Judicial Watch received 508 pages of documents in response to a FOIA lawsuit most of which were too redacted to have meaning, but the 60+ pages remaining revealed brand spanking new conflicts of interest between the Hillary Clinton-led State Department and the Clinton Foundation in Haiti. These new revelations are in addition to previous evidence of Haitian “funny business” between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s State Dept.
The documents were released as a of a federal court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department three and a half years ago (on May 28, 2013) (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)). It’s incredible that the State Department wasted taxpayer time and money to protect Clinton–well maybe not the Obama adminstration wanted her to be the next president, so to them it was worth wasting taxpayer cash.
The documents included an undated, unsigned memo entitled “Private Sector Opportunities for WJC” [William Jefferson Clinton]. The memo provided capabilities analysis of three companies with major investment interests in Haiti: Tetra Pak, Seaboard, and Cemex (see first document embedded below)
The documents also include a lengthy March 2009 email from Clinton Foundation Director of Foreign Policy Amitabh Desai to former Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro and subsequently forwarded to top Clinton aide Jake Sullivan containing the names of nearly 200 then-current and former heads of state to be invited to the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting. The list includes dignitaries from Saudi Arabia, which gave $14.5 million to the Clinton Foundation; Kuwait, which gave between $5 and $10 million; Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar – all of which donated between $1 and $5 million over the years. In February 2015, the Washington Post reported, “A third of foundation donors who have given more than $1 million are foreign governments or other entities … and foreign donors make up more than half of those who have given more than $5 million.” (See second document embedded below).
In July 2014, Judicial Watch released more than 200 conflict-of-interest reviews by State Department ethics advisers of proposed Bill Clinton speaking and consulting engagements during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The documents show that Mr. Clinton’s office proposed 215 speeches around the globe. And 215 times, the State Department stated that it had “no objection.” The Washington Examiner published a report by Judicial Watch Chief Investigative Reporter Micah Morrison and Examiner Senior Watchdog Reporter Luke Rosiak which notes that Mr. Clinton “earned $48 million while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy, raising questions about whether the Clintons fulfilled ethics agreements related to the Clinton Foundation during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.”
“It is a scandal that the Obama administration stalled the release of these smoking gun documents for over five years,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents show that Hillary and Bill Clinton’s machine sought to shake down almost every country in the world, from Saudi Arabia to desperately poor Haiti. President-elect Trump can’t move fast enough to launch a serious criminal investigation of the Clinton cash machine.”
This is not the first report of Clinton Foundation/State Department funny business in Haiti. After that horrible 7.0 magnitude earthquake in January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, Clinton Foundation Chief/ former POTUS Bubba visited Haiti just a few days after the devastation occurred. Both promised to help Haiti rebuild. In fact, Bill was named the UN special envoy to Haiti and in conjunction with his Secretary of State wife controlled billions of dollars of contracts awarded by the State Department to rebuild Haiti. “Coincidentally” many of those companies who got one of those lucrative State Dept. contracts to help rebuild Haiti, also “just happened to” give large donations to the Clinton Foundation.
The Govt. of Haiti set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and installed the Haitian Prime Minister and Bill Clinton as co-chairs of the commission’s executive committee. But soon a number of members of that commission wrote a letter expressing concerns they were not involved in the process and all of the decisions were being made by Clinton and the Prime Minister and they claimed and argued the national priority of the Haitians were being disregarded by the decisions being made. They were correct.
For example, there was the Haitian Mobile Money Initiative a system developed to allow Haitians to transfer money via cell phones. That contract was awarded to a company called Digicel who earned more than $50 million in Haiti. The company is run by Irish billionaire who set-up high-paying speeches for Bill Clinton and donated millions of his own money to the Clinton Foundation.
Another program to enable Haiti to raise needed capital by exploiting the country’s mineral resources. One of the companies which got a mining permit was VCS Mining. The company had little experience in mining, but right after they got the contract “just happened” to put Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony, on its Board of Directors.
Then there was the Caracol Industrial Park, announced in Haiti with great fanfare at a ceremony which included many American Celebrities. The Anchor store is a Korean manufacturer who “just happened” to be Clinton supporters.
During the presidential campaign, the former president of the Haitian Senate, Bernard Sansaricq, told Donald Trump that he had the documentation to prove that the Clintons tried to bribe him in an effort to get his support for the Clinton foundation’s work to defraud the people of Haiti.
A second possible bribery was exposed this past September. Apparently on Jan. 27, 2011, Clinton Foundation Chief Operating Officer Laura Graham sent an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills, voicing concern about a rumor. Ms. Graham had heard that Foggy Bottom was thinking about revoking the U.S. visa of Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive. “WJC will be v unhappy if that’s the case,” Ms. Graham warned Ms. Mills, using the initials of the former president.
Ms. Graham, who was also chief of staff to Mr. Clinton at the foundation, had other reasons to worry: “I’m also staying at [Mr. Bellerive’s] house fyi so exposure in general and this weekend in particular for WJC on this.”
So Clinton Foundation staff was hobnobbing with a powerful Haitian politician and using connections at the State Department to try to influence U.S. policy decisions involving that same politician. That’s unethical and it is also contrary to what Mrs. Clinton promised when she went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2009 as president-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state nominee. But most of those promises were ignored.
I probably don’t have to tell you that Prime Minister Bellerive got to keep his visa and Ms. Graham didn’t get kicked out of his house that weekend. The Wall Street Journal went on to explain that Mr. Bellerive and the Clintons made a lot of money by working together to milk Haiti for all they could.
The best part of the new Haiti revelations (as well as bringing up the old ones) is that we cannot be accused of creating Clinton scandals to deny her the Presidency. The American people denied her the presidency, therefore the Democrats can no longer claim that the investigation of the Clinton Foundation/Clinton State Department conflicts of interests are anything except what they have always been about holding criminals to account for their crimes.
“Private Sector Opportunities for WJC” by Jeff Dunetz on Scribd
Amitabh Desai to former Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro by Jeff Dunetz on Scribd