Clinton Cash Connections Exposed - New Docs Raise Questions On Clinton Conflicts of Interest
The
Clinton email scandal is serious enough. Nonetheless, it is useful to
remember what exactly Mrs. Clinton was trying to hide before our
litigation forced the disclosure of her separate email system. You can
bet that the cover up of the depth of her abuse of office for private
gain is one thing about which she does not want you to know the full
truth.
Judicial Watch is in the lead in uncovering these Clinton cash abuses.
This
week, we released 789 pages of State Department "ethics" review
documents concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
revealing that at least one speech by Bill Clinton appeared to take
place without the required State Department ethics approval. The
documents also include a copy of Bill Clinton's draft consultant
agreement with Laureate Education, Inc., which was submitted for ethics
review by the State Department. But the State Department redacted the
information regarding compensation and the specific services Bill
Clinton was hired to provide to the controversial "for profit" education
company. The documents were released as a result of a federal court
order in our history-making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
filed against the State Department on May 28, 2013, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)).
The documents include heavily redacted emails
from 2009 about the review of a speech Bill Clinton was set to give to
the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). An April 1, 2009,
email from then-State Department Senior Ethics Counsel Waldo W. "Chip"
Brooks notes that the ethics review approval of the speech "was in the
hands of Jim [Thessin] and Cheryl Mills. They were to discuss with
Counsel to the former President. I do not know if either ever did."
A
follow-up September 1, 2009, email to Brooks from a colleague asks,
"[W]as there ever a decision on the Clinton request involving scrap
recycling? Below is the last e-mail I have on it - I assume it just
died since I don't' have an outgoing memo approving the event ..."
Brooks responds two minutes later:
"I
think the decision was a soft call to Clinton's attorney and the talk
did not take place. You might want to send an email to [Clinton
Foundation Director of Scheduling and Advance] Terry [Krinvic] and tell
her that you have a gap in your records because you were gone and wanted
to know if the President ever did talk before ISRI?
In fact, Bill Clinton spoke to the scrap recycling group on April 30, 2009, for a reported fee off $250,000.
The documents also include a request
from Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation for an ethics review of Mr.
Clinton's proposed consulting arrangement, through WJC LLC, with
Laureate Education, Inc. The Obama State Department redacted key terms
of the attached May 1, 2010, draft agreement, including Mr. Clinton's
fees and the nature of Mr. Clinton's services.
Laureate Education, Inc. is the world's largest, for-profit, international higher education chain and reportedly
uses many of the same practices that spurred a 2014 regulatory
crackdown by the Obama administration on for-profit colleges in the
United States. In 2010, according to The Washington Post,
the company hired former President Clinton to serve as its honorary
chancellor, and since that time the former president has made more than a
dozen appearances in countries such as Malaysia, Peru, and Spain on the
company's behalf. Since 2010, the former president reportedly has been paid more than $16 million from the company for his services.
The Clinton-Laureate connection is rich. The Daily Caller did some digging into the Clinton tax returns that were highly revealing:
Clinton
signed on as the honorary chancellor of Laureate International
Universities, a subsidiary of Laureate Education, in 2010. Despite the
honorary nature of his position, that didn't stop the company from
paying him on average approximately $3 million a year. The investment
likely paid off, though, as Clinton has lent Laureate significant
legitimacy and has served as an advocate for the company overseas,
making appearance in countries like Peru and Malaysia to praise it. In
addition to these direct payments, Laureate also donated to the Clinton
Foundation and has cooperated with the Clinton Global Initiative.
The
latest State Department documents also show some push-back by ethics
officials concerning proposed Clinton speeches to Chinese
government-linked entities. State Department officials, for example,
had several questions about a proposed 2009 speech to a subsidiary of
the Shanghai Sports Development Corporation, a Chinese
"quasi-government" agency. Rather than answer the questions, the
Clinton Foundation representative emailed "we are not going to proceed
with this." State Department ethics official "Chip" Brooks commented
on the withdrawal of the Chinese speech in December 2009 to then-Deputy
Legal Adviser Jim Thessin, "Cooler heads have prevailed."
The
documents show the State Department approved scores of requests by
former President Bill Clinton to appear as the featured speaker at
events sponsored by some of the world's leading international investment
and banking firms, including J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Merrill Lynch,
Sweden's ABG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Brazil's Banco Itau, Vista Equity
Partners, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard Group
(described as "one of the world's largest investment management
companies"), Canada's Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Saudi Arabia's SAGIA conglomerate (which claims to be the "gateway to investments in Saudi Arabia").
While
the majority of the documents do not contain the fees that Clinton
charged for his speaking services, those that are disclosed reveal that
the former president routinely received six-figure honorariums for his
advice to the international investment counseling firms and banking institutions, including:
• Barclays Capital Singapore - $325,000
• Needham Partners South Africa - $350,000
• Cumbre de Negocios (sponsored by Nacional Financiera and El Banco Fuerte de Mexico) - $275,000 and $125,000)
• NTRPLC (which describes itself as "developing a new investment portfolio of wind projects in Ireland and the UK") - $125,000
The
documents reveal that between 2009 and 2011, former President Clinton
spoke to more than two dozen leading international investment firms and
banking institutions, many of them on more than one occasion. At least one of the documents
shows that Hillary Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills used a
non-governmental email account for the Clinton ethics reviews. Mills reportedly negotiated
the "ethics agreement" on behalf of the Clintons and the Foundation
that required the Clintons to submit to rigorous conflict-of-interest
checks. Despite this, and in apparent violation of Obama administration ethics rules,
the documents reveal that Bill Clinton's requests for speaking
engagement approval were invariably copied to Mills, who was involved in
ethics reviews as chief of staff for Mrs. Clinton at the State
Department.
The documents also include the demands
that Bill Clinton's speakers bureau, The Harry Walker Agency, laid out
for a speech sponsor in Slovenia. Notably, the documents require that
press be kept in a "designated, roped off area in the back of the room
with a staff escort" and that the "press should not be given access to
any area where the President likely may be."
This JW lawsuit broke open the Clinton cash scandal by forcing the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings
that led to at least $48 million for the Clintons and the Clinton
Foundation during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of State.
Previously disclosed documents in this lawsuit, for example, raise
questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia,
China and Iran, among others. This and other JW lawsuits on Benghazi
were the key pressure that forced the disclosure of the Clinton email
system.
Judicial Watch's litigation to obtain these conflict of
interest records is ongoing. The State Department has yet to search the
email records Mrs. Clinton purportedly turned over to the agency last
year, despite Judicial Watch's first requesting these records in 2011
and filing this lawsuit in 2013. The State Department also has yet to
explain why it failed to conduct a proper, timely search in the 20
months between when it received our request on May 2, 2011, and February
1, 2013, when Secretary Clinton left office.
Judicial Watch
also is pressing the State Department to conduct a reasonable search for
records, including any emails on the Hillary Clinton email server. On September 3,
Judicial Watch filed a request with the court for discovery from the
State Department and/or Mrs. Clinton in order to find these records so
they might finally be searched as the law requires. Specifically,
Judicial Watch's attorneys ask the court to take steps to obtain the
records directly:
To
the extent Secretary Clinton or her agents or vendors continue to have
access to this agency system of records, or any records from the system
that have migrated or been transferred to any new servers, storage
devices, or back-up systems, Judicial Watch respectfully submits that a
constructive trust must be imposed on any such records and systems so
that the State Department can access and search them for records...
Accordingly, Judicial Watch asks the court to order the State Department:
To
identify, either through declarations or discovery, all information in
its possession or control about the transfer of any data from the "clintonemail.com"
server to Secretary Clinton's vendor and whether any such data is still
available or otherwise recoverable from the vendor's server, storage
devices, or back-up systems. If the State Department asserts that it
does not have this information or cannot obtain it, limited third-party
discovery of Secretary Clinton and/or her vendor should be authorized to
enable the Court to obtain the information, which is necessary to
remedy the State Department's failure to search the server during
Secretary Clinton's tenure in office, its further failure to secure all
federal records on the server when Secretary Clinton left office, and
Secretary Clinton's wrongful retention of these records after she left
office.
Judicial
Watch's court filing details how it was "wrongful and in violation of
federal law and State Department regulations" to allow Hillary Clinton
"to retain exclusive access to this agency system of records (Clinton's
separate email server) and the official State Department communications
and records it contains after she left office on February 1, 2013."
In
short, we're asking the court to allow us to figure out where the
Clinton documents are and to take steps to make sure they are preserved
and searched as the law requires.
These records show that the "ethics reviews" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's potential conflicts of interest was a joke.
JW
supporters should be proud of how their support resulted in a lawsuit
that helped force the disclosure of Hillary Clinton's separate email
system. And now we hope that it results in getting all the Clinton
emails searched to find out what else Hillary Clinton didn't want the
American people to see about her shady dealings.
Judicial Watch's
FOIA lawsuit has become particularly noteworthy because it has been
reported that the Clinton Foundation, now known as the Bill, Hillary,
& Chelsea Clinton Foundation, accepted millions of dollars
from at least seven foreign governments while Mrs. Clinton served as
secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that a
$500,000 donation it received from the government of Algeria while Mrs.
Clinton served as secretary of State violated a 2008 ethics agreement
between the foundation and the Obama administration. Some of the
foreign governments that have made donations to the Clinton Foundation
include Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, have questionable human rights
records.
Links to the full production of documents can be found here: May 4, 2015; June 15, 2015; July 27, 2015 and September 4, 2015. Feel free to review the documents and let us know if you find anything important that we might have missed!
Courts Put an End to Obama Administration Obstruction Gambit in Clinton Scandal
I reported to you last week
how the State Department (with the help of Obama Justice Department
lawyers) sought to delay dozens Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuits (of which Judicial Watch filed 18) - under the guise of a coordination motion with the court. It created a lot of extra, costly work for us. But we won!
A
few days ago, federal judges here in DC rejected the Obama gang's
meritless stalling tactic. Below is the statement I made on behalf of
Judicial Watch in response to this important victory:
Judicial
Watch applauds the decision made by federal judges of the U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss quickly the State
Department's desperate effort to buy time for itself and Hillary
Clinton. Today's decision confirms Judicial Watch's contention
that the State Department knew that its action had no basis in law -
certainly none that it could identify - but nonetheless filed the action
despite the time and expense Judicial Watch would be forced to incur as
a result. With this obstruction out of the way, we are one step closer
to the legal reckoning for Mrs. Clinton's and the State Department's
contempt for the rule of law. Judicial Watch's massive legal effort -
18 cases to date - will insure that the emails on Hillary Clinton's
illicit email systems will be recovered, preserved, and reviewed for
public disclosure as the law requires.
Sure enough, things picked up a bit as a result of this important ruling. For example, one court almost immediately ordered
the State Department to start answering question about the status of
Judicial Watch's FOIA requests concerning the Clinton email issue.
Here's the text of the court order, issued by U.S. District Court Judge
Amy Berman Jackson:
MINUTE
ORDER. In light of the Order entered in No. 15-mc-1188 denying the
government's motion for the designation of a coordinating judge, it is
ORDERED that the stay of this case is hereby lifted. It is FURTHER
ORDERED that defendant shall file on or before October 15, 2015
a proposed updated schedule for the production of any and all
additional responsive records, taking into consideration the information
the defendant provided to the Court in Leopold v. U.S. Department of
State, No. 15-cv-123 (RC) concerning the status of the release of
non-exempt portions of records subject to FOIA contained in the emails
provided to State by former Secretary Clinton, but also including
information concerning the status of the release of records subject to
FOIA contained in the emails provided to State by other former
employees, such as Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jacob Sullivan, and
Phillippe Reines. Plaintiff shall then have until October 19, 2015,
to indicate to the Court whether it has any objections to defendant's
proposal. SO ORDERED. Signed by Judge Amy Berman Jackson on 10/8/2015.
Nice
to go from a dead stop to answers in a week or two! Our lawyers worked
hard to oppose this delaying game and I'm happy to see their work bear
fruit.
There have been many other developments this week, so be sure to go our Internet site for other news that we don't have space for this week! Until next week...
 Tom Fitton President
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