As Mr. Mueller’s investigation has intensified, the president and his conservative allies have mounted blistering counterattacks trying to discredit the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump has described the investigation as a witch hunt and accused F.B.I. leadership under the bureau’s former director, James B. Comey, of being biased toward Mrs. Clinton.
Some congressional Republicans have sought to cast doubt on an explosive dossier of unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Trump. On Friday, two influential Republican senators asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, a respected former British spy, lied to the federal authorities.
Mr. Trump’s calls to investigate Mrs. Clinton break with longstanding presidential practice. Since the Watergate scandal, the Justice Department has conducted criminal investigations largely free of political influence from the White House. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has declared that he has an “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”
The Clinton Foundation dismissed the investigation as politicized.
“Time after time, the Clinton Foundation has been subjected to politically motivated allegations, and time after time, these allegations have been proven false,” Craig Minassian, a spokesman for the foundation, said in a statement.
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, added: “Let’s call this what it is: a sham. This is a philanthropy that does life-changing work, which Republicans have tried to turn into a political football. It’s disgraceful, and should be concerning to all Americans.”
The foundation, which was formed in 1997 during Bill Clinton’s presidency and has raised roughly $2 billion, has been a repeated target for Republicans. In 2015, the conservative author Peter Schweizer published “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” an investigation of donations to the foundation made by foreign entities.
Mr. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, where Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, was a founder and the executive chairman.
The Justice Department, in a letter sent in November to the House Judiciary Committee, said prosecutors would examine allegations that donations to the Clinton Foundation were tied to a 2010 decision by the Obama administration to allow a Russian nuclear agency to buy Uranium One, a company that owned access to uranium in the United States, as well as other issues.
The letter appeared to be a direct response to Mr. Trump’s statement days earlier that he was disappointed with Mr. Sessions for not investigating Mrs. Clinton. An administration official said the F.B.I. had taken investigative steps related to the foundation inquiry before the Justice Department sent the letter to the judiciary committee.
In the letter, the Justice Department wrote that the attorney general had directed “senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues.” Those prosecutors would make “recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a special counsel.”
Several F.B.I. offices, including those in New York and Little Rock, Ark., had been investigating the foundation. At the direction of Mark F. Giuliano, then the deputy director of the F.B.I., the investigations were consolidated at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington and placed under the supervision of career public integrity prosecutors.
The decision by senior F.B.I. officials and prosecutors not to move forward with the case angered some agents while others believed there was little evidence to support more aggressive steps during a presidential campaign.
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