and philanthropist." That release was also condemned by some political observers who felt it unfairly omitted information about allegations of racial bias that plagued Trump's real-estate company in the 1970s.
"By law, FOIA materials that have been requested three or more times are posted electronically to the FBI's public reading room shortly after they are processed," the statement read. "Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI's public reading room."
Jason Leopold, a Vice News reporter who is well versed in FOIA requests and FBI procedure for releasing classified information, wrote on Twitter that the tweets are neither "news nor scandalous. The [account] is the FOIA reading room tweeting whenever there's a new posting."
It's unclear, however, whether the documents are tweeted automatically or manually by the bureau. The documents relating to Fred Trump, for example, were released by the bureau on October 7 but tweeted on October 30.
As such, many wondered why the account had suddenly come out of relative dormancy a few weeks before the election.
"Whatever the reasoning behind it, this latest release further brands the FBI as the Federal Bureau of Intervention," David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter. "It's a head-scratcher!"
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