On Wednesday, an independent group of Republicans united behind another request, asking the Justice Department to create a special counsel and "investigate the Clinton Foundation and alleged 'pay to play' tactics where donors to the Clinton Foundation were able to obtain inappropriate access to and influence over then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." The grounds for that request: last week's Associated Press story on the access some Clinton Foundation donors received to Clinton's State Department.

Clinton's campaign had waged an unusually successful fight against that story. It quibbled with the AP's initial tweet promoting its findings by saying "half" of the people Clinton met with personally had donated to the foundation. In fact, half of the private citizens — a fraction of all people Clinton met — had donated, and that sample came from the limited schedule the AP had been able to obtain in a transparency struggle with the State Department.

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"You would think after the House Benghazi committee backfired on them so badly, House Republicans would think twice before making more nakedly partisan calls for investigations," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told The Washington Post. "Voters see through this as reflexive partisanship from House Republicans who are just looking for anything else to talk about besides their own party's nominee."

But in the letter, House Republicans cast a wide net. Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.), its main author, suggested that the fact that the Clinton Foundation will stop taking foreign donations after the election was evidence that it was engaged in real-time chicanery.

"This begs the obvious question," Ratcliffe wrote, "about why an inappropriately cozy relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its donors with the President of the United States is deemed unethical, but the same relationship between the Secretary of State and candidate for president were not."

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