This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

There long have been concerns that the Clinton Foundation, run by politicians Bill and Hillary Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, operated as a pay-to-play scheme, taking in "donations" from corporations and foreign countries that wanted to gain influence.

After all, Bill Clinton was president from 1993 to 2001, and Hillary Clinton was secretary of state for Barack Obama. During that time, specifically, donations surged, while after she was out of office and out of power, they plunged.

Now a new report from Just the News, which repeatedly has investigated the foundation and its cash flow, notes that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI chief Kash Patel have given to Congress "a new cache of documents showing how Bill and Hillary Clinton's foundation collected donations from foreign and domestic interests seeking influence."

The documentation now raises anew concerns that such evidence was kept from federal prosecutors who tried to investigate pay-to-play allegations against the former first family a decade ago, the report explained.

The evidence, given recently to the Senate Judiciary Committee, details multiple instances where foreigners, "and even a U.S. defense contractor," sought to "curry favor with the Clintons through donations to their family charity."

Some of the evidence previously had been cited by whistleblowers who charged it was concealed during a corruption investigation in 2015 by the U.S. attorney's office in Little Rock, Arkansas, an effort that shortly later was shut down by Obama and his Department of Justice.

"The documents will make clear that there was an effort 'to obstruct legitimate inquiries into the foundation by blocking real investigation by line-level FBI agents and DOJ field prosecutors and keeping them from following the money,' said one official directly familiar with the documents," the report said.

There had been at least three attempts to review the "pay-to-play" scandal involving the Clinton Foundation but all were ordered closed by the Obama administration.

The new evidence was described as showing how lower-level FBI agents and some prosecutors deprived the decision-makers in those investigations of information about the foundation.

The scandal even encompasses Hillary Clinton's decision to keep government secrets, while she was secretary of state, on a private email server in her home, as she was accused of doing that "so she could hide her Clinton Foundation pay-to-play," according to a report.

According to emails obtained by Judicial Watch, Hillary Clinton gave preferential treatment to Clinton Foundation donors while she was secretary of state.

There was a time when the FBI was reviewing at least 19 Clinton Foundation bank accounts for campaign finance fraud, before the review was shut down.

Previously reported was the declassification of a government document confirming the efforts by the FBI and DOJ to block any review of Clinton Foundation behaviors.

It was Just the News that revealed the actions at the time, heading into the 2016 election, when the family foundation run by the Clintons solicited "contributions" and "donations" – totaling hundreds of millions of dollars – from various groups that had business pending before the federal bureaucracy, which Hillary Clinton ran.

The report explained Patel found a "bombshell" memo from 2017 that chronicled the "extensive political obstruction that career agents in three cities faced from their own bosses and the Obama Justice Department during the 2016 election as they probed whether Hillary Clinton engaged in a pay-to-play corruption scheme."

The government documents show Sally Yates, then deputy attorney general, ordered, "Shut it down!"