The conservative watchdog group 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 Department.
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 federal government wasted taxpayer time and money to protect Clinton, but that was typical of the soon-to-be-history Obama years.
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.
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.”
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 hanky-panky in Haiti. After the horrible 7.0-magnitude earthquake that rocked the island nation in January 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former-president visited. Both promised to help Haiti rebuild. In fact, Bill Clinton was named the U.N. special envoy to Haiti and, in conjunction with his Secretary of State wife, controlled billions of dollars in contracts awarded by the State Department to rebuild Haiti. Coincidentally, many of the companies that received one of those lucrative State Department contracts gave large donations to the Clinton Foundation.
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The Haitian government 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 after, 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. Thel letter claimed that the national priority of the Haitians was 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, which was paid more than $50 million. The company is run by an Irish billionaire who set up high-paying speeches for Bill Clinton and donated millions of his own money to the Clinton Foundation.
Another program enabled Haiti to raise needed capital by exploiting the country’s mineral resources. One of the companies that got a mining permit was VCS Mining. Despite the name, the company had little experience in mining, but right after it received the contract put Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, 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 which just happened to be a Clinton supporter.
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. 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,” Graham warned Mills, using the initials of the former president.
Graham, who was also chief of staff to Bubba at the foundation, had other reasons to worry: She wrote: “I’m also staying at [Mr. Bellerive’s] house fyi so exposure in general and this weekend in particular for WJC on this.”
Cross-posted at The Lid
