Newly released emails from staff members at the State Department under Hillary Clinton show ‘coordination’ between that branch of government and the Clinton Foundation, in a clear violation of ethics and possibly laws. This is in spite of a pledge Hillary Clinton made in 2009 to remove herself from the business of the Clinton Foundation while she headed the Department.
The Clinton Foundation, ostensibly a nonprofit charity established by the Clintons to perform humanitarian work, has been accused of acting as a slush fund and personal piggy bank for the couple.
Political observers have termed it a vehicle by which businesses such as defense contractors and foreign governments, such as those of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, could enrich the Clintons as they performed favors for the companies and regimes.
For instance, in 2011, Clinton’s State Department OK’d a weapons deal for Boeing and other companies to sell $29 billion worth of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. This was two months after Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Still later, Saudi Arabia gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Foundation.
On a recent edition of CNN’s New Day news program, co-host Chris Cuomo challenged these connections, stating, “These 44 emails, you know, many of which show coordination between staffers of one and staffers of the other, it’s wrong. She said in 2009 she wouldn’t do it anymore, and it continued after that.”
Cuomo was corrected by commentator Christine Quinn, who pointed out that none of the emails were from Hillary herself but were instead sent by State Department employees including Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin as well as Clinton family advisor Douglas Band.
Cuomo, however, argued that was a minor point, rhetorically asking Quinn, “So, you give her no responsibility for what the people underneath her do?” As an example, he said, “If they work for me, and it’s done as something that would be seen in the vein of what I want done, of course it’s going to come back to me.”
Further, CNN reported that the Department of Justice under Attorney General Loretta Lynch blocked the FBI from investigating the Clinton Foundation earlier this year. At the time, the FBI was looking at Clinton’s and her aides’ role in setting up her private email server, which later was found to have sent and received classified messages.
Two FBI agents had requested a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and the Justice Department denied their request, saying that its own officials had found insufficient evidence to scrutinize the Foundation a year prior to the FBI’s examination.
However, the FBI may be conducting a probe nonetheless, as FBI Director James Comey refused to say one way or the other if a study was ongoing. “I’m not going to comment on the existence or non-existence of any investigation,” Comey stated to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a televised hearing.
During an interview on Fox News in July, Clinton was criticized for telling host Chris Wallace that her past statements to FBI Director James Comey were “truthful,” a claim that Factcheck.org and other news vetting outlets found to be false.
Clinton later said that she had “short-circuited” with her response, an excuse that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump immediately attacked, tweeting, “anybody whose mind SHORT CIRCUITS is not fit to be our president! … Very dangerous!”
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, released 296 pages of emails that showed instances of Clinton Foundation officials giving the organization’s donors access to State Department contacts.
In 2009, a top official at the Clinton Foundation arranged a meeting between the previous U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Jeff Feltman, and a notorious Nigerian billionaire donor to the foundation, Gilbert Chagoury, who had business in the Middle East.
Douglas Band wrote, “We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re Lebanon… As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp.” Huma Abedin responded, “I’ll talk to Jeff.” Later, Band emailed Abedin back, saying, “Better if you call him. Now preferable. This is very important.”
Judicial Watch stated that Chagoury “pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline, Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government.”
In 2003, Chagoury, a known associate of former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, helped organize a trip to the Caribbean for Bill Clinton during which the former president was paid $100,000 for a speech there. In 2007, both Chagoury and Bill Clinton attended the wedding of Douglas Band in France.
Another email showed a Clinton Foundation staff member thanking a Hillary Clinton aide at the State Department for being able to go on a trip to Haiti that was “eye-opening” and inquiring about working for Clinton’s government agency.
The person’s name on the email was withheld, but Douglas Band wrote to Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills that the staffer’s request was “important to take care of.” The subject line of the email read, “A favor…” Abedin replied, “We have all had him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.” Band responded, “Great.”
It should be noted that Douglas Band was one of the key people who helped Clintons establish the Clinton Foundation in 2001. He also co-founded Teneo Holdings, a business that, according to Wikipedia, serves as a “U.S.-based global advisory firm that partners exclusively with the Chief Executive Officers and senior leaders of many of the world’s largest and most complex companies and organizations.”
Wikipedia notes that Bill Clinton, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Huma Abedin have all at one time or another acted as paid consultants for Teneo.
Judicial Watch further asserted that the 44 heavily redacted emails had not been previously transferred to the State Department as part of the thousands of messages requested in Clinton’s email server probe.
Judicial Watch released a statement that read, “Clinton’s top aides’ favors for and interactions with the Clinton Foundation seem in violation of the ethics agreements that Hillary Clinton agreed to in order to be appointed and confirmed as Secretary of State.”
For her part, Hillary Clinton denied claims of wrongdoing through a spokesman, saying that the email exchanges represented the staffers functioning as her personal aides, not as employees at the State Department. (At the time of the emails, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills both had dual roles working for Clinton’s State Department and for Hillary Clinton herself.)
The spokesman also stressed that the Clinton Foundation staff member that Douglas Band was trying to find a job for was not a donor to the Foundation, but merely one of its employees.
It should be mentioned that in an underreported action at the beginning of her presidential campaign, Clinton removed her name from the board of the Clinton Foundation. Both Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton currently remain attached to and employed by it.
“That the Clinton Foundation was calling in favors barely three months into Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department is deeply troubling, and it is yet another reminder of the conflicts of interest and unethical wheeling and dealing she’d bring to the White House,” declared Michael Short, a spokesman at the Republican National Committee.
From these and previous reports, it appears clear that the Clinton Foundation may be the place to start searching when it comes to evidence of the Clintons’ improprieties. Although the Foundation is theoretically a nonprofit organization, numerous reports of financial irregularities, accounting cover-ups and fraud have regularly appeared in the press regarding the Foundation.
Most of the Foundation’s donors are outside the United States. On more than one occasion, the Clintons have admitted that record-keeping and the following of reporting regulations at the organization have been lax and even errant in the past.
Management of the Foundation has ordered outside reviews of the nonprofit’s structure, legal and budgeting practices. In 2015, Eric Braverman, the Foundation’s CEO, resigned amidst an internal “power struggle,” according to political website Politico.
That the Justice Department attempted to block an investigation by the FBI into the Foundation is further proof that Attorney General Loretta Lynch, has put the Clintons “above the law” and made them immune from prosecution for their crimes.
It’s now past high time that conservatives write to their members of Congress and demand a formal, independent investigation into the Clinton Foundation once and for all.
