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Hillary Clinton hit with ethics complaint aimed at law license over role in Russia investigation

By Emily Hallas August 20, 2025 | updated 10 hours ago

A government watchdog filed an ethics complaint this week in Arkansas against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over concerns she helped conspire to derail President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign by fabricating ties between his team and Russia.

Democracy Restored is seeking a “formal review” into Clinton from the Arkansas state bar that could strip her of her license to practice law, citing in part her campaign’s promotion of the Steele dossier, widely viewed as a largely discredited report that fueled the government’s Russia-Trump investigation.

The organization’s demands follow recent assessments by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others that the Russia-Trump investigation was severely compromised by partisan bias favoring the former secretary of state. Democracy Restored’s complaint also pointed to the release of recently declassified federal documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee that it says could prove Clinton authorized a plan during her 2016 campaign against Trump designed to bring her political rival down by tying him to Russia.

“Within this release, there is an annex, which suggests that Clinton approved a plan created by one of her advisers to release false information with the purpose ‘to smear’ her political opponent during a presidential campaign and distract from the news surrounding her own legal accusations,” the complaint states, according to Fox News. 

Allegations that Trump was waging election interference sparked in 2016 as he campaigned against Clinton, who was then-President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. 

At the time, Clinton’s campaign team and the Democratic National Committee financed research into those allegations through the Steele dossier, according to a Federal Election Commission investigation that accused the former secretary of state of misrepresenting financial funding as legal services to obscure the spending.

The Clinton campaign denied claims it misrepresented how it financially backed the Steele dossier, although it and the DNC agreed in 2022 to settle the case by paying $113,000 to the FEC. 

The Steele dossier sparked various federal investigations into Trump at the height of his campaign against Clinton, including investigations from John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.

“The Clinton campaign fed this information to the FBI, media, and others in Washington, D.C.,” the Democracy Restored complaint reads. “These unverified and false allegations became so synonymous with Hillary Clinton that Special Counsel John Durham called the intelligence the ‘Clinton Plan intelligence.’”

RUSSIAGATE DEFINITIVE TIMELINE: HOW NEW INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS FIT IN

Gabbard has expressed concern that Clinton benefited from the Russia-Trump investigation, including when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence chief declassified documents in July that she said provided evidence that the Obama administration’s intelligence officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork” for a federal investigation into Russian ties to Trump’s campaign.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s principal interests relating to the 2016 election were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, not show any preference of a certain candidate,” Gabbard told reporters. “In fact, this report shows Putin held back leaking — held back from leaking compromising material on Hillary Clinton prior to the election, instead planning to release it after the election to weaken what Moscow viewed as an inevitable Clinton presidency.”

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Emily Hallas

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