The Nation publishes a photo of McCain and Rick Davis, celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006. On the same day, the Queen K, a mega yacht owned by Oleg Deripaska, is moored in the same bay. (Credit: The Nation
(…) “In fact, McCain’s drama involved the same foreign lobbyist Paul Manafort; one of the same Russian oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska; the same Russian diplomat, Sergey Kislyak, and the same wily Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that now dominate the current Trump controversy.
The FBI has said that there is no evidence to date that Trump ever met with a Russian figure banned from the United States.
McCain actually met twice with Deripaska, a Russian businessman and Putin ally whose visa was blocked by the United States amidst intelligence community concerns about his ties to Moscow. The meetings were arranged by Manafort and his lobbying firm partner Rick Davis, who later would become McCain’s campaign manager, according to interviews and documents. Deripaska, a metals magnet, is president of United Company RUSAL, and is considered to be one of the richest men in the world worth an estimated at $5.1 billion, according to Forbes.“My sense is that Davis and Manafort, who were already doing pro-Putin work against American national interests, were using potential meetings with McCain — who didn’t know this and neither did we until after the fact — as bait to secure more rubles from the oligarchs,” John Weaver, one of McCain’s top advisers at the time, told Circa in an interview this month.
Then Governor of Virginia Mark Warner, Senator John McCain, David Gergen and John Sununu are captured during the session ‘The Future of US Leadership’ at the Annual Meeting 2006 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2006. (Credit: Flickr)
(…) “In 2006, Davis and Manafort arranged two meetings with McCain and Deripaska in group settings while the senator was overseas on official congressional trips.
The first occurred in January 2006 in Davos, Switzerland, where McCain had traveled with fellow Republicans for a global economics conference.
When McCain and his other Senate colleagues, John Sununu and Saxby Chambliss, arrived at an apartment for drinks, Davis was present as a host with Deripaska by his side. A group of about three dozen then went to dinner, McCain and Deripaska included.”
(…) “Davis was McCain’s campaign manager in both 2000 and 2008. Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager for a brief time, resigned in August 2016, over questions of prior work with Ukrainian political parties.
During the 2008 campaign, the Davis Manafort firm disclosed through its U.S. partner Daniel J. Edelman Inc., that it was working for the political party in Ukraine supporting Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Putin.
“Davis Manafort International LLC is directed by a foreign political party, the Ukraine Parties of Regions, to consult on the political campaign in Ukraine,” the January2008 ForeignAgent Registration Act filing showed.
The work included developing “a communications campaign to increase Prime Minister Yanukovych’s visibility in the U.S. and Europe,” the report added, indicating that Davis and Manafort were being paid a $35,000 a month retainer for the work that began in spring 2007.” (Read more: Circa, 6/21/2017)
Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein (Credit: public domain)
“Attorneys for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein touted his close friendship with Bill Clinton and even claimed the billionaire helped start Clinton’s controversial family foundation in a 2007 letter aimed at boosting his image during plea negotiations, FoxNews.com has learned.
The 23-page letter, written by high-powered lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt, was apparently part of an ultimately successful bid to negotiate a plea deal before Epstein could be tried for using underage girls in a sex ringbased in Palm Beach, Fla., and his private island estate on the 72-acre Virgin Islands home dubbed “Orgy Island.” Epstein spent 13 months in prison and home detention after agreeing to a plea deal in which he admitted to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.
“Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges,” read the July 2007 letter to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida. “Focuses of this initiative include poverty, climate change, global health, and religious and ethnic conflicts.”
The hedge fund magnate’s true role in creating the foundation could not be confirmed. Whether Epstein was an actual founder of the foundation or exaggerated his role in a phony effort to appear altruistic is not clear.
Epstein is not cited in official paperwork filed by the Clinton Global Initiative as a founder or director. Neither The Clinton Foundation nor Dershowitz responded to FoxNews.com’s inquiry as to the extent of Epstein’s involvement. FoxNews.com first reported that flight logs show the former president flew on Epstein’s private plane dozens of times. But Clinton has publicly credited longtime assistant Doug Band, now counselor and director of the foundation, as conceiving of the idea.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/06/2016)
A company whose president is “best friends” with Chelsea Clinton received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Department of Defense think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents TheDCNF was allowed to review.
Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group, has over the last 10 years received numerous Defense Department contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment.
The Office of Net Assessment is so sensitive, the specialized think tank is housed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and reports directly to the secretary.
To date, the Long Term Strategy Group has received $11.2 million in contracts, according to USAspending,gov, a government database of federal contracts.
But after winning a decade of contracts from the Office of Net Assessment, the federal agency is only now in the process of granting clearance to the company. Long Term Strategy Group never operated a secure room on their premises to handle classified materials, according to the Defense Security Service, a federal agency that approves secure rooms inside private sector firms. Long Term Strategy Group operates offices in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.
(…) Clinton and Newmyer first met each other while attending Sidwell Friends School, an exclusive private Quaker school in the nation’s capital. They were in each other’s weddings, and in 2011 Chelsea referred to Newmyer as her “best friend.”
In numerous emails, Chelsea’s mom, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actively promoted Newmyer and attempted to assist her in securing Defense Department contracts.
Secretary Clinton put Newmyer in contact with Michèle Flournoy, then-President Barack Obama’s undersecretary of defense, according to the emails from Clinton’s private email server released by the Department of State under a lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
(…)”As the foundation grew, so did the outside business ventures pursued by Mr. Clinton and several of his aides.
None have drawn more scrutiny in Clinton circles than Teneo, a firm co-founded in 2009 by Mr. Band, described by some as a kind of surrogate son to Mr. Clinton. Aspiring to merge corporate consulting, public relations and merchant banking in a single business, Mr. Band poached executives from Wall Street, recruited other Clinton aides to join as employees or advisers and set up shop in a Midtown office formerly belonging to one of the country’s top hedge funds.
By 2011, the firm had added a third partner, Declan Kelly, a former State Department envoy for Mrs. Clinton. And Mr. Clinton had signed up as a paid adviser to the firm.
Teneo worked on retainer, charging monthly fees as high as $250,000, according to current and former clients. The firm recruited clients who were also Clinton Foundation donors, while Mr. Band and Mr. Kelly encouraged others to become new foundation donors. Its marketing materials highlighted Mr. Band’s relationship with Mr. Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, where Mr. Band sat on the board of directors through 2011 and remains an adviser. Some Clinton aides and foundation employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and Teneo began.
Those worries intensified after the collapse of MF Global, the international brokerage firm led by Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey, in the fall of 2011. The firm had been among Teneo’s earliest clients, and its collapse over bad European investments — while paying $125,000 a month for the firm’s public relations and financial advice — drew Teneo and the Clintons unwanted publicity.
Mr. Clinton ended his advisory role with Teneo in March 2012, after an article appeared in The New York Post suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was angry over the MF Global controversy. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton denied the report. But in a statement released afterward, Mr. Clinton announced that he would no longer be paid by Teneo.
(…) Mr. Band left his paid position with the foundation in late 2010, but has remained involved with C.G.I., as have a number of Teneo clients, like Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and UBS Americas. Standard Chartered, a British financial services company that paid a $340 million fine to New York regulators last year to settle charges that it had laundered money from Iran, is a Teneo client and a sponsor of the 2012 global initiative.” (Read more: New York Times, 8/13/2013)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov receives a “reset” button from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva Switzerland, March, 2009. (Credit: CNN)
“As Hillary Clinton was beginning her job as President Obama’s chief diplomat, federal agents observed as multiple arms of Vladimir Putin’s machine unleashed an influence campaign designed to win access to the new secretary of State, her husband Bill Clinton and members of their inner circle, according to interviews and once-sealed FBI records.
Some of the activities FBI agents gathered evidence about in 2009 and 2010 were covert and illegal.
A female Russian spy posing as an American accountant, for instance, used a false identity to burrow her way into the employ of a major Democratic donor in hopes of gaining intelligence on Hillary Clinton’s department, records show. The spy was arrested and deported as she moved closer to getting inside State, agents said.
Other activities were perfectly legal and sitting in plain view, such as when a subsidiary of Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy company hired a Washington firm to lobby the Obama administration. At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton’s global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.
Agents were surprised by the timing and size of a $500,000 check that a Kremlin-linked bank provided Bill Clinton with for a single speech in the summer of 2010. The payday came just weeks after Hillary Clinton helped arrange for American executives to travel to Moscow to support Putin’s efforts to build his own country’s version of Silicon Valley, agents said.
There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department.
“There is not one shred of doubt from the evidence that we had that the Russians had set their sights on Hillary Clinton’s circle, because she was the quarterback of the Obama-Russian reset strategy and the assumed successor to Obama as president,” said a source familiar with the FBI’s evidence at the time, speaking only on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.” (Read more: The Hill, 10/22/2017)
Clinton appears with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, (left), at the State Department on July 31, 2009, announcing a settlement in a legal case involving UBS. (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite / The Associated Press)
“In 2007, a whistleblower gave information about thousands of US citizens who were putting money in Swiss mega-bank UBS to avoid paying US taxes. The IRS [Internal Revenue Service] sues UBS to learn the identities of US citizens with secret bank accounts. UBS faces either complying and violating strict Swiss banking secrecy laws, or refusing and facing criminal charges in a US court.
The US government decides to treat this as a political matter with the Swiss government instead of just a legal problem with the bank. In March 2009, Clinton meets with Swiss officials and brings up a number of unrelated issues where the US wants help from Switzerland, such as using Swiss neutrality to help release a US citizen imprisoned in Iran. The Swiss help with these other issues, and appear to get concessions in the UBS case in return.
On July 31, 2009, Clinton announces a legal settlement: the US government dismisses the IRS lawsuit, and UBS turns over data on only 4,450 accounts instead of the 52,000 accounts worth $18 billion wanted by the IRS.
Some US politicians criticize the deal. For instance, Senator Carl Levin (D), says, “It is disappointing that the US government went along.” A senior IRS official will later complain that many US citizens escaped scrutiny due to the deal.
Former president Bill Clinton and UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive, Bob McCann, took the stage at a Clinton Global Initiative event in 2011. (Credit: Brian Kersey /UPI/ Landov)
UBS then helps the Clintons in various ways:
Total UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation grow from less than $60,000 through 2008 to about $600,000 by the end of 2014.
Starting in early 2010, UBS works with the foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, and lends the programs $32 million. In 2012, the foundation will tout these programs as one of their major accomplishments.
UBS gives the foundation $100,000 for a charity golf tournament.
In 2011, UBS pays Bill Clinton $350,000 for discussing the economy at a UBS event.
Also in 2011, UBS pays Bill Clinton $1.5 million to take part in eleven question and answer sessions with a UBS official, making UBS his largest corporate source of speech income.
Gilbert Chagoury, Chairman of The Chagoury Group (left), Bill Clinton (center) and Ronald Chagoury, Chief Executive Officer (right) attend the Eko Atlantic City Dedication Ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria on February 21st, 2012. (Credit: public domain)
Douglas Band sends an email to Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin. At the time, Band is both working for the Clinton Foundation and serving as a personal aide to former President Bill Clinton. Band asks for the State Department’s “substance person” in Lebanon to contact Gilbert Chagoury. “As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp [important].”
Abedin responds that the “substance person” Is “Jeff Feltman,” a former US ambassador to Lebanon. “I’m sure he knows him. I’ll talk to Jeff.”
Fifteen minutes later, Band sends another email to Abedin, writing, “Better if you call him. Now preferable. This is very important.” After some redacted text, he adds, “He’s awake I’m sure.”
(US Department of State, 6/30/2016)
CBS News will late call Chagoury “a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire philanthropist who was one of the Clinton Foundation’s top donors.” He gave between $1 and $5 million to the foundation. In addition, he pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. He was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for money laundering, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million.
Upon becoming secretary of state earlier in 2009, Clinton promised to avoid any possible conflict of interest between State Department work and Clinton Foundation work. (Judicial Watch, 8/12/2016) (CBS News, 8/10/2016)
In August 2016, a spokesperson for Chagoury will claim that Chagoury had been seeking to contact someone in the State Department to offer his perspective on the coming elections in Lebanon, and had not been seeking official action by the State Department. (Politico, 8/11/2016)
Gilbert Chagoury, Chairman of The Chagoury Group (left), Bill Clinton (center) and Ronald Chagoury, Chief Executive Officer (right) attend the Eko Atlantic City Dedication Ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria on February 21st, 2012. (Credit: public domain)
“This week we released 296 pages of State Department records containing 44 email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department. This brings the known total to 171 of new Clinton emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over. These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.
The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email, Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that, “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.
Included is a 2009 email in which Band directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us,” and insists that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.
Chagoury, a foreign national, is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and a top donor to the Clinton Foundation. He has appeared near the top of the Foundation’s donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the ClintonGlobal Initiative. According to a 2010investigation 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.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 8/12/2016)
CHF Int’l President & CEO, David Weiss making remarks in Liberia during the official indoor program held at the Logan Town Wesleyan Church. (Credit: public domain)
(…) “USAID contracts to remove debris in Port-au-Prince went to a Washington-based company named CHF International [now known as Global Communities]. The company’s CEO David Weiss, a campaign contributor to Hillary in 2008, was deputy U.S. trade representative for North American Affairs during the Clinton administration. The corporate secretary of the board, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, served in a number of posts in the Clinton administration, including assistant secretary of commerce.The Clintons claim to have built schools in Haiti. But the New York Times discovered that when it comes to the Clintons, “built” is a term with a very loose interpretation. For example, the newspaper located a school featured in the Clinton Foundation annual report as “built through a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action.” In reality, “The Clinton Foundation’s sole direct contribution to the school was a grant for an Earth Day celebration and tree-building activity.”
The Clintons claim to have built schools in Haiti. But the New York Times discovered that when it comes to the Clintons, ‘built’ is a term with a very loose interpretation.
A demonstrator holds up a sign showing images of former President Bill Clinton that asks where the aid money for reconstruction went during a protest demanding the resignation of President Michel Martelly in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2015. (Credit: Dieu Nalio Chery/The Associated Press))
USAID contracts also went to consulting firms such as New York–based Dalberg Global Development Advisors, which received a $1.5 million contract to identify relocation sites for Haitians. This company is an active participant and financial supporter of the Clinton Global Initiative. A later review by USAID’s inspector general found that Dalberg did a terrible job, naming uninhabitable mountains with steep ravines as possible sites for Haitian rebuilding.
Foreign governments and foreign companies got Haitian deals in exchange for bankrolling the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 billion and $5 billion.
The IDB receives funding from the State Department, and some of this funding was diverted to OAS for Haitian road-building contracts. Yet an IDB auditor, Mariela Antiga, complained that the contracts were padded with “excessive costs” to build roads “no one needed.” Antiga also alleged that IDB funds were going to a construction project on private land owned by former Haitian president Rene Preval — a Clinton buddy — and several of his cronies. For her efforts to expose corruption, Antiga was promptly instructed by the IDB to pack her bags and leave Haiti.” (Read more: National Review, 7/18/2016)
“Despite the polls in the run up to November 8, 2016, and the post-election shenanigans that continue to this day, the United States has a new President, and it is not Hillary Clinton. There are many reasons for this, and Charles Ortel’s dogged, two-year investigation of the Clintons’ predatory humanitarianism is a major one. He is not yet done. It is almost universally unacceptable to prey on the weak of one’s own species. There are laws and religious precepts against this in every human culture. In fact, as humans, we find it so heinous to prey on the helpless that, contrary to all biological rules, we prey on the strong, and not the sick, young, and injured, even when we hunt other species. The Clintons and their associates are not above the law, and Ortel, with his credentials as a graduate of the Harvard Business School, decades of Wall Street experience, and accurate assessment in 2008 of General Electric stock as being overvalued, is taking his investigation to the next level. I caught up with him last week for the following interview.” – Dr. Dady Chery
(Credit: The United Nations)
DC: Charles, we now know that former President Barack Obama did not pardon former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
CO: The pardons would have been for the Clinton family and others for federal offenses arising from the illegal operation of, and solicitation for, numerous so-called charities. The apparent failure to pardon removes a major excuse that US state, federal, and foreign government authorities may have had for failing to investigate, expose, prosecute, and win criminal convictions in what I believe to be the largest charity fraud ever attempted.
It will take time to replace federal government employees inside the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Trade Commission, who likely were complicit in a scheme to impede and obstruct investigations into this ongoing charity-fraud conspiracy. Given time, I certainly hope the Trump administration will increase the resources for the rumored investigations by the FBI and the IRS, which should address widespread illegal solicitation and operations in virtually every US state and numerous foreign countries. I also hope that the Trump administration will work closely with foreign-government donors who either were complicit in these charity frauds, or who should now be working hard to recover funds advanced to Clinton charities under false pretenses.
(Credit: US Department of State)
DC: Now that the Clinton Global Initiative has shut down its operations, will there be access to its documents? Are the people who were involved with CGI still responsible to show to the IRS and other government agencies that its affairs are in order?
CO: Unlike investigations into Ponzi schemes and other frauds involving for-profit entities, investigators wield enormous leverage when they finally decide to look into frauds by not-for-profit entities. Review of New York and other state laws, IRS regulations and practices, and laws in relevant countries suggest that the executives, directors, and their professional advisors will bear the burden of proving that they organized and then operated the various Clinton charities lawfully at all times. Losing or obscuring records will hurt those who are potentially liable, and I would note that criminal penalties for organizing and operating charity frauds, particularly disaster-relief charity frauds, are onerous.
(Credit: US Department of State)
DC: Many people confuse the Clinton Global Initiative, which recently closed its doors, with the Clinton Foundation. Is the CGI a legal entity, and how does it relate to the Clinton Foundation?
CO: The CGI began to operate in New York by September 2005, illegally, as a concept. Under US law, a validly organized charity cannot be a formless association; instead it must be a lawfully constituted entity. In most cases, the trustees or directors of a lawfully organized charity choose to establish a nonprofit corporation under US state laws; after this, they get federal tax exemption on the basis of a detailed application that must be filled out truthfully and accurately, and that states their specific purposes, which are then authorized by the IRS. There’s no record anywhere that the Clinton Foundation validly changed its authorized purposes. Originally, in January 1998, these were to erect a presidential archive, establish a research facility in Little Rock, Arkansas, and raise a capital endowment. So, starting with the first CGI Annual Meeting in Manhattan, the Clinton Foundation became engaged in substantial activities that were not authorized, or even charitable. Disclosures in the IRS filings for the Clinton Foundation show that CGI activities were substantial in every year from 2005 through 2009.
(Credit: US Department of State)
New CGI
On September 4, 2009, several weeks before the 2009 CGI Annual Meeting in Manhattan, a new Arkansas nonprofit corporation called “Clinton Global Initiative, Inc.” was established. It’s not clear yet from the filings how sums were divided between January 1, 2009 through September 3, 2009; and September 4, 2009 through 31 December 31, 2009. Though a CGI meeting was held in 2009 while the old initiative and the new legal entity both, in theory, existed, an application for federal tax exemption for the new entity was not submitted until August 2010. This application falsely claims that the new entity wasn’t a legal successor to any previous activity, when abundant evidence in the public domain shows otherwise.
(Credit: US State Department)
The New CGI held meetings in 2010, 2011, and 2012. So far, the Shared Services Agreement under which the parent Clinton Foundation operated New CGI hasn’t been made public. So we don’t yet know the financial ramifications of these arrangements. According to documents in the public domain, the Clinton Foundation controlled New CGI. So, in these three years, New CGI provided Annual Reports to the IRS, but its financial results were also consolidated into the Clinton Foundation’s financial and operating reports.
The Clinton Foundation elected, in theory, to merge New CGI back into the Clinton Foundation in 2013. To do so validly under Arkansas and other laws, each charity must be validly organized and operated from inception through the merger date. I don’t believe close analysis supports such a conclusion. Until recently, the Clinton Foundation continued to solicit funds for CGI and to hold various meetings whose charitable purpose is far from clear.”
Dady Chery is the Editor of Haiti Chery and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation. In addition to being an associate professor in the biological sciences, Chery is Haitian-born journalist, playwright, essayist, and poet who writes in English, French, and her native Kreyol. She writes extensively about Haiti and world issues such as climate change. Her many contributions to Haitian news include the first proposal that Haiti’s cholera had been imported into the country by the United Nations, and the first description of Haiti’s mineral wealth.
Margery Kraus, founder and executive chairman, APCO Worldwide (Credit: public domain)
“The Clinton Foundation’s donor disclosure site vastly understated support that the Clinton Global Initiative received from APCO Worldwide, a global communications firm that lobbied on behalf of Russia’s state-owned nuclear company.
The site, created to detect conflicts of interest for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because of her family’s various charitable efforts, shows APCO gave between $25,000 and $50,000 over the last decade.
But according to interviews and internal documents reviewed by The Hill, APCO was much more generous and provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-bono services and in-kind contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) between 2008 and 2016.
For instance, an internal CGI document prepared in fall 2011 lists APCO’s in-kind contribution at $275,000 for that year alone. And APCO’s annual report on its global charitable efforts boasted of a large jump in support for CGI in 2011.
“In 2011, APCO significantly increased its pro-bono support for CGI and, for the first time, our team managed the press around CGI’s America meeting, as well as its global Annual Meeting,” APCO stated in a report submitted to the United Nations Global Compact.
The increase in the contributions came as APCO was paid $3 million in 2010 and 2011 to work for Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company. Rosatom paid APCO to lobby the State Department and other federal agencies on behalf of its Tenex subsidiary, which sought to increase its commercial uranium sales in the United States.
In 2010 and 2011, APCO made more than 50 contacts with federal and congressional figures for Tenex, including at least 10 at the State Department, its foreign agent disclosure reports show.
APCO officials estimate their total cash support for CGI totaled $45,600 and their in-kind support to CGI exceeded $1 million since 2008. They also acknowledged that the firm’s pro-bono work increased significantly in 2011 while it worked for Tenex. But they insisted there was no connection between the professional and pro-bono work because separate units of the firm handled each.” (Read more: The Hill, 11/28/2017)
It will remain publicly unknown until the video is leaked to Fox News in October 2016.
A photo capture of Clinton as she appears in the 2010 cybersecurity video. (Credit: Fox News)
In the video, Clinton says that employees have a “special duty” to recognize the importance of cybersecurity. “The real key to cybersecurity rests with you. Complying with department computing policies and being alert to potential threats will help protect all of us.”
According to a later account by Fox News, “Clinton goes on in the video to underscore the important work the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security and IT department were doing to guard against cyber-attacks. She warns hackers try to ‘exploit’ vulnerabilities and penetrate department systems. She then urges staffers to log onto the internal cybersecurity awareness website or subscribe to their ‘cybersecurity awareness newsletter.’”
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will later find the video ironic, given Clinton’s own security issues with her private email server. He will say, “Hillary Clinton needs only to look into the mirror to find the biggest cybersecurity risk.”
Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon will say, “This is not new. It has been widely reported that during Clinton’s tenure the State Department issued these kinds of warnings about possible cybersecurity to employees. These warnings were more than appropriate given that it was subsequently confirmed that State’s email was hacked.” (Fox News, 10/22/2016)
Screenshot of Claudio Osorio and Bill Clinton appearing on the CNBC show, American Greed. (Credit: CNBC)
(…) “Miami businessman Claudio Osorio, who is currently serving 12 years in federal prison on fraud charges, leveraged his relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton to help his company InnoVida obtain a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) for a Haiti housing project in 2010.
OPIC is an independent government agency that submits its annual budget requests through the State Department and works closely with the agency.
Bill Clinton helped arrange for a high-powered Florida law firm to represent Osorio during loan negotiations with OPIC, according to court testimony. An internal OPIC memo said Hillary Clinton was prepared to marshal State Department resources to assist with the donor’s project.
InnoVida was supposed to use the funding to build houses in Haiti after the earthquake, but it defaulted on the loan and the homes were never built.
After InnoVida went bankrupt in 2011, a court-appointed investigator said it appeared that over $30 million of its funds had been diverted to foreign bank accounts and were not retrievable.
Osorio was later accused of using the company to run a Ponzi-like scheme, bilking government and private investors out of a collective $40 million and using their money to fund his lavish lifestyle—making payments on his Miami Beach mansion, buying a Maserati and maintaining his Colorado ski chalet.
Testimony of attorney Mark Hobson with Shutts and Bowen.
He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in 2013.
Much of the media coverage of InnoVida has focused on Jeb Bush’s involvement as a consultant and board member. But previously unreported government documents and testimony from the 2013 fraud trial of InnoVida’s chief financial officer reveal that Osorio’s relationship with the Clintons played a central role in InnoVida’s efforts to obtain OPIC funding for the house-building scam.
The OPIC official who helped approve the InnoVida loan wrote in a 2010 internal memo that “secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has made available State Department resources to assist with logistical arrangements” for the project and “Former president Bill Clinton is personally in contact with the company [InnoVida] to organize its logistical and support needs.”
The memo added that the Clinton Global Initiative had agreed to purchase “6500 homes in Haiti from InnoVida within the next year.”
During the loan process, Osorio repeatedly emphasized his connections to the Clintons during conversations with OPIC officials, boasting about taking a trip to Haiti with the former president after the earthquake and telling an OPIC manager that he had a direct line to Hillary Clinton.” (Read more: Washington Free Beacon, 7/17/2015)
“The Clinton Global Initiative is a program of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The foundation has been a focus of criticism this political season over donations received from governments and corporations that had business before Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state and that could be affected by decisions she would make as president. The foundation has said it “has strong donor integrity and transparency practices.”
The Clinton Global Initiative’s help for a for-profit company part-owned by Clinton friends poses a different issue. Under federal law, tax-exempt charitable organizations aren’t supposed to act in anyone’s private interest but instead in the public interest, on broad issues such as education or poverty.
“The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” the Internal Revenue Service says on its website.
Energy Pioneer Solutions was founded in 2009 by Scott Kleeb, a Democrat who twice ran for Congress from Nebraska. An internal document from that year showed it as owned 29% by Mr. Kleeb; 29% by Jane Eckert, the owner of an art gallery in Pine Plains, N.Y.; and 29% by Julie Tauber McMahon of Chappaqua, N.Y., a close friend of Mr. Clinton, who also lives in Chappaqua.
Owning 5% each were Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias and Mark Weiner, a supplier to political campaigns and former Rhode Island Democratic chairman, both longtime friends of the Clintons.
The Clinton Global Initiative holds an annual conference at which it announces monetary commitments from corporations, individuals or nonprofit organizations to address global challenges—commitments on which it has acted in a matchmaking role. Typically, the commitments go to charities and nongovernmental organizations. The commitment to Energy Pioneer Solutions was atypical because it originated from a private individual who was making a personal financial investment in a for-profit company.” (Read more: Wall Street Journal, 5/12/2016)
(…) “The memo came near the end of a 2011 review by law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett into Clinton Foundation practices. Chelsea Clinton had grown concerned about the audacious mixing of public and private, and the review was designed to ensure that the foundation didn’t lose its charitable tax status. Mr. Band, Teneo boss and epicenter of what he calls “ Bill Clinton, Inc.,” clearly felt under assault and was eager to brag up the ways in which his business had concurrently benefited the foundation, Clinton political causes and the Clinton bank account. The memoed result is a remarkably candid look at the sleazy inner workings of the Clinton grifters-in-chief.
The cross-pollination is flagrant, and Mr. Band gives example after example of how it works. He and his partner Declan Kelly (a Hillary Clinton fundraiser whom Mrs. Clinton rewarded by making him the State Department’s special envoy to Northern Ireland) buttered up their clients with special visits to Bill’s home and tête-à-tête golf rounds with the former president. They then “cultivated” these marks ( Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, UBS) for foundation dollars, and then again for high-dollar Bill Clinton speeches and other business payouts.
Teneo’s incestuous behavior also included Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. The Band memo boasts that Mr. Kelly (while he was Mrs. Clinton’s State envoy) introduced the then-head of UBS Wealth Management, Bob McCann, to Bill Clinton at an American Ireland Fund event in 2009. “Mr. Kelly subsequently asked Mr. Mccann [sic] to support the Foundation, which he did . . . Mr. Kelly also encouraged Mr. Mccann [sic] to invite President Clinton to give several paid speeches, which he has done,” reads Mr. Band’s memo. UBS ultimately paid Bill $2 million.
American Ireland Fund meanwhile became a Teneo client, and made Mr. Kelly (of former State envoy fame) a trustee, where he “ensured that the AIF is a significant donor to the Foundation.” AIF then bestowed upon Mrs. Clinton a major award on her final trip to Northern Ireland in 2012, in an event partly sponsored by . . . Teneo.
Not that this is all one way. Mr. Band let slip just how useful all these arrangements were for Teneo, too, when he backhandedly apologized in the memo for hosting 15 client meetings in a hotel room rented by the Clinton Global Initiative.
The memo removes any doubt that the foundation is little more than an unregistered super PAC working on the Clintons’ behalf. Donors to the charity are simultaneously tapped to give Bill speech requests and other business arrangements, including the $3.5 million he was paid annually to serve as “honorary chairman” of Laureate International Universities. Mr. Band’s memo also notes his success at getting donors to “support candidates running for office that President Clinton was supporting.” (Read more: Wall Street Journal, 10/27/2016)(Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLC “Governance Review” 12/03/2011)
Cheryl D. Mills speaks during a commitment workshop titled “Haiti: Lessons for the Future” at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting on September 24, 2012. The CGI logo is in the background. (Credit: Reuters)
On June 19, 2012, Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills travels from Washington, DC, to New York City. The next day, she interviews two high-level business executives in order to help the Clinton Foundation find a new leader.
When Clinton became secretary of state, she and the Clinton Foundation agreed to abide by rules specially created in an agreement with the Obama administration not to “create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.”
When news of this trip is made public in August 2016, Clinton’s campaign will claim that any work Mills did for the Clinton Foundation, such as this trip, was strictly voluntary.
The two executives interviewed by Mills had worked at Pfizer and WalMart, companies that CNN points out “have been huge donors to Foundation, and have worked with the Clinton Global Initiative.” However, neither of them get the job. (CNN, 8/11/2016)
Former Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, second from right, Trey Gowdy, second from left, and Elijah Cummings, left, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015. (Credit: Susan Walsh/The Associated Press)
“Hillary Clinton’s No. 2 at the State Department twice forwarded information to the Clinton Foundation that was later deemed classified, the latest instance of former Clinton staff transmitting now-classified information.
According to a new email chain shared with POLITICO by Citizens United, Cheryl Mills — Clinton’s former chief of state at State — forwarded State Department background information about Rwanda and the Congo to the Clintons’ philanthropic organization. Citizens United, a conservative activist group, obtained the messages via a Freedom of Information act lawsuit.
Former President Bill Clinton was visiting Africa, including Rwanda, around the time that Mills sent the email, which was mostly redacted. Former president Clinton was also considering giving Rwandan President Paul Kagame a plenary role at the Clinton Global Initiative, according to the emails.
“Fyi for [Bill] since he is in contact w/Kagame,” Mills wrote in an email chain dated July 28, 2012, forwarding to the foundation a message originally written to State employees under the subject “Developments in the Eastern Congo.”
“Thanks,” Ami Desai, the foundation’s director of foreign policy, wrote back. “He has been talking about giving Kagame a plenary role at CGI.”
The information in the 2012 emails was classified by the State Department in July of this year because of national security and foreign policy reasons, according to the documents. The classification specifically related to foreign government information and intelligence activities, sources or methods, according to the redaction labels.” (Read more: Politico, 10/06/15)
An email made public through the organization WikiLeaks suggests that a company controlled in part by the family of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons mastermind donated to the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative before a different company controlled by the same family was awarded a 35-year no-bid lease to Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal.
The Treasury Department declined to perform a mandatory national security check before awarding a 35-year lease at the port to Gulftainer’s GT USA. That the company, linked to the family of Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, now controls Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal operations presents a significant national security risk, observers note.
On October 24, 2016, WikiLeaks released an email, dated August 18, 2012, from the Clinton Foundation to former President Bill Clinton, advising the former President that “new sponsor” The Abraaj Capital Group agreed to support the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting with a $550,000 donation.
The Abraaj Group is a UAE private equity company co-founded by Hamid Jafar, the Iraqi business partner and brother of Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar. Hamid Jafar’s son, Badr Jafar, is currently listed as a member of Abraaj’s board of directors.
The same year as the donation revealed in the Wikileaks email, the State Department’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) awarded The Abraaj Group with the first of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and investment management contracts.
Another corporation, Crescent Petroleum, also appears to have financially supported an educational campaign co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Dr. Jafar’s nephew Majid Jafar, CEO of Crescent Petroleum. Gulftainer is a subsidiary of Crescent.
Shortly before the signing ceremony for Gulftainer’s new Port Canaveral cargo container terminal, Bill Clinton flew to Dubai to attend one of the educational campaign’s events with Majid Jafar.
The timeline surrounding the Port Canaveral deal, known as “Project Pelican,” suggests the Abraaj dealings are not unrelated. (Read more: American Report, 12/08/2016)(Archive) h/t @seacaptim
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton honor the victims of the Benghazi terrorist attacks at Andrews Air Force Base on September 14, 2012. (Credit: public domain)
“Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts. The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria. The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria.
(…) A Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, details that the attack on the compound had been carefully planned by the BOCAR terrorist group “to kill as many Americans as possible.” The document was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council. The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” says that the attack on the Benghazi facility “was planned and executed by The Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR).” The group subscribes to “AQ ideologies:”
The attack was planned ten or more days prior on approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for U.S. killing of Aboyahiye ((ALALIBY)) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 atacks on the World Trade Center buildings.
“A violent radical,” the DIA report says, is “the leader of BCOAR is Abdul Baset ((AZUZ)), AZUZ was sent by ((ZAWARI)) to set up Al Qaeda (AQ) bases in Libya.” The group’s headquarters was set up with the approval of a “member of the Muslim brother hood movement…where they have large caches of weapons. Some of these caches are disguised by feeding troughs for livestock. They have SA-7 and SA-23/4 MANPADS…they train almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”
The Defense Department reported the group maintained written documents, in “a small rectangular room, approximately 12 meters by 6 meters…that contain information on all of the AQ activity in Libya.”
(Azuz is again blamed for the Benghazi attack in an October 2012 DIA document.)
Hillary Clinton appears before a Senate committee to testify on the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya. (Credit: Jack Gruber/USA Today)
The DOD documents also contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. An October 2012 report confirms:
Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.
During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.
The DIA document further details:
The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles. The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]
Libyan President Mohammed Magariaf, alongside former United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York City, on September 24, 2012. (Credit: Wikipedia)
“Internal State Department documents released on Tuesday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch reveal a previously undisclosed meeting took place between the president of Libya’s National Congress, Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, and former President Bill Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) function in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks in 2012.
On September 13, 2012, less than 48-hours after the attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, al-Magariaf sent a request to the Clinton Foundation that expressed his desire to meet with former President Clinton and to participate in a Clinton Global Initiative meeting later that month in New York.
The Clinton Foundation official then contacted Sec. Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, and asked for guidance on how to respond to the request. Mills replied later that evening, “[The State Department] would not have issues.”
Nonetheless, the same e-mail chain reveals that Clinton Foundation official contacted Mills again four days later to seemingly double check into the State Dept.’s position on the meeting request. The e-mail, dated September 17, 2012, states, “al-Magariaf is asking for a meeting with [former President Clinton] next week. (He is confirmed to come to CGI) Would you recommend accepting of declining the [former President Clinton] meeting request?”
There is no record of Mills’ response to the September 17 inquiry in the documents, however, an e-mail from the Clinton Foundation to Mills and Sec. Clinton aide Huma Abedin, dated September 26, 2012, reveals that the meeting between the former president and al-Magariaf did take place. (Law & Crime, 3/22/2016)
“More details are coming to light days after the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell on June 2nd, 2020. The woman famous for her attachments to the late Jeffrey Epstein is turning out to have been perhaps more of the mastermind than first thought. Property connections and submarine operations aren’t typical and a wild plot to have the UN issue passports for the ocean is just weird. Her family history alone puts her in a league above most other illicit international operators. Ghislaine Maxwell’s company TerraMar appears to tie much of it together.
After her arrest this month on child sex trafficking crimes, multiple plaintiffs have connected her to highly evolved pedophile and human trafficking rings. After the death of Robert Maxwell, her father, in 1991 she moved to a Manhattan Property owned by Lynn Foreseter de Rothschild, whose husband is the British mega banker Evelyn Robert de Rothschild. The property is also listed as the base for TerraMar.
The TerraMar Project was a non-profit company that Ghislaine Maxwell started in 2012. Jeffrey Epstein and various other high power financiers funded the venture. The company described itself as an ocean conservation group but it shut down by 2019 over sex trafficking crimes stemming from Epstein’s arrest. It was only six days after Jeffrey Epstein was brought into custody that the firm announced it was shutting down permanently.
TerraMar didn’t last long but its short life was full of suspicious activity. The company had immediate support from globalist organizations including the Clinton Foundation. Maxwell attended multiple United Nations (UN) meetings and even spoke to the council as the founder of TerraMar. Ghislaine and another man from the company’s Board of Directors, Scott Borgerson, spoke in Washington DC at a special event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
When Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal will be questioned by the House Benghazi Committee in June 2015, he will reveal that in addition to the $120,000 a year he is paid for working at the Clinton Foundation, starting at “the very end of 2012,” he is also paid about $200,000 a year consulting part-time for Media Matters and related organizations. He will also say at the time of the interview that he is still being paid that much or even more.
Media Matters is a pro-Clinton media watchdog group chaired by David Brock, who also will run Clinton’s main Super PAC in her 2016 presidential campaign. Additionally, Blumenthal will say he works for Correct the Record, American Bridge, and American Independent Institute, which also are pro-Clinton organizations run by Brock.
In June 2016, when this information is publicly revealed by accident in a document released by Congressional Democrats, the Los Angeles Times will call Blumenthal’s part-time salary an “eye-popping amount of money” which “exposes once again the absurd amounts of money people in the orbit of the Clintons sometimes seem to rake in just for, well, being in the orbit of the Clintons.” (The Los Angeles Times, 6/27/2016) (Fox News, 6/19/2015)
Clinton at the main annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, on September 22, 2014 in New York City. (Source: John Moore / Getty Images)
“As soon as Clinton’s term as secretary of state ends, the “memorandum of understanding” between the Clinton Foundation and the Obama White House also comes to an end. As a result, the Clinton Foundation resumes accepting increased donations from foreign governments. For instance, shortly after Clinton resigns, the foundation receives a $2 million donation from a conglomerate run by a member of China’s National People’s Congress.
The Wall Street Journal will report that news of such donations from foreign governments “prompted criticism from Republicans and some Democrats, who said it represented a conflict for a potential future president,” given the anticipation that Hillary Clinton would run for president again in 2016. (The Wall Street Journal, 3/19/2015)
United Arab Emirates and Germany begin donating to the foundation for the first time, and other countries such as Saudi Arabia resume donating after holding off during Clinton’s time as secretary of state. (Washington Post, February 25, 2015)
Gehad El Haddad, spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood (Credit: Aaron T. Rose/DNE)
A fugitive Muslim Brotherhood leader and Clinton operative has been arrested by Egyptian authorities in an ongoing roundup of seditious Islamist militants.
The arrest of Gehad el-Haddad for inciting violence is a sobering reminder not just of how close Hillary Clinton’s network is to the brutal Muslim Brotherhood, the Left’s favorite Islamofascist cell, but also of the extent to which Islamist enemies of the United States have infiltrated the American political establishment.
And it is yet another vindication for Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) who has been viciously attacked by left-wingers and leaders of her own party for having the courage to sound the alarm about radical Islam’s penetration of the U.S. government.
A mere month after Haddad quit his Clinton Foundation job for full-time employment with the Brotherhood a year ago, now-deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi received an invitation to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative, a high-profile project of the foundation. Morsi calls Jews “bloodsuckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.”
“It was only a matter of time before Gehad el-Haddad was arrested,” said Eric Trager who was characterized by the Washington Free Beacon as an Egypt expert.
“Many of the other Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen have been apprehended, and in addition to decapitating the organization, the military-backed government has been specifically targeting the Brotherhood’s media wing, including by shutting down its TV stations at the time of Morsi’s ouster on July 3.”
“It has also gone after those connected to Morsi’s presidential office, and Gehad’s father is Morsi adviser and Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Office member Essam el-Haddad,” said Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
As the Washington Free Beacon reports, Gehad el-Haddad’s tenure at the Clinton Foundation “overlapped with his official work for the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Cairo in February 2011 when he assumed control of the Renaissance Project, a Brotherhood-backed economic recovery program.”
Although the Renaissance Project has been described as a long-term economic recovery program, Egyptian media say it is actually a program designed to implement the radical Islamization of Egyptian society.
“Renaissance is far more than the electoral program of President Mohamed Morsi or the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party,” the Egypt Independent reported last year. “It is a 25-year project to reform state, business and civil society, rooted in the Brotherhood’s Islamic values but conditioned by the experiences of the project’s founders in the modern economy.”
“You can’t come up with concrete solutions unless you have a compass to tell you what’s right or wrong,” Haddad told the Egypt Independent. “For us, that compass is Islam. We believe its mission is to change people’s lives.”
It is unclear if Clinton Foundation donors are aware that their donations have been used to train Islamic terrorists determined to snuff out individual rights and civil society.
Those who support the Global War on Terror should bear in mind that Haddad’s experience at the Clinton Foundation gave him the know-how to help build the terror apparatus, police state, and other oppressive institutions that would be required to turn Egypt into a totalitarian theocracy, which is the Brotherhood’s goal.
The Clinton Foundation’s Climate Initiative, which he worked on in Egypt, “taught Haddad about managing [a nongovernmental organization] and the role that civil society takes between the state and private sector, lessons he is applying to the Renaissance Project,” according to the Egypt Independent.
Haddad “officially became a senior adviser for foreign affairs in Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party in May 2011, when he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation,” the news website reports.
In Egyptian media, Haddad was a frequent apologist for the Brotherhood’s violent crackdowns on civil liberties in the Arab republic. He put his spin doctoring skills to use last December to downplay Brotherhood supporters’ attacks on women and children.
When pro-democracy protests swept Egypt on June 30, Hadded called the demonstrators violent thugs. “The anti-Morsi camp are providing a political endorsement to the violence,” he told the Washington Free Beacon at that time. “Some have resorted to violence because they didn’t do well at the ballot box.”
Evidence abounds of the Clinton political network’s close ties to totalitarian Islam.
While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, Huma Abedin was her Deputy Chief of Staff. The wife of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), Abedin worked from 1996 to 2003 at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), a journal of Islamic supremacism founded by al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. At the same time Abedin also worked for Hillary Clinton in different capacities.
Naseef hired Abedin’s father, the late Dr. Zyed Abedin, to oversee the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. As Andrew McCarthy notes:
“[t]he journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.”
Abedin’s mother was also active in the women’s division of the Muslim Brotherhood.
During Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the objectively pro-terrorist Obama administration, the entry ban applying to Islamic scholar, stealth jihadist, terrorism funder, and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, was lifted.
Radical imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, claimed to have ties to the Clinton administration. “I had dinner with [then-] Secretary of State [Madeleine] Albright — after the list” of unindicted co-conspirators was released. Albright refused to comment. Wahhaj is also involved the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s front group in the U.S.
Abdurahman Alamoudi helped President Clinton and the American Civil Liberties Union develop a presidential document called “Religious Expression in Public School,” which established a legal justification upon the ACLU could use to sue public schools to force them to remove Nativity scenes and curtail Christmas celebrations. Alamoudi is a former director of CAIR and founder of CAIR ally, American Muslim Council.
Haddad, a top Brotherhood communications official and adviser to Morsi when he was Egypt’s president, was “city director,” a senior communications position, at Clinton’s charity, the former William J. Clinton Foundation, from August 2007 to August 2012. As of 2008, the Wahhabist kingdom of Saudi Arabia was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation.
Incidentally, it needs to be noted that the Bill Clinton-founded philanthropy may yet regret a name change earlier this year. After Hillary Clinton left her Foggy Bottom perch behind, the foundation was renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation so she could share in its glory, past and future.
Frank Gaffney has written a full-length pamphlet for the David Horowitz Freedom Center about the Muslim Brotherhood’s connections to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. After the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11 last year, David Horowitz previewed the pamphlet, writing:
“If anyone needed evidence that Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of the Muslim Brotherhood, the events of the last few days should be more than sufficient. On the anniversary of 9/11, on what should be a day of shame for the Muslim world, the US Embassy in Cairo issued a statement condemning critics of Islamofascism in language appropriate to the office of propaganda for the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamofascists launched violent attacks on Americans, repeating the outrages in miniature of the World Trade Center attacks 11 years ago. In the face of these outrages the posture of the U.S. government is one that would make Neville Chamberlain blush.”
It’s unlikely that Hillary Clinton will blush. After all, she’s shameless.
Clinton gives a private paid speech for Goldman Sachs, a financial services company. In it, she says, “[W]hen I got to the State Department, we were so far behind in technology, it was embarrassing. And, you know, people were not even allowed to use mobile devices because of security issues and cost issues, and we really had to try to push into the last part of the Twentieth Century in order to get people functioning in 2009 and ’10.”
The comments will be flagged as potentially politically embarrassing by Tony Carrk, Clinton’s research director, due to Clinton’s daily use of a BlackBerry mobile device during the same time period. Although the comment is made in private, Carrk’s January 2016 email mentioning the quote will be made public by WikiLeaks in October 2016. (WikiLeaks, 10/7/2016)
If the money comes from bad people and organizations, what if it’s turned to a good purpose? One hears frequently that “the Clinton Foundation does so many good works around the world!” Some charity experts purport to analyze the Foundation’s work; they’ve simply retyped statements from the various pages on the organization and its associates’ websites.
Foundation self-reports it spends 87.2% on “Program Services”
Supporters also tout the organization’s “A” rating from Chicago-based Charity Watchdog, aka “The American Institute for Philanthropy.” This organization has a budget of under $600,000 a year, and its five board members have not changed in at least a decade. Its founder Daniel Borochoff’s salary comprises about 30% of its current revenue. The methodology used by Charity Watchdog is extraordinarily simple and involves no analysis of program conduct, nature and impact, just adding up and dividing numbers from official tax returns. It is effective in detecting unsophisticated charity scammers who phone elderly people for donations, and then spend the money on themselves. Charity Watchdog itself is an organization worthy of some scrutiny as to its effectiveness and impact.
You can read my four-part series here on Medium (start here) if you want to read more in-depth about the Clinton Foundation’s programs.
The Clinton Foundation reported it received $337,985,726 in revenue in 2014 (the most recent year for which it has reported income and expense or filed taxes). Below are an additional three primary programs and achievements advertised on the Clinton Foundation website and their reported outcomes and stated cost.”
(…) Clinton Global Initiative ……………………..$23,544,381
The Clinton Global Initiative hosts huge Gala meetings that serve as PR vehicles for well-known attendees. CGI America was held in June in Atlanta. Most attendees pay $20,000 and up. At the Galas, attendees sit and hear panel speeches, watch videos, get reports on various issues (like “climate change”) and sign up for a “Commitment to Action” if they desire. The “Commitment to Action” is a non-binding agreement of “improvement” in whatever area the individual or organization thinks they ought to be working in. Since the majority of the attendees represent corporations or international finance, they “agree” to make various improvements in business they conduct.
Attendees and speakers at this year’s Gala include Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Ursula Burns (Xerox CEO), Jim Yong Kim (President of the World Bank Group), Hemant Kanoria (Chairman and Managing Director of Srei Infrastructure Finance Ltd.) and many other global corporate luminaries.
Membership is by invitation only.
Those who attend the meetings also receive the benefits illustrated below:
According to the Clinton Foundation, “more than 3,400 ‘Commitments to Action’” have been made “to date” — and a blog post records that “123 new Commitments to Action were signed in 2015.”
Let’s divide 123 into $23,544,381 and see what we get:
$191,417.73
Reasonable!
Let’s see if we can find a typical “Commitment to Action.”
No funds of the Clinton Foundation are expended to do any of the work or “action” in the Commitment to Action. The organization/corporation that makes the Commitment is agreeing to undertake the stated Action and obtain the identified outcomes or results on their own. The “Commitment” is supposed to be reported back to the Clinton Foundation each year.
“The September 2014report prepared by Palantir on the Clinton Global Initiative’s ‘work’ between 2005 and 2013. Palantir states they focus on Big Data analysis. One would hope this report is atypical of the company’s actual Big Data analysis.
Sample page from Palantir CGI program report. No you are not dumb if you think “What?” Your guess is as good as mine and Palantir’s as to what this is supposed to mean. Yes, the section header really is 36 words long. Yes it is representative of the entire report.
As I reported in the initial article, the Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative doesn’t do much on its own. Almost 100% of its “outcomes” in any of its stated areas of focus are based on “Commitments to Action.” These “Commitments” resemble “Memoranda of Understanding” (MOU) some may be familiar with from local and regional nonprofit work. I’m sure attorneys much smarter than me may point out that these commitments are in no way enforceable.
You may have heard of Trump University, and also separate for-profit schools with ties to the Clinton Foundation. In addition, there is a Clinton Global Initiative University. Like everything else about the Clinton Foundation, it is based on “Commitments to Action.” They give you a roadmap for these “Commitments” too.
I confess, I don’t understand why no one in any official position except for Charity Navigator’s oblique assessment that it cannot “rate” the Clinton Foundation due to its “business model” has not questioned this “business model” as being tax exempt. Tony Robbins seems more eligible for nonprofit status, as at least he provides products like books, tapes and seminars, and he might even make more of a social impact!”
(…) “All the organization does is hold meetings for which it charges the attendees and takes sponsorship money from companies and CEOS — and I quote from the Clinton Foundation “FAQ”
“Sponsorship revenue for CGI is up over last year, and more than half of the 30 companies listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are current CGI members or sponsors …”
So let’s walk through it together.
New language added 8 June 2016 which seems to go at the end toward Civil Rights, community and neighborhood improvement, eliminating prejudice, and related activities.
This is about how the IRS is supposed to determine whether or not a corporation should pay taxes on the revenue it receives or not. As previously noted, here’s what they received in 2014 and the prior year.
In 2014, they took in more than $242 million, and spent more than $217 million in “program services.”
They note 486 employees on their form 990 for 2014. If that $217 million was spent exclusively on salaries that’s an average of $447,958 per employee. (PS: “experts” out there — it makes this ratio even worse if you factor in 100% of their expenses, not “better”). Their net assets increased by more than $100 million between 2013 and 2014. It looks like they permanently designated an endowment. So all their extra now goes into that. Just in case.
If I were a corporate sponsor paying for the Clinton Global Initiative meetings, I would dial Donna Shalala up and ask, “What ROI are you going to give us for the contribution?”
And as to the individuals paying to attend the conferences, I would call up and ask, “Why do I have to pay? Can’t you afford at least to fly me here and put me up?”
A person who teaches accounting compared the Foundation to the Carter Foundation in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. (*Note: The nonprofit sector in the US is in horrible shape: There are 19 total jobs in the nonprofit sector listed within 150 miles of downtown Los Angeles — a distance that would encompass all of LA, Orange, San Bernardino/Riverside,Ventura and San Diego counties, a population area of roughly 20 million people). (Read more: Amy Sterling Casil, 7/13/2016)
(Timeline editor’s note: Amy has been a friend to our grass root group since the email timeline days and we appreciate her generosity in allowing us to post excerpts of her research on the Foundation timeline. Please be sure to read her entire articles at the link we provide in each entry.)
(…) the Clinton Global Initiative partnered with the Polaris Project in 2009, to build an anti-trafficking approach, replicable worldwide. The Polaris Project operates the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) and runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Polaris is based out of D.C. and is funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services. Together, they created a “Global Modern Day Slavery” database of organizations across the globe to monitor human trafficking, in 2014. They claim it is the most comprehensive database of modern-day slavery organizations ever compiled for the public, and as noted on the map above, there are 199 countries in this database.
They state “By enabling actors in the anti-human trafficking field to better locate, identify, and connect with each other, the tool will help connect victims of human trafficking and at-risk populations to the help they need.”
When they began this project in 2014, they had 200 organizations in the database. There are now 2936 organizations and hotlines working on human trafficking and forced labor. There are 26 in D.C. alone. If one has done any research on human trafficking, there is a lot of telling information to be garnered from this database. It’s definitely one heck of a network.
The Global Modern Day Slavery Directory has also partnered with Liberty Asia’s Freedom Collaborative, an online, password-protected platform for anti-trafficking “stakeholders” that offers a newsfeed updated by users, a global community of organizations and research, and programmatic and legal resources. USAID and UNDP are just two of Freedom Collaborative’s partners.
Liberty Asia also partnered with La Strada International and the Polaris Project in 2013 to launch an alliance of human trafficking hotlines around the world. Google funded this effort with $3 million dollars after determining that most illegal groups were involved in human trafficking in some way. Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, said that there wasn’t great coordination between all of the hotlines.
“If you call one hotline in one company, it generates data locally, but there is no way to correlate data with a hotline in another country,” said Cohen. “[So we thought]: can you integrate all these hotlines so it doesn’t matter which one you call? You need an integrated ecosystem to make the right response.”
KEY FACTS
• The Polaris Project is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Members are by invite only and donate a minimum of $15,000 annually.
• Catherine A. McLean is the Chairperson for the Board of Directors at Polaris. McLean was the senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign in 2008.
• Steve Rosenthal, on the Board of Directors, served as Associate Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Labor during the Clinton administration.
“A useful timeline in the OIG report sketches the McCabe-McAuliffe saga—a swamp tale of a particular sort. In 2014, McCabe, a rising star at the FBI, is assistant director of the bureau’s Washington, DC, field office. His wife is a pediatrician in Virginia. Terry McAuliffe is governor.
In February 2015, Dr. McCabe receives a phone call from Virginia’s lieutenant governor. Would she consider running for a state senate seat?
Less than two weeks later, in March 2015, McCabe and his wife drive to Richmond for what they thought was a meeting with a Virginia state senator to discuss Dr. McCabe’s possible run for office.
In Richmond, according to the OIG report, they are told there had been “a change of plans” and that “Governor McAuliffe wanted to speak to Dr. McCabe at the Governor’s mansion.”
It’s around this time that a veteran FBI agent’s radar might start blinking.
McCabe and his wife meet with McAuliffe for 30 to 45 minutes, according to the OIG report. Fundraising was discussed. “Governor McAuliffe said that he and the Democratic Party would support Dr. McCabe’s candidacy.” McAuliffe asked McCabe about his occupation and “McCabe told him he worked for the FBI but they did not discuss McCabe’s work or any FBI business.” McCabe later described it to an FBI official as a “surreal meeting.”
After the meeting, the couple rode to a local event with the governor, then returned to the mansion with the governor to retrieve their car.
McCabe informed FBI ethics officials and lawyers about the meeting and consulted with them about his wife’s plans. No one raised strong objections. McCabe recused himself from all public corruption cases in Virginia and Dr. McCabe jumped into the race.
Jill and Andrew McCabe in their campaign attire on March 7, 2015. (Credit: Sharyl Attkisson)
In July 2015, the FBI opened an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices.
Let’s pause to note here that while the official FBI investigation was opened in July 2015, Mrs. Clinton was known to be in hot water as far back as March 2015, when the State Department inspector general revealed her widespread use of a private, non-government email server.
Swamp cats will notice that March 2015 is also when Andrew and Jill McCabe got their surprise audience with McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton money man.
The McCabe fortunes rose in the autumn of 2015. Mr. McCabe was promoted to associate deputy director of the FBI. Dr. McCabe received $675,000 from two McAuliffe-connected entities for her state senate race. They were by far the biggest donations to her campaign.
In November 2015, Dr. McCabe lost her race.
In January 2016, the FBI opened an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
On February 1, Mr. McCabe was promoted again, to deputy director of the FBI.
Despite the McAuliffe connection, the OIG report notes, there was no FBI re-evaluation of McCabe’s recusals following his promotions. Although recused from Virginia public corruption investigations, he retained a senior role in Clinton-related matters.
In May 2016, news broke that McAuliffe was under FBI investigation for campaign finance violations. CNN reported that investigators were scrutinizing “McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative” and Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang, a U.S. permanent resident who made large donations to both the McAuliffe 2013 gubernatorial campaign and to the Clinton Foundation.
On October 23, the Wall Street Journal revealed the McAuliffe-linked donations to Dr. McCabe’s campaign. At FBI headquarters, McCabe resists pressure from senior executives to recuse himself from all Clinton-related matters.
Finally, on November 1—a week before the presidential election—McCabe recused from the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation investigations.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 6/21/2018)
“After being the subject of a spate of negative newspaper accounts about potential conflicts of interest and management dysfunction this winter — long beforeClinton Cash — the Clinton Foundation wound up on a “watch list” maintained by the Charity Navigator, the New Jersey–based nonprofit watchdog. The Navigator, dubbed the “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is a powerful and feared player in the nonprofit world. Founded in 2002, it ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence. For a while, the Clinton Foundation was happy to promote Charity Navigator’s work (back when they were awarded its highest ranking). In September 2014, in fact, the Navigator’s then-CEO, Ken Berger, was invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative. Of course that was before the Foundation was placed on a list with scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Red Cross.
Since March, the Foundation has embarked on an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to get removed from the list. Clinton Foundation officials accuse the Navigator of unfairly targeting them, lacking credible evidence of wrongdoing, and blowing off numerous requests for a meeting to present their case. “They’re not only punishing us for being transparent but are not being transparent themselves,” Maura Pally, the Foundation’s acting CEO, told me by phone from Morocco last week. “Charity Navigator doesn’t disclose its donors, but we do and yet that means we’re suffering the consequences.”
Navigator executives counter that the Foundation has demanded they extend the Clintons special treatment. They also allege the Foundation attempted to strong-arm them by calling a Navigator board member. “They felt they were of such importance that we should deviate from our normal process. They were irritated by that,” says Berger.
The feud is a microcosm of all that is exhausting about the Clintons’ endless public battles. Generally, it goes like this: bad press about their lack of transparency sparks some real-world consequence or censure, the Clintons complain that they’re being held to an unfair standard while their critics contend that they expect to be able to write their own rules, and the resulting flare-up leads to more bad press.” (Read more: NYMag 5/10/2015)
The Clintons stand behind Terry McAuliffe during his inauguration as the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 72nd governor. (Credit: Patrick Semansky / The Associated Press)
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is widely considered the best friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and was co-chair of one of Bill’s presidential campaigns and the chair of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. In March 2016, McAuliffe says, “We’re best friends, I’ve been family friends with the Clinton’s for thirty years. It’s a great relationship, we vacationed together for years, we’re just very personal friends…” (The Valley’s Music Place, 3/31/2016)
On March 7, 2015, McAuliffe and other state Democratic Party leaders meet with Dr. Jill McCabe and persuade her to run for a state senator seat in Virginia. Dr. McCabe is a hospital physician who has never run for political office before. This has potentially larger political implications, because her husband is Andrew McCabe, an FBI official who runs the FBI’s Washington, DC, field office at the time.
Dr. Jill McCabe (Credit: Twitter)
FBI officials will later claim that after the March 7, 2015 meeting, Andrew McCabe seeks ethics advice from the FBI and follows it, avoiding involvement with public corruption cases in Virginia, and also avoiding any of his wife’s campaign activities or events.
Five days before Jill McCabe is asked to run, on March 2, 2015, the New York Times publicly reveals Clinton’s use of a private email address, and her use of a private email server is revealed two days later, starting a major and prolonged political controversy. Jill McCabe announces her candidacy on March 12, 2015.
On July 10, 2015, the FBI’s Clinton email investigation formally begins, although it may have informally begun earlier.
Andrew McCabe and Jill McCabe pose at a campaign event in 2015. (Credit: Sharyl Attkisson)
Andrew McCabe’s Washington, DC, field office provides personnel and resources to the investigation. At the end of July 2015, he is promoted to assistant deputy FBI director, the number three position in the FBI.
During the 2015 election season, McAuliffe’s political action committee (PAC) donates $467,500 to Jill McCabe’s campaign. Furthermore, the Virginia Democratic Party, ”over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control,” according to the Wall Street Journal, donates an additional $207,788 to her campaign. “That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him.”
This represents more than a third of all the campaign funds McCabe raises in the election. She is the third-largest recipient of funds from McAuliffe’s PAC that year.
Virginia State Senator Dick Black (Credit: Twitter)
On November 3, 2015, Jill McCabe loses the election to incumbent Republican Dick Black. Once the campaign is over, “[Andrew] McCabe and FBI officials felt the potential conflict-of-interest issues ended,” according to the Journal.
In February 2016, Andrew McCabe is promoted to deputy FBI director, the second highest position in the FBI. In this role, he is part of the executive leadership team overseeing the Clinton email investigation, though FBI officials say any final decisions are made by FBI Director James Comey.
However, that is not the only potential conflict of interest. By February 2016, four FBI field offices are conducting investigations of the Clinton Foundation. McAuliffe was a Clinton Foundation board member until he resigned when he became the governor of Virginia in 2013. (The Wall Street Journal, 10/24/2016)
Also, at some point in 2015, if not earlier, the FBI begins conducting an investigation of McAuliffe. When the existence of this investigation is publicly leaked in May 2016, media reports suggest it may involve McAuliffe’s financial relationship with a Chinese businessperson who has donated millions to the foundation. It is also reported that investigators have looked at McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a yearly conference run by the Clinton Foundation. (CNN, 5/24/2016)
Andrew McCabe (Credit: Getty Images)
In the spring of 2016, Andrew McCabe agrees to recuse himself from the McAuliffe investigation, due to McAuliffe’s donations to Jill McCabe’s election campaign. However, he doesn’t recuse himself from the Clinton Foundation investigation or the Clinton email investigation, despite McAuliffe’s close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. (The Wall Street Journal, 10/24/2016)
In mid-July 2016, the FBI seeks to reorganize the Clinton Foundation investigation. McCabe decides the FBI’s New York office should take the lead, while the Washington office that he formerly headed should take the lead with the McAuliffe investigation. The Journal will later report, “Within the FBI, the decision was viewed with skepticism by some, who felt the probe would be stronger if the foundation and McAuliffe matters were combined.” However, the decision is implemented.
McCabe also is involved in an effort to shut down the foundation investigation in August 2016, but his role is unclear.
In October 2016, McCabe’s potential conflicts of interest will be revealed by two Wall Street Journal articles. (The Wall Street Journal, 10/30/2016) In early November 2016, the Journal will report that “some [in the FBI] have blamed [McCabe], claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the [Clinton Foundation] case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation.” (The Wall Street Journal, 11/2/2016)
Around that time, James Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office, will say of McCabe, “The guy has no common sense. He should be demoted and taken out of the chain of command.” (The American Spectator, 11/1/2016)
Ye Jianming, (l) a Chinese oil tycoon, with President Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic in Shanghai in 2015. (Credit: Lucie Mikolaskova/Czech News Agency/The Associated Press)
“The Clinton Foundation accepted a donation from CEFC China Energy Company, the firm [from] which Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter appears to have leveraged his father’s office to gain equity and kickbacks from.
The Clintons, however, had no qualms about accepting money from Ye, a Chinese Communist Party member with ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The New York Times noted:
“Mr. Ye also further loosened CEFC’s purse strings, donating as much as $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.”
Clinton Foundation records reveal that CEFC China Energy company donated a sum between $50,001 and $100,000 to the foundation, a sizable amount which came in the third quarter of 2015.
The Wall Street Journal described how, in response to Clinton’s 2016 bid for the presidency, donations to the foundation had skyrocketed:
“Some foreign companies were also among the new donors to the foundation. Attijariwafa Bank, a major bank in Morocco in which the holding company controlled by the Moroccan royal family has owned a stake, gave between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative. (The holding company earlier this year indicated it planned to sell its shares in the bank.) CEFC China Energy Company, an energy and financial services firm that is one of the largest private companies in China, gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative.”
(…) “The Clinton Foundation network is actually comprised of several different charities that all perform seemingly similar functions. Those include the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Climate Initiative and several more, all with varying degrees of overlapping finances.
Ortel said the foundations’ complex paper trails are littered with mistakes and repeat filings.
In November, the Clinton Health Access Initiative was forced to refile its tax returns after a review revealed big-ticket foreign donations that had been left off its Form 990 filing.
The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has been removed from the website of a prominent nonprofit watchdog, Charity Navigator, because its “atypical business model can not be accurately captured” by methods used to size up traditional charities.
The pattern extends to smaller charities linked to the Clintons, Ortel noted. One organization founded by former President Bill Clinton, the American India Foundation, has problems that stretch around the country.
For example, the American India Foundation’s nonprofit status was revoked in Illinois in 2002, according to state records. This year, the charity was listed as “not in good standing.”
In Massachusetts, the foundation had its nonprofit status revoked in June 2014 and was not reinstated until March 22 of this year.
In March 2015, the charity held a gala in an Atlanta hotel, according to an event promotion.
But the American India Foundation was not then registered to solicit funds in the state of Georgia, correspondences shared with the Washington Examiner suggest. In fact, the only charity in the Clinton orbit that was registered in the Peach State as of October was the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation — even though the Clinton Global Initiative plans to hold its glitzy annual conference in Atlanta next month.
An official with the Georgia secretary of state’s office said the state government did not have an open investigation into potentially unregistered arms of the Clinton Foundation, although emails shared with the Examiner indicate inquiries about the charities were routed to a securities enforcement attorney in November of last year.
Sandra Miniutti (Credit: public domain)
Sandra Miniutti of Charity Navigator said the patchwork of nonprofit regulations across different states can sometimes trip up well-meaning charities.
“The current state registration system is complex, bureaucratic and out-of-date with the modern times,” Miniutti said. “It was conceived before the internet and technology made it easily for charities to solicit across state lines.”
Miniutti said nonprofits often tap outside firms to keep up with compliance issues.
“While we don’t condone non-compliance, it is not particularly surprising to hear of an organization accidentally being out of compliance,” she said.
Hal Moroz, a private attorney and former Georgia judge, said he referred some of Ortel’s findings on the violations of the foundation to the state attorney general’s office.
“This is a matter of great public interest because we have a major party presidential candidate who has been greatly enriched by the questionable activities of a foundation that was meant to serve charitable public interests,” Moroz said.
“The records of charities are open to public review and scrutiny, and this is so because there are certain tax advantages to registering under state and federal law as a charity and the citizens of the United States foot the bill for these tax advantages,” he added.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 5/16/2016)
(…) “Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
(…) Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
(…) Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
(…) During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
Gotta hand it to Bill. At least he lent his name to his winter vacation spot’s “health needs.” ~Amy Sterling Casil (Credit: Getty Images)
“One of the stated goals of the Clinton Foundation is to improve Health and Wellness. When I saw they listed it as one of their areas where they did work, I was like “Why Coachella Valley?” Boh-de-oh.
When I first decided to look at the Clinton Foundation programs and records, the “Coachella Valley” was listed as one of five “Health and Wellness” programs in the U.S. Now these programs listed on the Foundation’s website are far murkier with more than a dozen new links of uncertain provenance. None of the new links one may see listed in apparent desperation are actually conducted by the Clinton Foundation, nor are most of them “programs” but we’ll put that issue aside for the time being.
I’m going to walk you through an analysis of this “charitable venture” since I know the area well, know the real needs, and unlike the Clinton Foundation, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), Clinton-Giustra Global Whatever, Clinton Global Initiative, William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and all the rest, I’ve been involved in actual nonprofit work for half of my adult working life.” (Read more: Amy Sterling Casil, 7/09/2016)
In HILLARY’S AMERICA, bestselling author and influential filmmaker D’Souza reveals the sordid truth about Hillary and the secret history of the Democratic Party. This important and controversial film releases at a critical time leading up to the 2016 Presidential campaign and challenges the state of American politics.
The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning James Grimaldi joined me this morning to discuss the MSM’s inexplicable —to me– refusal to put spotlight on the Marc Rich-Gilbert Chagoury business relationship and Chagoury’s massive donations to the Clinton Foundation:
HH: I’m joined by the Wall Street Journal’s James Grimaldi, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who has written extensively on the Clinton Foundation over the years. James, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show, great to have you.
JG: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
HH: How many stories do you think you’ve written on the Clinton Foundation over the last, since she became Secretary of State?
JG: Well, about a dozen, I think I’ve written on the Clinton Foundation in the last couple of years. So…
HH: All right, in those dozen stories, did you ever bring up Gilbert Chagoury?
JG: Yes.
HH: And what was your conclusion about him?
JG: Well, I mean, the interesting thing about the Gilbert Chagoury story is it goes back quite a ways. In fact, the Journal has done stories on Chagoury going back more than, I think, ten or fifteen years. Well, Chagoury was convicted of money laundering in Switzerland. He was involved with difficulties in Nigeria. And he’s very close to the Clinton Foundation. He was a big donor to the Clinton Foundation, and he was given some special access, it appears, because through Douglas Band, who’s a top aide to Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And when she became Secretary of State in early 2009, he wanted to speak to someone at the State Department, and Doug Band intervened to try to make a phone call happen with a top diplomat. He went through his contacts in Hillary Clinton’s office to make that happen.
HH: Now I have read in some places that he has pledged a billion dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative. Have you confirmed that, James Grimaldi?
JG: Yeah, no I haven’t looked, I haven’t re-looked, I really should say, into Gilbert Chagoury in the last couple of years. In many ways, he’s sort of known, but the numbers are large. I don’t know if it’s a billion dollars, but he’s one of the largest patrons for the Foundation.
Bill Clinton and Marc Rich (Credit: NYPost)
HH: Have you written on his relationship with the late Marc Rich?
JG: Yes, in fact, I think I, this, boy, you’re really testing my memory here. So when Marc Rich was pardoned, I covered at the Washington Post and wrote several stories about the Marc Rich pardons. I covered the hearings. I probably wrote a dozen stories about the pardons or more. And because I didn’t know that Chagoury was specifically the topic of this phone call, I didn’t go and reread my stories.
Gilbert Chagoury, Chairman of The Chagoury Group (left), Bill Clinton (center) and Ronald Chagoury, Chief Executive Officer (right) attend the Eko Atlantic City Dedication Ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria on February 21st, 2012. (Credit: public domain)
HH: Do you, can you recall generally what the relationship was between Chagoury and Rich, how close it was? I’ve done what I could. I have Googled Chagoury and Rich. I didn’t find any of your stories mentioning them in the same story. Would that surprise you that they weren’t mentioned in the same story?
JG: Yeah, it might. We could go back and we could take a look at what I wrote during the, did this come up during the pardon hearings that were held by Dan Burton that I covered?
HH: No, this, I’m talking only in the context of the Clinton Foundation, because I find the Chagoury-Rich connection, given the revelations of August 10th, to be remarkably salient. Do you?
JG: Well you know, I’m surprised they would not have come up during the Marc Rich pardon case, because I was very impressed with the work of the House Oversight Committee and Dan Burton’s team. I thought the hearings were excellent. I thought they were particularly salient with regard to the Marc Rich pardons and the connections therein. If you had wanted a Chagoury expert, I think the best person to talk to would be right there in Los Angeles, John Imschweiler, who wrote one of the most extensive pieces about Marc Rich that’s appeared in the Wall Street Journal. I think it was a 2,000 word article. And actually, we’ve been in some correspondence recently about Chagoury.
HH: Now on August 10th, out comes the emails that show Band making the request of Abedin for a meeting with Chagoury.
JG: Yes.
HH: I, this gets to my key point, and I have been banging on the MSM that the public needs to know that Chagoury and Rich are tied up together, and Chagoury is making millions, if not up to a billion dollars’ worth of contributions to the Clinton Foundation. And Marc Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton. I think this is sinister. Do you think it’s sinister?
JG: Well, the facts as you state them, I’m not sure if I would use the word sinister, but they’re certainly noteworthy. When I go through the top donors of the Clinton Foundation on their self-disclosed list, which I have exposed as having a lot of flaws, I’m not sure that Chagoury comes up into the billion dollar range, but I’m willing to entertain that. On August 10th, I was enjoying vacation in Ventura County, California, so I did not cover that story, although I did contribute to it while on vacation, but have not gone back to look into it. So are you, do you think there should be, it sounds like you have new information.
HH: No, I have only the emails that have come out last week and yesterday. And thus far, I’ve been able to discover S. Daniel Abraham, a major donor, wanting the meeting, Bono wanting a satellite link-up to the Space Station, Chagoury, the Crown Prince of Bahrain, $32 million dollar donor to the Foundation, wanting a meeting, and Casey Wasserman, $5-10 million dollar donor to the Foundation, wanting a visa for a crook. All of those requests going to Doug Band and then relayed to Huma Abedin. So I have a pattern here that I haven’t seen. Have you written up this pattern of, I mean, it just came out since August 10th. That’s what I’m looking for. I mean, great reporting prior to August 10th, but that’s like saying there was great reporting on Lance Armstrong prior to the DOJ charging him with doping. There’s a before August 10th and an after August 10th, in my mind, set of articles.
JG: Well, you know, well, that’s interesting. I’m surprised you’re not at all interested in the fact that we’ve reported that 60 companies that were lobbying the State Department had given the Clinton Foundation $26 million dollars. I’m surprised you’re not interested in our coverage about these companies that got favors from the State Department, specifically from Hillary Clinton, including General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Boeing, and that gifts to the Clinton Foundation came in or around the time she did specific favors for those companies.
HH: You see, I am interested in that, but smoking guns are what make political stories. We have smoking guns beginning August 10th with the Chagoury emails, and now we find there are 14,900 emails that she did not release that she attempted to delete, and that the State Department is sitting on. So my calculation is of the 750 pages of emails that have been released, we have found five smoking guns of favors asked for of Doug Band by contributors that at least made it to the Clinton inner circle of Abedin and Mills. That’s all since August 10. Prior to that, it’s ugly and it’s messy and it’s stinky, but it’s sort of like Lance Armstrong and doping. Everyone sort of thought something was going on, but until the evidence showed up, he didn’t lose the endorsement deals.
JG: Well…
HH: There’s a new day now.
JG: I think you’re missing a point here, and I think if we go back, let’s go back and look at the Chagoury emails. What was it that Chagoury wanted? Well, from what we can tell from that email, he said he wanted a phone call. We’re not really sure what happened on the phone call. We know what his spokesman who used to work for the Bush administration, who now worked for Gilbert Chagoury, says that phone call was about, which was about the Lebanese elections. That possibly could be right or wrong. I don’t necessarily see that as a smoking gun. I do think that when you have a pattern of as many as a dozen companies that have given either the Clinton Foundation or have given Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton personally for their own personal bank accounts speaking fees, and you can show that those same entities were the recipient of specific favors that came in or around the time that those donations or contributions were made, and you have a pattern of a dozen of those, I mean, you know, there are coincidences in the universe, but you have to say that when that happens more than a dozen times, it could be interesting.
HH: Oh, I agree. I agree with that completely.
JG: And I think…
HH: I’m talking with James Grimaldi…
JG: I think what UBS got from Hillary Clinton was far more significant than Chagoury’s phone call.
HH: No…
JG: And I think that $1.5 million dollars that Bill got in his personal bank account after Mrs. Clinton was involved in helping negotiate down for UBS with the Swiss foreign minister, was a pretty significant story.
HH: It is. James, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you’re writing that. What I’m looking at is the second most controversial thing that Bill Clinton did as president was pardon Marc Rich, the second most. That’s after the Monica…
JG: Which, after the Monica? Okay.
HH: So it is a disgusting thing. He was indicted on 65 cases, including dealing with Iran while Americans were being held hostage, probably will dog him. We thought his political career was over. Chagoury is Marc Rich’s business partner. This is just a question of journalistic approach. Shouldn’t every story that mentions Chagoury and his relationship with Doug Band and the Clinton Foundation mention that he was Marc Rich’s business partner?
JG: I suppose you make a point there. We could, we certainly could make a point about that. Like I said, I was on vacation when the Chagoury email came out. And in that time, I was busy, and since I got back on Tuesday or Wednesday of last week, I wrote a story over the weekend on Friday in which I was able to uncover that the Clinton Foundation was trying to make some changes to their rules. I presented a list of questions to the Clinton Foundation around Noon. They refused to answer. They said they’ll answer when they feel like answering, and then at 5:00, they leak their supposed new changes to their policy to the Associated Press at 5:00.
HH: I know. That was silly. But here’s my key. Here’s my key question, James.
JG: So…
HH: …before we run out of time, is there hasn’t been one story since August 10 in a mainstream media journal, not one, that investigates, expands upon in details, the relationship between Marc Rich and Gilbert Chagoury. Is that a failing of the mainstream media?
JG: Well, I need to know more about the relationship between the two. I need to be able to fact check the facts that you talk about. I will say that there is a bias in the mainstream media that against rewriting stories that have been investigated in some great detail. That may be a failing. I run into that issue all the time. Some of the facts that I talked about today, which I wrote in the last two years in the two dozen stories, are often missed by lots of readers, including intelligent radio show hosts who…
HH: Oh, I didn’t miss them. I read them. They’re just not to the point.
JG: …don’t know about, don’t know about these things.
HH: Oh, no, I do. I’ve read them all. But what your tweets seem to suggest is I didn’t care about them. I did. I think they’re important. But the most important thing, it’s like not spotting Everest when you’re looking at a mountain range. The biggest thing is Rich-Chagoury, and no one’s written about it.
JG: Well, like I said, John Imschweiler wrote a 2,000 word piece not too far in the distant past. It might be worth bringing that story up again.
HH: I’m going to go find it. I don’t think it mentioned Chagoury, at least if it did, the Google algorithm…
JG: It’s a Chagoury piece.
HH: Yeah, the Chagoury piece does not mention Marc Rich to my knowledge. I can’t find one, not one.
JG: Yeah, no, it might. I don’t know. I mean, as I said, John is like one of our experts for Chagoury. This new Chagoury email that you find to be a smoking gun, and I’m not sure that it is, but it’s interesting, and we certainly put it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, but I’m not sure it shows a quid pro quo, which is what a smoking gun email would do.
HH: It doesn’t. I’m just saying…It shows Marc Rich’s…
JG: In fact, that’s what we’re looking for, is a quid pro quo email.
HH: It shows Marc Rich’s business partner, James, doing business with the Clintons. I’ve got to go. Come back again, but I hope you’ll turn your very great abilities to Chagoury and Rich, James Grimaldi of the Wall Street Journal.
Although the FBI’s Clinton email investigation was closed in July 2016, the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation continues, though it never has had grand jury backing and thus no subpoena power.
Clinton speaks at the 10th Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting in September, 2014. (Credit: Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press)
The email investigation uncovered many thousands of emails on non-government computers belonging to Clinton and some of her aides, and many of these same people had obvious roles with the Clinton Foundation. As a result, sometime in September 2016, Clinton Foundation investigators ask to have access to the emails found in the Clinton email investigation.
But that request is rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter.”
However, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe allegedly tells them no and says they can’t “go prosecutor shopping.”
In early October 2016, a different FBI investigation will find emails belonging to Clinton aide Huma Abedin on a previously unknown computer, leading to a different legal issue about sharing information between various FBI investigations.
It appears the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation still has not been given access to the possibly relevant emails found by the Clinton email investigation. (The Wall Street Journal, 10/30/2016)
“A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe.
These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.
Lockheed Martin
When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.
But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year.
Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel.
How much money did James Comey make from Lockheed Martin in his last year with the company, which he left in 2010? More than $6 million in compensation.
Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor. The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010.
According to records, Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010.
In 2010, Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department.
“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records.
HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.”
“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “$1 billion in financing” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.
Who Is Peter Comey?
When our source called the Chinatown offices of D.C. law firm DLA Piper and asked for “Peter Comey,” a receptionist immediately put him through to Comey’s direct line. But Peter Comey is not featured on the DLA Piper website.
Peter Comey serves as “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper. James Comey was not questioned about his relationship with Peter Comey in his confirmation hearing.
DLA Piper is the firm that performed the independent audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World’s first big push to put the email scandal behind them. DLA Piper’s employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base.
And here is another thing: Peter Comey has a mortgage on his house that is owned by his brother James Comey, the FBI director.
Peter Comey’s financial records, obtained by Breitbart News, show that he bought a $950,000 house in Vienna, Virginia, in June 2008. He needed a $712,500 mortgage from First Savings Mortgage Corporation.
But on January 31, 2011, James Comey and his wife stepped in to become Private Party lenders. They granted a mortgage on the house for $711,000. Financial records suggest that Peter Comey took out two such mortgages from his brother that day.
This financial relationship between the Comey brothers began prior to James Comey’s nomination to become director of the FBI.
DLA Piper did not answer Breitbart News’ question as to whether James Comey and Peter Comey spoke at any point about this mortgage or anything else during the Clinton email investigation. (Read more: Breitbart, 9/10/2016)(Archive)
“Bernard Sansaricq, the former Haitian president of the Senate in 1994, told Donald Trump at a campaign event that Clinton invaded Haiti. Sansaricq said he was hitting back hard against the invasion on TV and to appease him, he said Clinton sent Bill Richardson to speak with him.
A week later, the US embassy called and said they sent a messenger who told him to join their movement and he will be made the richest man in Haiti. He refused out of principle, he said.
A week later, by executive order, he said Bill Clinton revoked his visa.
Haiti’s problems are corruption, weak institutions, bad roads, poverty, poor education. However, the money from the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton-Bush fund helped foreign investors and Haiti’s wealthy elite.
“The Clinton Foundation’s long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization’s charitable work and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency.
But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization’s clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work. In November, the Australian government confirmed it “has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.” The government of Norway also drastically reduced their annual donations, which reached $20 million a year in 2015.
On January 12, the Clinton Foundation received more bad news: a WARN notice was filed with the New York Department of Labor. The main office of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City would be closing, laying off 22 employees. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) “offers protection to workers, their families, and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government.” The reason for the filing was stated as the “discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initiative,” after CGI previously announced layoffs leading up to the general election.
The Clinton Global Initiative was created in 2005 to serve as a networking platform for the Clinton Foundation. Both the initiative’s mission and its own definition of what it seeks to accomplish are vague. “Rather than directly implementing projects, CGI facilitates action by helping members connect, collaborate, and make effective and measurable Commitments to Action—plans for addressing significant global challenges,” states the CGI website. The Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation director of media relations have not responded to requests for comment.
WikiLeaks revealed several criticisms of the Clinton Foundation were true, as pay-to-play schemes and the foundation’s corrupt management were exposed. On October 26, The Washington Post reported a memo detailed how the Clinton Foundation was used to boost Bill Clinton’s income.
“The memo, made public Wednesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, lays out the aggressive strategy behind lining up the consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements for Bill Clinton that added tens of millions of dollars to the family’s fortune, including during the years that Hillary Clinton led the State Department,” reported The Washington Post. “It describes how Band helped run what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.,” obtaining “in-kind services for the President and his family—for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”
(Timeline editor’s note: While preparing this timeline entry, I discovered the links provided by Jeff Carlson to Rep. Goodlatte’s press release and letter, are no longer working links on the House Judiciary Committee website. I called Rep. Nadler’s office to ask why those documents are no longer available and they could not (or would not) give me an answer. With a little further searching, I was able to find the original letter in the Wayback Machine.)
(A screenshot of my attempt to access Rep. Goodlatte’s press release and letter on the House Judiciary Committee website.)
“The House Judiciary Committee issued a press release on July 27, 2017, stating that a formal request for the appointment of a second Special Counsel has been made to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The actual letter may be viewed here.
The Judiciary Committee members were specific in their request. They are asking for investigation into the following:
The members call for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate grave concerns such as former Attorney General Lynch’s directive to former FBI Director Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the investigation into former Secretary Clinton; the FBI and Justice Department’s investigative decisions related to the Clinton email investigation, including the immunity deals given to potential co-conspirators; selected leaks of classified information that unmasked U.S. persons incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community; and the FBI’s reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, among many others issues.
Fourteen specific topics of investigation are noted – many of which were asked previously but remain unanswered:
Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch directing Mr. Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the Clinton investigation;
The shadow cast over our system of justice concerning Secretary Clinton and her involvement in mishandling classified information;
FBI and DOJ’s investigative decisions related to former Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, including the propriety and consequence of immunity deals given to potential Clinton co-conspirators Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, John Bentel and possibly others;
The apparent failure of DOJ to empanel a grand jury to investigate allegations of mishandling of classified information by Hillary Clinton and her associates;
The Department of State and its employees’ involvement in determining which communications of Secretary Clinton’s and her associates to turn over for public scrutiny;
WikiLeaks disclosures concerning the Clinton Foundation and its potentially unlawful international dealings;
Connections between the Clinton campaign, or the Clinton Foundation, and foreign entities, including those from Russia and Ukraine;
Mr. Comey’s knowledge of the purchase of Uranium One by the company Rosatom, whether the approval of the sale was connected to any donations made to the Clinton Foundation, and what role Secretary Clinton played in the approval of that sale that had national security ramifications;
Disclosures arising from unlawful access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computer systems, including inappropriate collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign;
Post-election accusations by the President that he was wiretapped by the previous Administration, and whether Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch had any knowledge of efforts made by any federal agency to unlawfully monitor communications of then-candidate Trump or his associates;
Selected leaks of classified information related to the unmasking of U.S. person identities incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community, including an assessment of whether anyone in the Obama Administration, including Mr. Comey, Ms. Lynch, Ms. Susan Rice, Ms. Samantha Power, or others, had any knowledge about the “unmasking” of individuals on then candidate-Trump’s campaign team, transition team, or both;
Admitted leaks by Mr. Comey to Columbia University law professor, Daniel Richman, regarding conversations between Mr. Comey and President Trump, how the leaked information was purposefully released to lead to the appointment of a special counsel, and whether any classified information was included in the now infamous “Comey memos”;
Mr. Comey’s and the FBI’s apparent reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, including the company’s creation of a “dossier” of information about Mr. Trump, that dossier’s commission and dissemination in the months before and after the 2016 election, whether the FBI paid anyone connected to the dossier, and the intelligence sources of Fusion GPS or any person or company working for Fusion GPS and its affiliates; and
Any and all potential leaks originated by Mr. Comey and provide to author Michael Schmidt dating back to 1993.
They are all questions and topics that merit actual investigation.
The Committee’s questions fall into broader subgroups:
Hillary Clinton Investigation
Clinton Foundation
Surveillance
Unmasking of U.S. Citizens
FBI/Comey Collusion
Illegal Leaks
The final question pertains to Michael Schmidt, a New York Times reporter who has broken a number of stories on Trump-Russia as well as apparent leaks from Comey. You may find a complete listing of Schmidt’s articles here. Someone was whispering directly into his ear.
I’m not sure what will come from this letter – perhaps nothing – but the House Judiciary Committee’s timing is excellent. Attorney General Sessions has been under pressure for his recusal on the Russian Investigation along with his lack of prosecutorial zeal. If this request had come out a month ago, I would have noted it but not thought much else. At this particular juncture of events, I find myself marginally more hopeful that something – anything – might result from the Committee’s formal request.” (Read more: themarketswork.com, 7/29/2017)
“An Australian investigative journalist who is a retired police detective said Tuesday he has been asked to provide the FBI with details about multiple allegations of mishandling millions of dollars contributed to the Clinton Foundation by the Aussie government.
“I have been asked to provide the FBI with further and better particulars about allegations regarding improper donations to the CF funded by Australian taxpayers,” Michael Smith told LifeZette.
At the center of Smith’s complaints are former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and multiple Australian government officials, including senior diplomat Alexander Downer, that government’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom.
(Credit: Michael Smith)
(…) The materials Smith is giving the FBI focus on a 2006 memorandum of understanding between the Australian government and the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton HIV/AIDs Initiative (CHAI). Smith claims the foundation received a “$25M financial advantage dishonestly obtained by deception” as a result of actions by Bill Clinton and Downer, who was then Australia’s minister of foreign affairs.
Also included in the Smith materials are evidence he believes shows “corrupt October 2006 backdating of false tender advertisements purporting to advertise the availability of a $15 million contract to provide HIV/AIDS services in Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian government after an agreement was already in place to pay the Clinton Foundation and/or associates.”
(…) A third complaint concerns what Smith describes as “the $10 million financial advantage dishonestly obtained by deception between April 1, 2008, and Sept. 25, 2008, at Washington, D.C., New York, New York, and Canberra Australia involving an MOU between the Australian government, the “Clinton Climate Initiative,” and the purported “Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute Inc.” (Read more: Lifezette, 1/16/2018)(Archive)
William D.Campbell worked as an informant for federal authorities investigating Vadim Mikerin, a Russian official in charge of US operations for Tenex, a unit of Rosatom. (Credit: TenamUSA)
“An FBI informant connected to the Uranium One controversy told three congressional committees in a written statement that Moscow routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton‘s charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations.
The informant, [William] Douglas Campbell, said in the statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton.
Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell’s credibility, setting the stage for a battle with Republicans over his testimony.
Campbell added in the testimony that Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clintons’ Global Initiative.”
“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.”
APCO officials told The Hill that its support for the Clinton Global Initiative and its work with Russia were not connected in any way, and in fact involved different divisions of the firm. They added their lobbying for Russia did not involve Uranium One but rather focused on regulatory issues aimed at helping Russia better compete for nuclear fuel contracts inside the United States. (Read more: The Hill, 2/07/18)
American Center for Law & Justice Logo (Credit: public domain)
“We have just uncovered a stunning revelation about the extent to which the Clinton State Department colluded with the Clinton Foundation. Despite what Hillary Clinton told the American people, there was no firewall.”
(…) “These documents, only now being uncovered through our FOIA request and subsequent litigation, show extensive communications exchanged between Clinton or her senior staff at State Department and Doug Band – a senior aid at the Clinton Foundation and creator of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
In recent court filings, the State Department has revealed that more than 8,700 documents exist in Cheryl Mills’ and/or Huma Abedin’s files which contain the single search term, “Doug Band.” It is possible, and indeed likely, that each document consists of several pages placing the number closer to 18,000 pages or more.
The ACLJ has also learned through our litigation that another 22,000 documents exist in Cheryl Mills’ and Huma Abedin’s files (not including attachments) mentioning or referring to the Clinton Foundation or a related term referencing the foundation.
This information alone serves as overwhelming evidence of the corruption that occurred within the State Department during the time Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. The documents also confirm that Secretary Clinton intentionally lied to the American people and misled the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during her confirmation hearings for Secretary of State. On several occasions, Secretary Clinton assured the Senate that she would maintain a complete separation between her two worlds – the foundation and any donors hoping to obtain favors and her operation of the State Department. In fact, she informed the Senate that as early as January 2009, steps had already been taken to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Absolutely no such steps appear to have ever been taken.
Indeed, in just the most recent 89 pages of documents produced by State which mention Doug Band, it is clear that Band served as a liaison for Clinton donors looking for favors and official acts from the Clinton-run State Department.
From requests for Secretary Clinton’s appearance at social events and fundraisers to requests for special consideration for government positions (Brock Johnson) and at least 5 ambassadorships (a diplomatic official of the highest rank), Doug Band was the guy to contact; and he had a direct line to Secretary Clinton and her senior staff. If a foundation donor needed help with a visa application in light of a prior criminal conviction or experienced complications with international travel, they contacted Doug Band and, within minutes of receiving their request, Doug Band would forward the request/favor to Huma Abedin or Cheryl Mills.
In fact, when other government employees or officials couldn’t get a hold of Secretary Clinton or her staff, they emailed Doug Band for a response.”
(…) “Brock Johnson later tipped off Cheryl Mills about a “Significant FOIA” request in 2012 that requested information about “the number of email accounts of, or associated with, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.” The Inspector General found that the State Department then falsely stated that there were “no records responsive to your request,” when in fact numerous officials knew about Secretary Clinton’s private email address. To be clear, Johnson tipped off Cheryl Mills about the FOIA request that would have first publicly uncovered Secretary Clinton’s email scandal; instead the State Department covered it up for months longer. And Johnson obtained his job as a “favor” to the Clinton Foundation.” (Read more: American Center for Law and Justice, 5/23/2018)
(…) “In a Nov. 29DOJ press release, three executives including Abul Huda Farouki were charged “for their roles in a scheme to defraud U.S. military contracts in Afghanistan, engaging in illegal commerce in Iran, and laundering money internationally.” Farouki was the CEO of Anham, a defense contractor based in the United Arab Emirates
This wasn’t the first time Farouki or his company have been involved in allegations of misconduct. In a 2013 article by The Daily Caller, headlined “Clinton Donors Get a Pass on Shady Contracting,” Farouki and his company were highlighted:
“In June 2011, the Defense Department’s Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released a scathing report on a defense contracting company called Anham. The title of the report and its conclusion were the same: ‘Poor Government Oversight of Anham and Its Subcontracting Procedures Allowed Questionable Costs to Go Undetected.’”
The article then asked a simple question: Given prior violations, how was Anham able to secure an $8 billion contract in Afghanistan that “allowed it to illegally ship supplies through two Iranian border crossings and a seaport controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard?”
Huma Abedin appears to Farouki’s right at a Tomorrow’s Youth Organization Gala event in Washington, DC on October 21, 2010. (Credit: public domain)
The $8 billion contract, along with the illegal shipment of supplies, being cited in the 2013 article appear to be exactly the same violations being alleged in the 2018 DOJ indictment. So why weren’t Farouki and his company charged with these same, known violations back in 2013?
The answer may lie within Farouki’s many connections to the Democratic Party. The Daily Caller notes that Farouki is a longtime donor to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and donated to Obama for America in 2008. But Farouki’s closest ties lie with the Clintons and their Foundation.
“Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne delivered to the Department of Justice a number of documents, including emails and text messages, in April, regarding both the origins of the Russian investigation, and an FBI operation into Hillary Clinton with which he was personally involved during the first months of 2016, according to a U.S. official who spoke to SaraACarter.com.
Byrne has also confirmed the account.
Byrne claims the documents, which have not been made public and are currently under investigation by the DOJ, are allegedly communications he had with the FBI concerning both the Clinton investigation and the origins of the Russian investigation. SaraACarter.com did not review the documents, which are now under review by law enforcement.
He approached the DOJ and met with lawyers on April 5th and 30th. The first meeting was without counsel in Washington D.C. A source directly familiar with the interviews confirmed Byrne’s account of the meetings.
DOJ officials said they could not comment on Byrne’s allegations.
“I gave to the DOJ documents concerning both the origin of the Russian probe and the probe into Hillary Clinton, both of which I was involved in, and both of which turned out to be less about law enforcement than they were about political espionage,” Byrne told SaraACarter.com Monday.
He noted that the communications will prove that the FBI also had an operation into Clinton Foundation that he was directly involved in.
“This is going to become the greatest political scandal in US history,” he said.
“If we survive it, and if Rule of Law returns to America, it will be due to one man: Bill Barr.”
Several weeks ago, FBI officials told SaraACarter.com that they declined to comment on Byrne’s allegations.
Byrne said the investigation into Clinton was one of the main reasons he came forward. This reporter first published Byrne’s story about his relationship with now convicted Russian gun right’s activist Maria Butina. She pleaded guilty in 2018 for failing to register as a foreign agent in the U.S. and is now serving out her sentence, which ends in October.
Byrne’s claims regarding the Clinton Foundation investigation are not without parallel. According to numerous officials the FBI had an ongoing investigation. Whistleblower and former government informant William Campbell was interviewed in 2018, by bureau agents from the Little Rock, Arkansas’ field office. According to Campbell, who first spoke to this reporter in 2017, he was asked by FBI agents whether donations to the Clintons charitable organization from Russia were used to influence U.S. nuclear policy during the Obama Administration. Specifically, he was asked about the sale of 20 percent of Uranium One.
As also reported in 2018, by John Solomon with The Hill, the “agents questioned him extensively about claims the Russians made to him that they had routed millions of dollars to an American lobbying firm in 2010 and 2011 with the expectation it would be used to help President Clinton’s charitable global initiative while major uranium decisions were pending before Hillary Clinton’s State Department.”
Byrne, told SaraACarter.com that the FBI was also investigating Clinton’s charitable organizations in the first half of 2016, and that he was directly involved in one of the operations being conducted by the FBI. He did not give details regarding the operation saying but said it directly dealt with Clinton and whether or not there was pay for play.
On Monday, Byrne appeared on Fox Business Network with David Asman, revealing his claims about the Clinton investigation.
“I ended up in the center of the Russian and the Clinton investigations,” said Byrne.
“I have all the answers. I have been sitting on them waiting for America to get there. Last summer I figured out… what they all are is all about political espionage. It had nothing to do with law enforcement, it was all political espionage. Here’s the bottom line. There is a deep state like a submarine lurking just beneath the waves of the periscope depth watching our shipping lanes. And a nuclear icebreaker called the USS Bill Barr has snuck up on them and is about to ram midship.”
“That’s about to happen and I think we’re about to see the biggest scandal in American history as a result. But it was all political. Everything you think you know about Russia and Clinton investigations is a lie,” Byrne told Atman.
“It’s all a cover-up. It was all political espionage.”
Connecticut attorney John Durham, who has been appointed by Justice Department investigator Attorney General William Barr is probing the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Russia probe, and according to several sources is investigating the full extent of Byrne’s claims and the documentation he provided in April. (Credit: Zero Hedge, 8/12/2019)
“It was evident several weeks ago that U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is one of the current participants in the coup effort. It was Taylor who engaged in carefully planned text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam Schiff’s political coup effort.
Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (’06-’09) and later helped the Obama administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.
Rudy Giuliani (Credit: Anthony Devlin/Shutterstock)
Today Rudy Giuliani has released a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor has blocked VISA’s for Ukrainian ‘whistle-blowers’ who are willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme. Unfortunately, Senator Graham, along with dozens of U.S. Senators currently serving, may very well have been a recipient for money through the aforementioned laundry process. So, good luck with the visas.
U.S. senators write foreign aid policies, rules, and regulations thereby creating the financing mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds. Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered funds back through their various “institutes” and business connections to the foreign government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]
The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money laundering by granting conflict waivers, approvals for financing (think Clinton Global Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money. The officials within the State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of “indulgence fees”, junkets, gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.
If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the entire apparatus. President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process. Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup. The letter.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because, well, in reality, all of the U.S. Senators (both parties) on the Foreign Relations Committee [Members Here] are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and contributions from foreign governments.
Mitch McConnell (Credit: Getty Images)
A “Codel” is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payment terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing. This is why Senators spend $20 million on a campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year. The “institutes” is where the real foreign money comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc. etc. There are trillions at stake.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds the power over these members (and the members of the Senate Intel Committee), because McConnell decides who sits on what committee. As soon as a Senator starts taking the bribes lobbying funds, McConnell then has full control over that Senator. This is how the system works.
The McCain Institute is one of the obvious examples of the financing network. And that is the primary reason why Cindy McCain is such an outspoken critic of President Trump. In essence, President Trump is standing between her and her next diamond necklace; a dangerous place to be.
So when we think about a Senate Impeachment Trial; and we consider which senators will vote to impeach President Trump, it’s not just a matter of Democrats -vs- Republican. We need to look at the game of leverage, and the stand-off between those bribed Senators who would prefer President Trump did not interfere in their process.
McConnell has been advising President Trump which Senators are most likely to need their sensibilities eased. As an example, President Trump met with Lisa Murkowski last week. Senator Murkowski rakes in millions from the Oil and Gas industry, and she ain’t about to allow horrible Trump to lessen her bank account any more than Cindy McCain will give up her frequent shopper discounts at Tiffany’s.
WASHINGTON DC – Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is getting a high-profile perch as he joins the Senate during his latest clash with President Trump.
Romney was named on Thursday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving him an opening to wade into several looming foreign policy battles between Congress and the White House. (link)
Now do you see how McConnell works?
Oh yeah, about those recess appointments…. Once you see the strings on the Marionettes you can never go back to a time when you did not see them. (Conservative Treehouse, 11/23/2019)
These witnesses have direct (non-hearsay) evidence of Democrat criminal conspiracy with Ukrainians to prevent @realDonaldTrump from being President, and more.
In a fantastic display of true investigative journalism, One America News journalist Chanel Rion tracked down Ukrainian witnesses as part of an exclusive OAN investigative series. The evidence being discovered dismantles the baseless Adam Schiff impeachment hoax and highlights many corrupt motives for U.S. politicians.
Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress.
What is outlined in this interview is a problem for all DC politicians across both parties. The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko were not done independently.
Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously protecting Joe Biden and his family. This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch.
Imagine what would happen if all of the background information was to reach the general public? Thus the motive for Lindsey Graham currently working to bury it.
(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)
You might remember George Kent and Bill Taylor testified together.
It was evident months ago that U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was one of the current participants in the coup effort against President Trump. It was Taylor who engaged in carefully planned text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam Schiff’s political coup effort.
Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (’06-’09) and later helped the Obama administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.
In November Rudy Giuliani released a letter he sent to Senator Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor blocked VISA’s for Ukrainian ‘whistle-blowers’ who are willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.
Unfortunately, as we are now witnessing, Senator Lindsey Graham, along with dozens of U.S. Senators currently serving, may very well have been recipients for money through the aforementioned laundry process. The VISA’s are unlikely to get approval for congressional testimony, or Senate impeachment trial witness testimony.
U.S. senators write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds. Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered funds back through their various “institutes” and business connections to the foreign government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]
The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money laundering by granting conflict waivers, approvals for financing (think Clinton Global Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money. The officials within the State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of “indulgence fees”, junkets, gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.
If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the entire apparatus. President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process. Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup.
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain meeting with corrupt Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko in December 2016.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because, well, in reality, all of the U.S. Senators (both parties) are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and contributions from foreign governments.
A “Codel” is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payment terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing. This is why Senators spend $20 million on a campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year. The “institutes” is where the real foreign money comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc. etc. There are trillions at stake.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 12/08/2019)
Tedros Anhanom Ghebreyesus and Bill Gates attend a Rotary convention to discuss WHO and the Gates Foundation’s collaborative initiatives focusing on primary health care on June 13, 2017. (Credit: Tedros AdhanonGhebreyesus/Facebook)
The current head of WHO is a Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, formerly the head of the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, a speaker at the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, and named chair of the board of the Global Fund in July 2009: Global Fund Board appoints Minister of Health of Ethiopia as Chair
The Global Fund is an independent Geneva-based financing entity launched in 2002 to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The US government provides 1/3rd of its funding totaling $18B to date since inception:
This updated fact sheet examines the key role played by the United States in the Global Fund, an independent, multilateral financing entity designed to raise significant new resources to combat HIV…
Not widely known or broadcasted is the fact that the Clinton Foundation and Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (an unauthorized and unapproved program by IRS codes) has been a sub-recipient of Global Fund money (pages 8, 9, 11, 25, 51): Independent Progress Report Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative in Indonesia
During Tedros Adhanom’s tenure as board chair of the Global Fund, the organization gets rocked by claims of fraud and misappropriation of funds. The US House Committee on Foreign Relations drafts a report:
“…to ensure that all necessary steps are taken to correct and prevent the misuse of Fund resources.”
(page 6/10) The Congressional report and other reviews minimize the size of the fraud and misappropriation of funds. Others with a more discerning eye had a more critical take.
A full 67% of money spent on an anti-AIDS program in Mauritania was misspent, the investigators told the fund’s board of directors. So did [sic] 36% of the money spent on a program in Mali to fight tuberculosis and malaria, 30% of grants to Djibouti”
The problem here — the loophole the Congress left open and the State Department drove its certification process through — is secrecy.
Who was minding the purse strings of USAID which was the source of funds that went from the US State Dept to the Global Fund at this juncture? Documents we sourced from the State Department show that none other than Secretary Hillary Clinton herself oversaw the USAID funds.
How did the State Department view this fraud at the Global Fund? From a letter we sourced written by the Government Accountability Project on April 22, 2016, we learned:
“…this documentation strongly indicates an irregular and improper collusion between the Global Fund and the State Department in Washington that cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the succeeding years. It is tantamount to fraud.”
At the same time, the Clinton Fdn and Clinton HIV/AIDs and Clinton Health Access Initiative were collecting millions in fees, the Global Fund and also other recipients of Global Fund money who in turn were donors to the Clinton Foundation (classic money laundering). These donors include the governments of the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, and Lesotho. Where was the State Department IG while all this was going on? Oh, yes, that’s right there was no IG for the State Department during HRC’s tenure. How does that happen? Perhaps the same way a Secretary of State sets up a secret server. Rule of law, anybody?
The State Department had no permanent inspector general during Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure as secretary, leaving in place an acting inspector who had close ties to agency leadership.
So when you hear from @BillGates and the World Health Organization @WHO and the Global Fund @GlobalFund and a host of others about WHO leader Tedros Adhanom and for another version of the Global Fund to battle coronavirus, please retweet this thread.” (Financial Bounty Hunters/USA @LWDoyleUSA, 3/27/2020)(Archive)
(Timeline editor’s note: The Twitter thread that includes this source material has been reformatted for an easier read.)
On April 18, 2020, the Clinton Global Initiative University hosted a Coronavirus event to discuss the following:
“Today, President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton held a virtual convening of students, government leaders, and health experts from around the world for the 12th annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) meeting. Since its launch in 2007, CGI U has brought together 10,000 college students from around the globe to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges – building “Commitments to Action” that address challenges on their campuses, in their local communities, and around the world.
Today’s program included opportunities for students to hear from government and health leaders, have their questions answered by President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, collaborate with other students, and respond to a new challenge to build Commitments to Action that respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the program, students came together in virtual breakout sessions to discuss their Commitments to Action and responses to the pandemic with peers who are in the same region.
President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton also announced the formation of the CGI U COVID-19 Student Action Fund,(link is external) funded by Founding Partner, Kevin Xu and colleges and universities that comprise the CGI University Network. This fund will provide over $100,000 in funding to student projects that aim to fight the pandemic, including awareness and prevention campaigns; disease monitoring and response systems; support projects for public health practitioners, and other programs.
Part of this event also included a virtual conversation between Bill Clinton and California Governor Gavin Newsom, discussing the “need” to track people “who are positive” with the Wuhan Coronavirus aka COVID-19, and describing the effort in terms of an “army” of young people. “Should we have a contact tracer corps, even if we call it something more elegant?” Clinton asks.
Newsom’s response to Clinton is an affirmative yes, explaining in no uncertain terms:
“The predicate for getting back to some semblance of normalcy is our ability to identify individuals through testing; to be able to trace their contacts; to isolate individuals that have either been exposed or quarantine people that are testing positive.”
The video clip below has been removed by YouTube and was tricky to recover from Twitter. It now has a permanent spot in the Clinton Foundation timeline, for posterity’s sake.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at his coronavirus briefing on April 30, 2020, that the state will hire thousands of contact tracers as part of the system being developed to help the state return to everyday life.
Not to be outdone, on April 28, 2020, during a virtual town hall with 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton says regarding the coronavirus pandemic, “this is a high stakes time because of the pandemic” and later said, “this would be a terrible crisis to waste.”
On May 4, 2020, we learn California’s Ventura County is hiring “contact tracers” and implementing the program.
“Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud on Monday, only after she managed to convince figures from across the political spectrum that her company would revolutionize blood testing.
Holmes, who claimed that her biotechnology firm would create cheaper tests that used less blood, was convicted of four counts of fraud. The jury deadlocked on three counts, and Holmes was found not guilty of four others. She had denied all charges, with her lawyers arguing that her “mistakes are not crimes.”
In addition to lying to investors, Holmes impressed upon many political luminaries, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, the virtues of Theranos.
“This is inspiration. It is amazing to me, Elizabeth, what you’ve been able to do. What’s most impressive to me is you’re not only making these lab tests more accessible … empowering people whether they live in the barrio or a mansion, putting them in a position to help take control of their own health,” Biden told Holmes at a 2015 meeting at Theranos’ headquarters when he was vice president.
A special conversation on “The Future of Equality and Opportunity” with President Clinton and Founder and CEO of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes and Executive Chairman of the Alibaba Group Jack Ma, during the Closing Plenary Session of the September 2015 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting. Video
She also convinced Gen. James Mattis and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to sit on Theranos’ board of directors. Mattis intervened on Theranos’ behalf with the Department of Defense after a DOD official requested an investigation into the company’s potentially illegal distribution of medical technology.” (Read more: The Daily Caller/1/03/2022)(Archive)
Ghislaine Maxwell pointed to her work for Bill Clinton’s philanthropic endeavors as she argued she should serve just four years in jail at her sentencing next Monday.
The pre-sentencing filing sent by Maxwell’s lawyers claims she should spend far less time behind bars than the 50-year stretch she’s currently facing.
The filing paints Maxwell, 60, as a victim of pedophile ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, and says her life has already been ruined by the disgrace of her conviction.
It also mentions an inmate at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center had been offered cash to strangle Maxwell in her sleep.
Maxwell was convicted of trafficking and sexually abusing underage girls last December.
“Unilever CEO Alan Jope declared his company would “not back down” on Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) issues during a Tuesday forum at the Clinton Global Initiative.
“In 1939, George Orwell wrote that we have sunk to such depths that stating the obvious is the first responsibility of every person and he was talking about a book on power written by Bertrand Russell,” Jope told former President Bill Clinton, according to the video posted to Twitter by Will Hild of Consumers First. “But it applies to today, because stating the obvious, that we have an emergency, we have a climate emergency, is becoming an unpopular thing to do.”
.@BlackRock CEO Larry Fink calls to “change the charters” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, along with bringing together “all governments” to facilitate his global ESG transition: pic.twitter.com/MR4Hn9Q5p5
“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash is incredibly dangerous for the world,” Jope continued. “And the first thing Unilever will do is we will not back down on this agenda despite these populist accusations.”
Jope’s remarks came as part of a panel that also included Clinton, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Sustainable Energy for All CEO Damilola Ogunbiyi. BlackRock reportedly uses its investments to push companies to adopt ESG, with Fink calling for changes to the charters of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to support ESG.
The ESG framework pushes companies to prioritize social and environmental factors into their investment considerations instead of “simply considering the potential profitability,” according to Investopedia. Critics of ESG and other “woke” agenda items have pointed to crises in Ghana, where blackouts took place, and Sri Lanka, which suffered an agricultural crisis, as reasons to oppose the agenda.
“Disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly paid former President Bill Clinton roughly $250,000 to give a speech at his Crypto Bahamas Conference in April 2022, according to a Thursday report from the New York Post (NYP).
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on the same stage (and SBF.) You don’t see that very often these days, eh? pic.twitter.com/Vt5pn6egHn
Bankman-Fried’s conference featured Clinton alongside other world leaders and top crypto executives. Not long after, Bill and Hillary Clinton invited Bankman-Fried to speak at the 2022Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in September, the NYP reported.
CGI is a philanthropic conference run by the Clinton Foundation. Bankman-Fried’s headshot is featured on the conference’s website next to other prominent names, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Melinda French Gates. Bankman-Fried’s name was also included in a press release leading up to CGI.
The Clintons enabled Bankman-Fried to grow his reputation among prominent politicians and investors, the NYP reported. He was reportedly connected to the couple through former Clinton aide Michael Kives, whose venture capital fund, K5 Global, allegedly received a $300 million investment from Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research.
“Kives (r), had ties to both the entertainment world and the political one. Prior to spending 15 years at CAA, he worked for former President Bill Clinton and also for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Washington office. In recent years, he has married the two by becoming a player in the Democratic fundraiser scene in Los Angeles and has hosted events at his Hollywood home. Hollywood Reporter, 2/26/2018 (Credit: public domain)
Bankman-Fried was the Democratic party’s seventh largest donor in the 2022 midterm election cycle, according to watchdog group OpenSecrets. He spent north of $37 million for Democrats in primaries and general elections and donated smaller sums to Republican campaigns, OpenSecrets shows.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 1/19/2023)(Archive)
Clinton at the main annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, on September 22, 2014 in New York City. (Source: John Moore / Getty Images)
World Bank President Ajay Banga and the Bahamas’ Prime Minister Philip E. Davis will be there. So too Hollywood stars Jose Andres, Orlando Bloom, and Matt Damon. Those are just some of the people who have put their hands up to attend the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2023 next month in New York City.
All the Clinton family will be on hand to personally meet them, too, along with major corporations including Cisco, JetBlue and Pfizer, who will help with charitable funding.
Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton announced Monday the conference this year would seek even more commitments to “address climate change, health care issues, gender-based violence, the war in Ukraine and a host of other issues.”
A subset of the Clinton Foundation, the CGI “convenes global and emerging leaders to create and implement solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges,” according to its website.
The annual call for financial contributions follows a long and controversial tradition with the CGI, an organisation which infamously had its genesis on a celebrity-laden private plane flight to Davos and subsequent assertions of charitable efforts around the globe.
The CGI ended in 2016 as Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign.
The year before, donations plummeted by 37 percent amid allegations Clinton used the charity to solicit millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments and corporations in exchange for giving these entities favorable treatment while she served as Secretary of State.
Breitbart News and its senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cashfirstrevealed the worldwide nexus of shady deal-making between Clinton Foundation donors, their impact and link to the CGI, the six-figure speeches given by Bill Clinton, and the corresponding actions approved by the U.S. State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
FACT CHECK: Why did they perform an internal audit that scored the Foundation 4/10? https://t.co/soZZ1L70KC
“Every day, billions of people around the world, even in the face of the most dire circumstances, make a profound decision to choose hope and keep going,” the former president told the Associated Press in an emailed statement ahead of the 2023 meeting.
“At CGI, we’re focusing on how to move forward in the face of daunting challenges—to act now, find new partners, and stick with it to make a positive difference in people’s lives.”
Pope Francis kicks off CGI 2023 conference urging all people to do their part in addressing the worlds problems, especially climate change and care for children. (Credit: Andres Kudacki/AP)
After a six-year break, the Clinton Global Initiative is reconvening in New York this week with a launch Tuesday of a major humanitarian effort in war-torn Ukraine.
The Associated Pressreported that the initiative, called the “CGI Ukraine Action Network,” will create and finance commitments to Ukraine from its global partners and new world leaders.
According to the report, the new network is the brainchild of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, and will be made up of “numerous monetary commitments” to the country.
“This year’s meeting will focus on what it takes to keep going — to maintain and advance progress, in spite of the difficulties that arise, and increase our capacity to cross the divides and make common cause with one another wherever possible to build a stronger future for all,” the Clintons said in a letter to the CGI community regarding this week’s conference.
In addition to Ukraine, this year’s forum will tackle the issues of climate change, healthcare, income inequality, and food insecurity, as well as “threats to democracy around the world” and record-setting refugee displacement.
“As always, the focus will be on what we can do, not what we can’t,” the letter read. “And will highlight how even seemingly small actions, when taken together, can turn the tide on even our most stubborn challenges.” (Read more: Newsmax, 9/18/2023) (Archive)
Shortly after the world began learning the details of the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, Hillary Clinton published a note of support on X for “everyone affected by the horrific attacks by Hamas” and expressing “strong support of our ally,” Israel. The former secretary of state had nothing to say about one of Hamas’s key allies, the energy-rich kingdom of Qatar, and not surprisingly: Qatar is not only an important friend of the U.S. in the region but also for many years was a generous patron of Bill and Hillary Clinton. As JW President Tom Fitton noted on X, Qatar funneled money to the Clintons when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state and she “hid this until disclosures from Wikileaks and pressure from Judicial Watch forced her to admit to tens of millions of previously hidden foreign cash payments to ‘Clinton Inc.’”
Slipping money into the hands of slippery politicians—a time-honored tradition in the Middle East and elsewhere—of course is not the same as providing significant ongoing state support for a murderous terrorist organization. But the Clinton experience does provide a snapshot of the Qatari influence operation and a warning about what Qatar may be up to elsewhere, including in the United States.
The Qatar-Clinton money trail begins around 2008, when the Clinton Foundation—under pressure due to Mrs. Clinton’s imminent ascent to State Department leadership—published a list of donors. Among them: Qatar, listed as contributing between $1 million and $5 million. A Clinton Foundation spokesman later acknowledged that Qatar had been sending the Clintons money “since 2002.”
Pressure mounted on the Clintons in 2014 with the publication of a Judicial Watch investigative report disclosing that Bill Clinton had earned upward of $48 million in speaking fees around the globe, including from Arab countries, while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. “Former President Clinton trotted the globe collecting huge speaking fees while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy,” Tom Fitton noted at the time.
In 2016, a leaked Wikileaks email revealed that five years earlier, in 2011, the Clintons had received a $1 million gift from Qatar. That gift was never reported by the Clintons, a clear violation of the disclosure agreement the Clintons had signed with the State Department when Mrs. Clinton took the helm. Soon after the 2011 gift, a high-ranking Qatari official pressed the Clinton circle for “five minutes” with the former president.
Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuits also turned up more evidence of Clinton conflict of interests, including the courting of Qatar. A JW FOIA disclosure in late 2016 revealed a list sent by a Clinton Foundation senior adviser to a high-ranking aide to Secretary of State Clinton; the list noted more than 200 foreign leaders to be invited to the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, including the emir of Qatar, the Qatari prime minster, and the minister of foreign affairs.
Qatar’s pursuit of influence in the United States is not limited to the Clintons and their allies. According to investigative reports, Qatar has given $1 billion to American universities since 2011. Qatar also is a major purveyor of anti-Semitism. Its media is filled with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. And at the UN—not exactly a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment—a high-ranking Qatari official was recently denied a senior post on the grounds of anti-Semitism. That’s useful context when considering Qatar’s role supporting Hamas.
The Clinton Foundation committed to help fund Ghislaine Maxwell’s Terra Mar Project from 2012-2019. (Credit: Snip from Clinton Global Initiative web page)
Hillary Clinton’s name has appeared in court documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for the first time, with a newly-published tranche requesting ‘all communications’ from her and 12 other people.
The former Secretary of State’s surprise entrance on the Epstein stage – her husband has been mentioned multiple times, and was known to associate with the late pedophile financier for several years – came as lawyers asked whether the Clinton Foundation was bankrolling Maxwell.
Maxwell, the only person convicted for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking network, refused to answer.
Hillary Clinton was not known to be close to either Maxwell or Epstein and has never been pictured with either of them.
Her name comes up in a 2016 document filed by Maxwell’s attorneys, relating to Virginia Roberts-Giuffre – an Epstein victim, who sued Maxwell for defamation in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s name is mentioned in a single line concerning Roberts-Giuffre’s request for ‘all communications with thirteen specific witnesses,’ according to Newsweek.
She does not feature anywhere else in the documents that have been released as of Friday.
Another document shows Roberts-Giuffre trying to assess how much Maxwell is worth, as part of the defamation case.
Roberts-Giuffre’s legal team accuse Maxwell, the daughter of a Czech-British newspaper magnate, of refusing to release her financial records, and imply that she wanted to hide the source of her wealth.
‘For example, Defendant has refused to comply with a discovery request seeking information about her connection to the Clinton Foundation, claiming that such a request is ‘obviously intended to harass and embarrass’ her,’ the court documents state.
‘Nothing could be further from the truth.’
Roberts-Giuffre’s lawyers say that Maxwell intends to claim that she lied about meeting Bill Clinton.
They suggest that Maxwell could be trying to protect Bill Clinton, because his foundation supports Maxwell financially.
It is Defendant who intends to argue at trial that Ms. Giuffre has made inaccurate statements about various interactions with former-President Bill Clinton,’ said Roberts-Giuffre’s legal team.
Of course, if Defendant (or any of her organizations) is receiving funding from the Clinton Foundation, that would provide a clear motive for her to slant testimony on this subject.
Ms. Giuffre is entitled to explore this clear possibility of bias by obtaining information of the financial connections between Defendant and the Clinton Foundation.’
There has never been any evidence that the Clinton Foundation was financing Maxwell, or any other private individuals.
