Hillary Clinton has been criticized for using her office during the tenure of being the Secretary of State in granting special privilege to large donors of her family’s Clinton Foundation.
Back in 2016, the Associated Press published an investigative report based on logs of meetings Hillary Clinton took as Secretary of State. In the story, the AP stated that at least 85 of 154 people from private interests that Clinton met or had phone conversations with while Secretary of State donated to the Clinton Foundation. In total, the 85 donors contributed as much as US$156 million to the Foundation. Link to this AP report has been deleted.
Commenting on the Clinton Foundation scandal, Gersh Kuntzman in an article in the New York Daily news termed it – “impossible to defend”.
In February 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and a Canadian government agency that was trying to get the Keystone XL pipeline built all donated to the Clinton Foundation.
In addition to receiving donation in exchange for favor, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also followed few more unethical tactics. For example, when she was secretary of state, Bill Clinton’s speaking fees magically doubles and tripled – from about US$150,000 a speech to US$500,000 for a speech in Russia and US$750,000 for a speech in China. The State Department had easily approved these speeches.
Bill Clinton raked in at least US$26 million from speaking to organizations that also donated to the Clinton Foundation.
According to Politico, Hillary Clinton was a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while she was secretary of state. The commission was working on a “request to approve the sale of US uranium stock to Russian atomic energy agency Rosatom as part of a transitioned takeover of a company which through an earlier merger had acquired US uranium interests”. A report in The New York Times revealed – Rosatom was having ties to the Clinton Foundation.
Rosatom acquired 17 percent of a South African company called Uranium One in 2009. In 2007, Uranium One merged with UrAsia, which was owned by Frank Giustra. Giustra gave US$31 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2006 and pledged US$100 million more in the following years. Giustra, along with Bill Clinton, acquired uranium interests in Kazakhstan in 2005. The chairman of Uranium One when it was acquired by Rosatom, Ian Telfer, also gave US$2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation.
According to The Wall Street Journal, when IRS was suing Swiss bank UBS AG in order to obtain the identities of Americans who were using the bank to set up offshore accounts, Hillary Clinton immediately intervened into the matter. As a result, UBS increased donations to the Clinton Foundation – from US$60,000 to US$600,000 by 2014. It lent the foundation US$32 million for an inner-city loan program and paid Bill Clinton US$1.50 million for some speaking gigs with its Wealth Management Chief Executive, Bob McCann.
According to a 2018 report published in The Hill, a private firm named MDA Analytics LLC, which was run by accomplished ex-federal criminal investigators alleged the Clinton Foundation engaged in illegal activities and may be liable for millions of dollars in delinquent taxes and penalties.
The 48-page submission, dated August 11, 2017, supports its claims with 95 exhibits, including internal legal reviews that the foundation conducted on itself in 2008 and 2011.
Those reviews flagged serious concerns about legal compliance, improper commingling of personal and charity business and “quid pro quo” promises made to donors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of State.
The submission also cites an interview its investigators conducted with Andrew Kessel that quotes the foundation’s longtime chief financial officer as saying he was unable to stop former President Clinton from “commingling” personal business and charitable activities inside the foundation and that he “knows where all the bodies are buried”.
Some evidence that MDA investigators cited is public source, such as internal foundation reviews hacked in 2016 and given to WikiLeaks. Other materials were provided to the investigators by foreign governments that have done business with the charity, or by foundation insiders.
One of the nonpublic documents is an interview memo the MDA Analytics investigators penned after meeting with Kessel in late November 2016 at the Princeton Club in New York City.
Kessel told those investigators that “one of the biggest problems was Bill Clinton’s commingling and use of business and donated funds and his personal expenses”, according to the whistleblower submission.
“There is no controlling Bill Clinton. He does whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with foundation funds”, states a separate interview memo attached to the submission.
“Bill Clinton mixes and matches his personal business with that of the foundation. Many people within the foundation have tried to caution him about this but he does not listen, and there really is no talking to him”, the memo added.
Another review written by a private lawyer named Kumiki Gibson in 2008, who was hired by the foundation to study its governance, directly flagged concerns about improper commingling of charitable and private business.
“The work of the Foundation and the President are intertwined in a way that creates confusion at, and undermines the work of, the Foundation at virtually every level”. Gibson wrote, warning that such commingling poses “reputational and legal challenges, and with confusion, inefficiencies and waste”.
Specifically, the memo warned the foundation had not created policies and procedures “required by law” and that some of its leaders “appear to have interests that do not always align with those of the Foundation”.
It also raised the possibility of illegal activities, saying the foundation and its managers held an “anti-compliance attitude” and that there were lower-level employees who “begged” for whistleblower protections after witnessing “less than fully compliant behavior or even worse are asked to participate in or condone it”.
The 2011 review conducted by the law firm Simpson Thacher raised similar concerns about legal compliance and noted that auditors in 2009 and 2010 had found “material weaknesses”, such as a lack of governing board meetings and unsigned board minutes.
That report alleged some foundation workers “abuse expense privileges” and others suffered conflicts of interest, especially as the foundation solicited large donations from countries with business interests before Hillary Clinton at the State Department. “It appears conflicts are not timely disclosed” and “when staff becomes aware of conflicts, they are unsure how to raise and clear these conflicts”, the report warned.
The report even raised the possibility that donors were expecting favors at State or from the former president’s government connections in return for money.
“Some interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts”, the lawyers warned.
According to a 2016 report published in The New York Post:
The inner workings of a mysterious off-the-books arm of the Clinton Foundation were partially revealed in the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The little-known Haiti Development Fund, an LLC incorporated in Delaware in August 2010, was created by the Clinton Foundation with an initial endowment of $20 million from shady Canadian mining mogul Frank Giustra and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
The Fund was supposed to supply desperately needed seed money to Haitian entrepreneurs after an earthquake devastated the country in January 2010.
A 2016 report published in The Globe and Mail, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton earned millions from Canadian corporate elites while the couple was exerting influence on various foreign governments in favor of those elites and for such cooperation, Clintons were getting huge amounts through numerous ways including donation to Clinton Foundation.
For example, in June 2005, Bill Clinton clambered aboard the private jet of Frank Giustra, the Vancouver mining financier. Bill Clinton needed to get to Mexico City to begin a speaking tour of Latin America and oversee the work of his sprawling charitable enterprise. The two men didn’t know each other well. But Giustra happened to have a luxury MD-87 aircraft to get him there. And he was curious about the former US president and his philanthropic work.
The trip and the conversation marked the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Soon after, Frank Giustra became one of the largest single donors to the Clinton Foundation and rallied an entire industry to raise millions of dollars for its fight against global poverty. He, in turn, gaines entrée to Bill Clinton’s inner circle – and became Corporate Canada’s most famous “Friend of Bill”.
For more than a decade, both men have burnished their reputations by travelling the globe and collaborating on big ideas in far-flung places.
Giustra’s Twitter profile is a veritable photo gallery of the two men. Here they are in Peru in November 2004, distributing household goods to women. There they are in El Salvador earlier that same year, assisting small-scale farmers. The Canadian arm of the Clinton Foundation – the brainchild of Giustra and known as the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership – has poured more than US$35-million into eradicating poverty in parts of the developing world where many of the mining companies he helped finance do business.
In 2005, Frank Giustra visited Kazakhstan with Bill Clinton and, soon after, acquired uranium interests in the former Soviet republic. In 2007, he secured the rights to operate one of Colombia’s largest oil fields.
In both instances, Bill Clinton introduced Frank Giustra to the president of the country before the asset sales were completed.
And here is another shocking information on Hillary Clinton’s notorious bids in unseating a government in a foreign country and planting his “old friend” and large donor of Clinton Foundation as the head of the government.
Dark deals between Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Yunus
People may express surprise seeing blind support of Hillary Clinton towards controversial Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus while it is documented fact that the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had illegally used her position in the State Department to award more than US$13 million in grants to Yunus, contracts and loans despite his ouster from Grameen Bank in 2011. Funds were given to Yunus through 18 separate US Agency for International Development (USAID) award transactions listed by the federal contracting site USAspending.gov.
Other federal agencies also opened their coffers to Yunus after Clinton entered the administration. The Department of Treasury awarded a US$600,000 grant directly to Grameen America under a fund designed to boost financial institutions in community development. A Treasury Department spokesman declined to provide any details beyond the fact the funds were for activities in New York.
A series of Small Business Administration grants to Grameen America also began in July 2011, totaling US$934,000. Those grants were for “salaries and expenses” for the foundation to operate its New York offices where Hillary Clinton once was a US senator.
According to the US Congress, Hillary Clinton used hard-ball tactics against the Awami League government in Bangladesh in order to help her ruthlessly corrupt millionaire friend. The document shows Hillary Clinton deployed an array of high-powered officials at the Department of State, US Embassy in Bangladesh and World Bank to rescue Muhammad Yunus from corruption and financial crime charges.
Although the Clinton Foundation website earlier declared that Muhammad Yunus had donated US$300,000 from his millions of dollars deposited in various foreign banks, the link to this declaration on the Clinton Foundation website has been mysteriously removed by Clintons. Similarly, the Clinton Foundation also has been deleting information related to a few more controversial donors of the Clinton Foundation.
A report from the Daily Mail said some of the claims involved allegedly illegal donations with the intent of buying influence with Hillary Clinton, who at the time was trying to become president. While Yunus’ net worth is estimated at US$10 million, his actual wealth size is much higher.
On June 1, 2017, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley asked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to respond to reports that Hillary Clinton tried to pressure Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina by threatening her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy with an IRS tax audit while he was living in the United States. Link to this matter has also been mysteriously deleted from the website of Senator Chuck Grassley.
When back in January 11, 2007, an-army backed interim government came to power, Hillary Clinton made frantic bids in influencing the key figures of that government to consider Muhammad Yunus as the “new leader of Bangladesh”, by executing “minus-two formula” of forcing Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia into retirement and forced exile. The BBC reported April 7, 2007, that “the army would sponsor Nobel Peace prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus as a new leader”.
