‘Crooked Hillary’ Earns Her Nickname in Stunning New Email Revelations
With the release of new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, there is no longer any room for doubt that then-Secretary of State Clinton used the State Department to buy and sell favors for herself, her husband Bill, and her close aides.
The State Department turned over 44 previously unreleased email exchanges that Clinton failed to include among the 30,000 emails she released to the government, revealing State Department favors for Clinton Foundation donors and rich allies of the power couple.
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, obtained the emails as part of its lawsuit against the State Department.
According to the New York Post, an April 2009 email exchange between top Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills and Doug Band, who was running the Clinton Foundation at the time, show Band “urgently asked for a meeting between a top US official and Gilbert Chagoury — a major donor to the Clinton family charity.” The “top US official” was Jeff Feltman, America’s former ambassador to Lebanon who became Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in August 2009.
A close pal of Bill Clinton’s with financial interests around the world, Chagoury is a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire who donated between $1-5 million to the Clinton Foundation and in 2009 pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. Chagoury was convicted of money laundering in Switzerland in 2000, paying a $66 million fine in a plea deal.
Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin set up the meeting Band requested; she was quickly rewarded for the favor:
Abedin’s quick response to Band paid dividends down the road.
In June 2011, Band formed the Teneo consulting firm, with Bill Clinton as the paid honorary chairman. And in 2012, Abedin won permission to work as a $15,000-a-month consultant for Teneo in a special arrangement that allowed her to remain on the State Department payroll.
This is far from being the only case of alleged kickbacks found among Clinton’s emails.
The Daily Caller News Foundation details how Clinton aide Cheryl Mills set up a deal to direct money from an Abu Dhabi oil company—now known as TAQA—to a Bangladeshi banker named Muhammad Yunus—a long-time friend of the Clintons and Clinton Foundation donor. After this deal was brokered, the oil company put “as much as $500,000 into President Bill Clinton’s pockets via a speaking fee he got in Scotland.”
“The complicated set of international transactions is contained in a cryptic May 7, 2012, email chain between Cheryl Mills, then Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, and Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director,” writes The Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock. “The email chain was obtained by Citizens United, the conservative activist group that is the lead plaintiff in multiple federal Freedom of Information Act court cases.”
Here’s where things get interesting, and really sketchy:
The issue of the TAQA donation was initially raised by Clinton Foundation development officer Linda Andich, who read an Associated Press article about Clinton’s intervention on behalf of Yunus during an official visit to Bangladesh.
Yunus was charged by an official Bangladeshi commission with financial mismanagement of Grameen Bank, a government bank that was supposed to give out “micro-loans” to poor women in the country. He was eventually forced to leave the bank.
“Just reading about HRC’s support of the Grameen Bank, which prompted me to check in for any updates for the State Department, re: the Donation from TAQA,” Andich wrote Desai and Dennis Cheng, the Clinton Foundation’s chief development officer, on the morning of May 7.
Three hours later, Desai contacted Mills, saying, “we’d welcome your guidance on accepting funds from TAQA.” Mills replied, “Will call to discuss.”
That ensuing discussion completed a deal offered by TAQA managing director Leo Koot in Scotland in which Koot donated $60,000 to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for former President Bill Clinton’s appearance at charity-auction dinner.
The dinner in Scotland was a fundraiser for Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, and Bill Clinton made off with a $250,000-500,000 speaking fee.
What’s clear from these revelations is that Hillary Clinton abused her position in the State Department to fundraise for the Clinton Foundation on an international scale—when she was supposed to be of service to the country and American citizens.
Can we expect more of this behavior should she become president? (For more from the author of “‘Crooked Hillary’ Earns Her Nickname in Stunning New Email Revelations” please click HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
