Clinton Foundation Link in the Hillary Email Scandal: History of Wrecklessness with National Security

Hillary Clinton's email headache doesn't seem to be going away no matter how much she attempts to wave it off.

Federal investigators have reportedly determined more than 300 emails on the former secretary of state's private server could be classified information. The private server was discovered because of the House Benghazi committee. But don't forget about the infamous Clinton Foundation. 

(Credit:State.gov)

As I wrote about in Foundation Watch in May -- before we found out this server contained classified info -- Hillary Clinton has played fast and loose with national security information for some time.

From Foundation Watch:

As Hillary Clinton was in charge of running America’s foreign policy, Bill was giving high-dollar speeches in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Central America, Turkey, Thailand, Taiwan, India, and the Cayman Islands, according to Judicial Watch. Certainly some of these should have raised eyebrows by reviewers at the State Department, considering tenuous U.S. relations with Russia and China. And the fact that the list of donors includes Muslim nations that are known for mistreating women, ought to set off the hypocrisy alarm bells because Mrs. Clinton has long positioned herself as a champion of women’s rights.

The New York Times also reports when she was at the State Department, Hillary okayed a financial transaction that handed control over 20 percent of America’s strategically important uranium resources to Russia after investors gave money to Bill and large donations to the Clinton Foundation. This matters because uranium is needed to make nuclear weapons and America only has an estimated 20 percent of the uranium it needs.

From 2005 through 2011 investors in Uranium One, a shady Canadian company, reportedly gave money to the Clinton Foundation. In 2010 Bill accepted $500,000 from an investment bank to give a single speech in Russia. Uranium One stock carried a “buy” rating with the bank, which had links to the Russian government. Eventually the Kremlin assumed 100 percent control over Uranium One through a subsidiary of Rosatom, a state corporation owned by the Russian government.

Then there are the massive financial institutions sponsoring the speeches that would certainly have an interest in currying favor with the Department of State. These sponsors included Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and American Express. Other sectors sponsoring international speeches included major players in the energy, automotive, casino, hotel, real estate, technology, media, and health care industries, according to Judicial Watch.

Another sponsor was Renaissance Capital in June 2010, where the former president talked in Moscow about the theme of “Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States: Going Global.” This was in the middle of Hillary’s “reset button” approach to U.S.-Russia relations. The investment bank was focused on Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and sub-Saharan Africa, the Washington Examiner reported.

For Clinton’s speech to a UBS Wealth Management event in April 2012 in Chicago, the State Department characterized it as “approximately 300-400 ultra-high net worth clients, prospective clients, and UBS Financial Advisers.”

Two years earlier, Clinton spoke at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, which the State Department review characterized as “a private speech of up to 350 friends and patrons of Mohegan Sun.… The event will not be open to the public. The event will not be publicly advertised.”

Another event reveals how in tune the Clintons are with the supposed plight of “income inequality” and the poor: Clinton spoke in October 2011 at a San Francisco event for the Wells Fargo Private Bank and the Wells Fargo Family Wealth Group, whose clients, State Department documents explain, “have at least $5 million and $50 million in assets respectively.”

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch show the State Department also approved a consulting gig for Clinton with Teneo Strategy, a company headed by Clinton Foundation adviser Doug Band, with offices in Dubai, London, Dublin, Hong Kong, Brussels, and Beijing. After taking some heat over Teneo’s ties to the failed investment firm MF Global, the Clintons ended the deal after just eight months.

Teneo Strategy brings up another aspect that complicates the whole Clinton Foundation-State Department nexus, which is Huma Abedin, better known to some as Mrs. Anthony Weiner. Abedin served under the Secretary of State as deputy chief of staff from January 2009 to June 2012, at which point she became a senior adviser and a “special government employee” that would be allowed to represent individual clients and have outside employment. She was a “special government employee” until February 2013. During that time, Abedin did not disclose what type of work she did for Teneo Strategy, the New York Times reported.

“So we know that the Obama administration’s judgment as to what constitutes a ‘conflict of interest’ is skewed, to put it nicely,” Judicial Watch said in a press release about its findings.

Apparently, some in the State Department may agree with Judicial Watch. On April 10, the department’s inspector general announced he was launching an investigation into Abedin’s irregular employment arrangements.

As evidence continues to accumulate that Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets may have put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin, who has known ties to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill. And it’s not clear that it will ever come up. After several Republican lawmakers publicly raised concerns about Abedin in 2012, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was enraged.

“These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way,” the senator said. “These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis and no merit. And they need to stop now.”

It is a matter of public record that Huma’s mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is a co-founder of the Muslim Sisterhood, a pro-Sharia organization consisting of the wives of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian opposition newspaper Al-Liwa Al-Arabi reports that Muslim Sisterhood members: “smuggle secret documents”; “spread the Brotherhood’s ideology by infiltrating universities, schools and homes”; “fulfill the interests of the Brotherhood”; and “organiz[e] projects which will penetrate [the Brotherhood’s] prohibited ideology into the decision-making in the West … under the guise of ‘general needs of women.’” Nagla Ali Mahmoud, wife of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist who was elected president of Egypt in June 2012 and then deposed, is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. Mrs. Abedin is editor-in-chief of the notoriously pro-Islamist Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. From 1996 to 2008, Abedin worked as assistant editor of the Journal, FrontPageMag.com reported.

And the Clinton Foundation has some explaining to do after one of its former employees received a sentence of life imprisonment in Egypt after being convicted of sedition. In 2012 Gehad el-Haddad, “divided his time between volunteering for the Muslim Brotherhood and heading the Cairo office of the Clinton Climate Initiative, but later that year began to work full time for the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to the Egypt Independent.

Appropriately, the name Gehad can also be spelled Jihad.

A month after Haddad left the Clinton Foundation job for a position with then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood standard-bearer, the Clinton Global Initiative invited Morsi to deliver a major address. Morsi calls Jews “bloodsuckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.” After Morsi was overthrown, in 2013 Haddad was arrested in Egypt for inciting violence. Haddad was given a life sentence on April 11 of this year, according to the Muslim Brotherhood’s official English language website.

Could the Drip, Drip, Drip on Foundation Ultimately Topple Hillary Before the First Primary?

Martin O'Malley's formal entry into the 2016 presidential campaign, joining Bernie Sanders, could be a sign that at least some Democrats view Hillary Clinton as less of a forgone conclusion than much of the political class.

With the drip, drip, drip, it's worth pondering: What happens if it all becomes too much? O'Malley might be in a good position with his organization already in place. But expect Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and other bigger names to enter the Democratic field if Hillary does implode.

Here's an excerpt from my Capital Research Center piece on the Clinton Foundation, which is bound to cause more problems for Hillary.
 

While Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, the governments of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Australia, Norway, Algeria, and the Dominican Republic all lavished millions of dollars on the Clinton Foundation. While acting coy when questioned about most of these, the Clinton Foundation has admitted it should have sought approval from the State Department before accepting $500,000 from the government of Algeria. Whoops.

For the entirety of the Clinton Foundation’s existence, foreign donors made up one-third of all donors giving more than $1 million and made up more than half of donors who gave $5 million or more

In fact, Bill Clinton even saw the foreign donations from shady countries as a positive. “I think it is a good thing—for example, the U.A.E. gave us money,” the former president said of the United Arab Emirates. “Do we agree with everything they do? No. But they are helping us fight ISIS, and they built a great university with NYU, open to people around the world. And they have helped us support the work that this foundation does. … Do I agree with all the foreign policy of Saudi Arabia? No.”

In late March, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus sent a letter to Jarrett, now a White House Senior Adviser. Among the questions in the letter were (1) “At what point did the Administration become aware that the MOU and the process of vetting Clinton Foundation donors were flawed?” (2) “What did the White House do, if anything, to mitigate issues with the Clinton Foundation’s donors?” (3) “Was the White House aware that the MOU was insufficient while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State? If so, were any addendums added to supplement the MOU?” (4) “Was there any independent audit or verification that the Clinton Foundation was abiding by the MOU’s Donor Disclosure provisions?” (5) “Were foreign governments that contributed to the Clinton Foundation given special treatment or consideration by the White House?” (6) “If the White House had been aware of the violations, would the Clinton Foundation or Secretary Clinton have been reprimanded in some fashion for their actions?”

“The public deserves detailed answers to these questions. I request a response to each in writing,” the RNC chairman continued. “The MOU was billed to the public and Congress as a pledge toward transparency and the avoidance of conflicts of interest. The American people deserve to know whether it was nothing more than a memorandum between parties that had no real interest in either of these goals.”

For its part, the White House had little to say when asked whether the foundation was getting money from foreign governments. “I’m certainly not going to have a response to them from here, but I think that was a letter that they sent to the State Department?” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told the press. “You mentioned both the contents of the letter describing the Clinton Foundation and the actions of the Secretary of State at the State Department. So, I wouldn’t anticipate a response from here.”

When a journalist responded, “But it was the White House that was supposed to have the agreement overseeing it,” Earnest said, “Well again, for questions about actions by the Clinton Foundation I’d direct you to the foundation that does very important work around the world, but I don’t have a reaction to the letter.”

It’s no surprise that a Democratic administration would not be eager to criticize the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. But what’s clear is that typical Clinton corruption became an Obama administration problem thanks to a family that prefers to explain things after the fact rather than ask permission before acting.

And much more potentially damning evidence is on its way.

As the New York Times reported last month, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why

Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by acclaimed best-selling author Peter Schweizer is scheduled to be published May 5. The book, “a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities — is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy,” according to the newspaper.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), now a declared presidential candidate, said the book contains “big news” that will “shock people” and make voters “question” Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. The volume “asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return,” the Times reports.

“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Schweizer writes.
Paid by radical billionaire George Soros, the leftists at the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America are doing their best to smear Schweizer, who serves as president of the Government Accountability Institute. That nonprofit declares on its website that its mission is “to investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance.” Schweizer was previously a consultant to NBC News and the William J. Casey Research Fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution.

After admitting he hadn’t read the book, Media Matters founder David Brock, a former Clinton detractor turned Clinton booster, slammed Clinton Cash on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show. “I think this is a political put-up job, and I can smell it from a mile away,” Brock said. That was too much for the show’s co-hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who then cross-examined Brock on whether it’s fair to consider if the book might contain information about the alleged reciprocal relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. Brock said it’s a non-issue because Mrs. Clinton handed over 55,000 pages of her emails from her time in the Obama administration.

Brzezinski interjected, “That’s not the question,” indicating she was referring to the 30,000 emails Clinton admitted were deleted. “There’s no answer, is there?” Brzezinski asked. Brock was dismissive of the female journalist, replying that the pages of emails that the State Department will eventually release will throw light on Clinton’s official duties.

“No, David,” Brzezinski said. “That’s the way the law works, Mika,” Brock replied, saying that individual government agencies are allowed to decide how their records should be archived.
Brzezinski bristled at that answer and said angrily, “No, actually, David, you don’t have to give me a lesson on the regulations of the State Department.”

The Center for American Progress, founded by Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign manager John Podesta (who was also White House Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton), attacked the book in a ThinkProgress blog post by Aviva Shen. Shen doesn’t write much worth reading but she does point out that the evidence in the book wouldn’t be enough to convict the Clintons in court, a fact conceded by the book’s author.