Clinton Cash
by Peter Schweizer
7
Podium Economics
WHAT WAS BILL BEING PAID FOR?
Most ex-presidents see the demand for their speechmaking decline as they move farther away from
their time in office. The opposite applies to Bill. Indeed, during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state,
Bill’s speechmaking activity increased and became much more profitable, particularly overseas. In a
number of cases, these speeches were paid for by people with an interest in obtaining favors from
Hillary.
Does Bill’s outsized personality and global popularity really explain his record financial success
on the speaking circuit? We have become used to former occupants of the Oval Office making money
in their post-presidential years. Ronald Reagan famously gave two speeches for $2 million in Tokyo
following his retirement from office. George H. W. Bush gave lectures and joined corporate boards
for firms like the investment giant the Carlyle Group. But no one comes close to Bill Clinton.
The really troubling thing about Bill’s speeches is the apparent correlation between his fees and
Hillary’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state. The timing of the payments, the much
higher than average size of some of them, and the subsequent actions taken by Hillary raise serious
questions about just what those who underwrote these exorbitant fees were actually paying for.
As noted earlier, Hillary infamously claimed she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the
White House. So while Hillary went to the US Senate, Bill hit the lecture circuit. In 2001 he gave
thirty-nine speeches overseas and twenty in the United States. In the following seven years, the
Clintons pulled in a stunning $109 million.
1
As Clinton’s presidency receded into the past, his income from speeches, especially big paydays
from overseas speeches, declined. But when Hillary became secretary of state in 2009, those high paying overseas speeches ramped up dramatically. Bill’s three best years securing speaking fees over
$250,000 occurred while Hillary was at State. In fact, of the thirteen Clinton speeches that fetched
$500,000 or more, only two occurred during the years his wife was not secretary of state.
TD Bank, a Canadian financial institution, has paid Bill more than any other financial institution for
lectures. More than Goldman Sachs, UBS, JPMorgan, or anyone on Wall Street. TD Bank paid Bill
$1.8 million for ten speeches over a roughly two-and-half-year period from late 2008 to mid-2011.
Moreover, these payments came at a crucial time, as Hillary wrestled with a controversial decision
of enormous financial interest to the bank.
Beginning in 2008 TransCanada Corporation sought US government approval for the $8 billion,
1,660-mile-long Keystone XL pipeline, which was designed to transport 900,000 barrels a day from
Alberta’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
2 Because the project crossed an
international border, authority for granting a presidential permit of approval rested with the US
secretary of state.
3
TD Bank had never paid Bill for a speech until the pipeline project began snaking its way through
Washington. It was late 2008 and Keystone XL permits had just been submitted to Washington.
Hillary had lost the Democratic nod for the White House, but she was still a powerful US senator.
Capitol Hill Republicans were generally supportive of energy projects like Keystone XL. If there
was going to be opposition, it would likely come from liberal Democrats.
One of the Keystone XL pipeline’s biggest shareholders was none other than TD Bank, which held
$1.6 billion in shares. TD Bank was also on the hook for $993 million it had loaned to TransCanada.
4
TD Bank, in a research note, called the pipeline a “national priority” that was essential for the long term health of the Canadian oil industry.
5
There had been talk since June 2008 that Barack Obama, having sewn up the Democratic
nomination, would pick Hillary as his secretary of state. On November 21, 2008, the New York Times
reported that Hillary would indeed be his nominee to head up the State Department.
6 Four days later,
on November 25 and 26, Bill was in Canada delivering his first of three speeches, for which TD
Bank paid him $525,000.
7 But the Clintons were only getting started. Hillary was confirmed as
secretary of state on February 21, 2009. In May Bill returned to Canada and gave three more
speeches for another $525,000, making appearances in Halifax, St. John, and Toronto. Four months
later, on September 13, TD Bank sponsored yet another appearance, this one for $175,000 in
Toronto. On November 3, 2009, TD Bank paid him another $175,000 for a speech in Abu Dhabi.
8 On
May 20, 2010, Bill spoke for another $175,000 in a speech underwritten by TD Bank, this time in
Calgary.
9
Many of these TD-sponsored events were “private affairs,” not open to the public or the press.
10
At several of the speeches, Clinton was introduced or interviewed by TD Bank vice chairman
Frank McKenna. A former Canadian politician and former ambassador to the United States, McKenna
is described in the Canadian press as “a good friend of both Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
11 His interest
in the Keystone XL pipeline went beyond his role as an executive with TD Bank. McKenna also sits
on the corporate board of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL), a heavy-oil producer that
planned to use the pipeline to move its oil to the United States.
12
When the pipeline project ran into rough opposition in Washington, McKenna became a vocal
advocate. When President Obama decided to delay review of the project until after the 2012
elections, McKenna questioned whether Canadians were being “screwed” by the decision.
13
Given Hillary’s role in green-lighting the project, she naturally became the focus of intense
lobbying efforts. In addition to suddenly throwing almost $2 million at Bill, Canadian corporations
with an interest in the project hired several senior aides from Hillary’s presidential campaign to
assist them in their efforts.
The lead lobbyist for TransCanada was Paul Elliott, who had served as the deputy national
campaign director on Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. E-mail correspondence released through
the FOIA reveals that US State Department officials advised TransCanada on how to build support
for the Keystone Pipeline—even as the department was conducting its review on whether or not to
approve it.
14 One of those communicating with Elliott was Nora Toiv, a special assistant to Hillary
Clinton.
The chummy nature of the correspondence between Elliott and senior officials in the State
Department enraged environmental groups. “I think we’ve gone way beyond bias,” said Damon
Moglen, the director of the climate and energy program for Friends of the Earth. “We now see that the
State Department has been complicit in this entire affair.”
15
TransCanada certainly seems to have gotten its money’s worth from Elliott. Meanwhile the
provincial government of Alberta, where the oil sands were located, hired another Clinton aide.
Hilary Lefebre, who served as the director of broadcast media strategy for Hillary’s presidential
campaign, received a $54,000 consulting fee to “blunt” criticism of the project from environmental
groups.
16
Environmental activists continued to accuse the State Department of failing to offer a truly
independent review of the Keystone XL project. To offer an environmental assessment, State hired a
company called Environmental Resources Management (ERM). But there was a problem:
environmental activists pointed out that ERM had financial ties with TransCanada. State Department
officials attempted to cover that fact up, redacting the biographies of the study’s authors to hide their
previous work for TransCanada.
17
Meanwhile, in May 2011 Bill was paid $280,000 for appearances in Fredericton and Antigonish.
18
The Clinton speech submissions to State Department ethics officials (per the Obama administration
memorandum of understanding described in chapter 1) didn’t indicate that TD Bank was a major
investor in Keystone XL. Three months later, in August, the State Department released a final
environmental impact statement that was seen as largely supportive of the pipeline.
19
Throughout the process, Hillary remained relatively quiet. The political winds for Democrats were
difficult. While organized labor favored the deal, environmentalists, Hollywood, and numerous high dollar contributors opposed it.
20
By late 2011 events appeared to be reaching a crescendo. As hearings commenced in Washington,
Hillary sent word that there should be no Canadians present. “Canadian officials saw the request as a
suggestion that Ms. Clinton supported the project, and didn’t want a Canadian presence to further
disturb the peace.”
21 And there was muted evidence that Hillary was quietly pushing the deal through.
At an appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, she had been asked about energy
policy in general and the Keystone XL pipeline in particular. While explaining that she had not yet
decided whether to approve the project, Hillary declared, “we are inclined to do so, and we are for
several reasons.” She touted the project on the grounds of “energy security.” “We’re either going to
be dependent on dirty oil from the [Persian] Gulf or dirty oil from Canada,” she said, leaving the
audience with the impression that she favored the latter.
22
Vocal opposition continued to mount, as President Obama came under increasing pressure from
environmentalists. During an October 26 speech, Obama was heckled about the pipeline. “I know
your deep concern about [Keystone XL],” he said. “We will address it.” In a series of interviews
with local media outlets through the Midwest, where the pipeline was supposed to run, he was
pressed on the issue.
23 After officials in Nebraska demanded that the pipeline be rerouted to avoid
sensitive environmental areas, President Obama decided to delay approval of the project.
24
In late February 2012 Bill finally issued his statement of support for the project at (of all places) a
Department of Energy conference for clean technology start-ups. With a group of bureaucrats and
green-energy investors looking on, Bill told the crowd in Maryland that America should “embrace”
the pipeline.
25 Later the same afternoon, Hillary was at the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, discussing the pipeline. Naturally, she was asked about her husband’s remarks.
“He’s a very smart man,” she responded, causing a smattering of chuckles in the crowd. For
Canadians, this was another hopeful sign. As the Canadian press put it, “Bill Clinton’s comments will
almost certainly cause a stir given his wife has already been accused of a pro-pipeline bias by the sea
of American environmentalists who oppose Keystone XL.”
26
Obama’s edict that the pipeline issue not be settled until after the 2012 elections effectively sealed
its fate, at least as it related to Hillary’s ability to get it approved. By January 2013 she was gone
from Foggy Bottom.
Since she left office, Hillary has used the fact that because she was involved in the process, she
can’t talk about her views on the Keystone Pipeline. As she told one crowd, “I’ve said before in
Canada as I’ve traveled around your country avoiding answering questions about the Keystone
pipeline because I really can’t, having been part of the process.” So her involvement prevents her
from talking about Keystone, but it didn’t prevent her husband from making millions from its largest
shareholder.
29 As Charles Calomiris, a professor of financial institutions at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Business, explains, the speeches were not really about speeches. What they really
wanted was to buy Hillary’s goodwill by paying Bill. “I’m not sure it would matter if those speeches
had taken place in Clinton’s bathtub,” he said. “What matters is that they paid him.”
30
While much of the media attention to Clinton’s speaking has focused on his fees from Wall Street
and pharmaceutical companies, it has been the outsized payments from overseas that have really
brought in the money. In 2011 Bill Clinton made $13.3 million in speaking fees for giving fifty-four
speeches.
31 But of those speeches paying $250,000 or more, nearly 40 percent, or $5.1 million of
those fees, came from just eleven speeches given outside the United States. Overall, these mega-paying speeches for over $250,000 generated nearly $40 million in income for the Clintons from
2001 to 2013.
In short, Bill Clinton’s best years—with much higher than average fees being consistently paid by
foreign entities—occurred while his wife was at the pinnacle of her power as secretary of state, a
perch with enormous influence over issues that directly affected foreign governments.
A few examples make the point.
Beginning in 2009, the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson came under US pressure for selling telecom
equipment to oppressive governments, some of which used those technologies to monitor and control
their own people. In late 2010 the SEC sent a letter to Ericsson about sales to countries that were
considered state sponsors of terrorism by Hillary’s State Department.
32 The regimes included Sudan
and Syria, where Ericsson sold and maintained telephone-switching equipment, and Iran, where it
was selling “commercial grade systems to public network operators for mobile communications.”
33
Hillary was a well-known hawk on Iran and used economic tools against regimes that were
considered sponsors of terrorism. According to US diplomatic cables, State Department officials
were “regularly and increasingly” raising these transactions involving Ericsson with the Swedish
foreign minister.
34
In April 2011 Ericsson was named in a State Department report for supplying telecom equipment
for the oppressive regime in Belarus.
35 Separately, on Capitol Hill pressure was mounting and a bill
would later be introduced in December 2011 in the House of Representatives to “stop the sale of
surveillance technologies to repressive regimes.”
36
In June 2011 the State Department started
drawing up a list of which goods and services might be covered under expanded sanctions on Iran
and other state sponsors of terrorism.
37
Meanwhile, Ericsson decided to sponsor a speech by Bill Clinton and paid him more than he had
ever been paid for a single speech: $750,000. According to Clinton financial disclosures, in the
previous ten years Ericsson had never sponsored a Clinton speech. But now it apparently thought
would be a good time to do so. [nothing to see here folks,move along dc]
On November 12, 2011, Bill appeared at a telecom conference in Hong Kong and talked in general
terms about the role that telecom plays in our lives. One week later, on November 19, the State
Department unveiled its new sanctions list for Iran. Telecom was not on the list.
38
On December 8, Hillary discussed the issue of telecom companies and their sales to repressive
regimes for the first time since Bill’s speech. She argued that companies like Ericsson needed to
make “good decisions” about whom they do business with but proposed no further action.
39
In April 2012, President Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on telecom sales to
Iran and Syria. But those sanctions did not cover Ericsson’s work in Iran. The Swedish company said
that it was planning to scale down its work in the country because of public pressure, but internal
documents obtained by Reuters found that the company planned to honor existing contracts in Iran.
40
In 2011 much of the Arab world was in upheaval, dealing with the aftermath of the Arab Spring,
which had sparked widespread protests across the region. In Egypt and Tunisia, large crowds took to
the streets and demanded political change. Many of these protests turned violent.
41 Even countries
considered relatively stable, including Bahrain and Yemen, were dealing with violent upheavals.
42
The events left small but wealthy countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) feeling very
vulnerable. The UAE was being pressured by the United States to tighten its grip on economic ties
with Iran.
43
In May two oil and shipping companies faced sanctions for their trade with Iran. On June
20, 2011, the Obama administration designated six UAE-based shipping firms for sanctions over their
business dealings with Iran.
44 Three days later, the United States charged several other parties in the
UAE with trading parts for fighter jets and attack helicopters to Iran.
45
The UAE was in a precarious situation because it feared the Iranian regime. But it feared
something perhaps even more: being abandoned by the United States. In a secret State Department
cable, the crown prince said his country was “being left out of our [US] Iran sanctions consultations.”
He explained to a visiting congressional delegation that the royal family was “left wondering what
will happen to them in any deal the US and Iran reach through back-channel conversations.”
46
Amid this uncertainty, the royal family decided to pay Bill Clinton $500,000 to come and speak in
Abu Dhabi.
47 Bill arrived in Abu Dhabi and stayed at the Emirates Palace hotel.
48
His speech was on collecting environmental data. “The lack of environmental data hurts,” he said.
“On top of all environmental issues, the financial crisis is making the world’s stability even worse.
The only way out, though, is a green economy.”
49
What is striking about the speech is not what Clinton said but the timing of the payment. Even as
Bill was being introduced to the audience by the crown prince of the UAE, the prince’s brother (the
foreign minister) was en route to Washington for meetings with none other than Hillary. Sheikh
Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan arrived in Washington on December 12 and met Hillary the day after
Bill collected his half million. Based on the Clintons’ financial disclosures, it does not appear that
the UAE royal family had ever paid for a Clinton speech before.
50
This was not the first time Bill collected large checks for speeches paid by foreign governments,
such as Thailand and Turkey.
51
It certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The year 2010 was a tense time for US-Chinese relations. The problems were piling up: the Chinese
government reduced its military ties with the Pentagon following US arms sales to Taiwan; Google
disclosed that it had been a victim of a Chinese cyber assault; Barack Obama hosted the Dalai Lama
in Washington amidst public outcries in Beijing; relations grew stiff when officials disagreed on
trade issues and China’s alleged manipulation of its currency. Meanwhile, China was flexing its
military muscle, sending a submarine to the bottom of the South China Sea where it planted a Chinese
flag on the ocean floor to signify China’s claim to the mineral-rich area.
At the center of US policy toward China was Hillary Clinton, who was the architect of the Obama
administration’s strategic “pivot” to Asia.
At this critical time for US-Chinese relations, Bill Clinton gave a number of speeches that were
underwritten by the Chinese government and its supporters. That might not be apparent if you look at
the Clintons’ public financial disclosures. For example, on October 21, 2011, Bill gave a speech
before something called the Silicon Valley Information Business Alliance in Santa Clara, California.
But who underwrote the speech? According to correspondence between Bill’s office and the State
Department, the cosponsors were a coalition of Chinese government entities and organizations. Bill
received $200,000 for the speech (well above his average for speaking in the United States) and the
sponsors were the China Electronic Commerce Association (an entity launched and chaired by an
official from the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry);
52
the Suzhou People’s government (a
municipality around Shanghai); the China Association of Science and Technology Industry Parks (this
third sponsor sounds pretty innocuous, but it is a government-run entity in China); and the California
State Friendship Committee, a small California-based organization designed to foster US-Chinese
relations.
53
There were no clear guidelines about what was and what wasn’t permissible. After the speech in
California, Bill Clinton’s office contacted the State Department and sought approval for a speech
sponsored by the Shanghai Airport Authority (SAA). Note the flexibility and lack of understanding
that it had already approved the speech in California when the State Department wrote back, “[Your
correspondence] states that the Shanghai Airport Authority, a state-owned enterprise, would be a
‘title sponsor only.’ Does this mean that SAA is not contributing any funds to pay for President
Clinton’s fees? I don’t believe we’ve previously cleared acceptance of fees from PRC-linked
entities, but could consider this variation.”
The State Department Ethics Office was willing to “consider” a “variation” on guidelines, they
wrote to Clinton’s office. Ultimately Clinton declined the speech. His office said there was a
scheduling problem.
Bill also took a $550,000 payment for an appearance in Shanghai at something called the Huatuo
CEO forum, underwritten by Chinese billionaire Yan Jiehe, a man described as “China’s baddest
billionaire builder.” Yan has become wealthy in part through large government construction contracts.
His company is perhaps most famous in China for lopping off and flattening seven hundred
mountaintops for a construction project. (Yan says, in defense, the number wasn’t quite that high.)
54
Yan, who calls Clinton a “close friend,” is an outspoken Chinese nationalist, explaining that foreign
countries must “not look down on China. . . . I understand that my country, my nation, China is the
greatest in history.”
55
Prior to Hillary’s appointment as secretary of state, Bill had given only two speeches on the
Chinese mainland, for a total of $450,000.
After Hillary’s appointment, the Clintons promised both the incoming Obama White House and the
US Senate that his speeches and business ties would be vetted by the State Department Ethics Office,
as described in chapter 1.
This approach was doomed to fail, because the disclosures to be made were not required to
indicate anything other than the name of the donor, certainly not investments or what business they
might have with the State Department. An examination of the communication between Bill’s office
and State Department ethics officers, which was obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA), indicates that Bill Clinton’s office never provided anything but a cursory
description of who was paying for each speech. TD Bank’s ties to the Keystone Pipeline, for
example, were never disclosed. Ericsson, in the correspondence concerning that speech, is simply
described as a “world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment.” No mention is made of
its tangles with the State Department at the time. And the department green-lighted 215 speechmaking
arrangements as not posing conflicts of interest.
56
For the ethics officers replying to the Clinton requests, the emphasis was on a speedy response.
And then there was the intimidation factor: they were vetting speeches being done by the spouse of
their ultimate boss. And the spouse happened to be a former president. For good measure, all
correspondence pertaining to Bill’s speeches between his office and the ethics office was copied to
Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff and Bill’s longtime friend.
57 And who ran the ethics office at the
time? That would be the State Department legal adviser, Harold Koh, who had previously been
appointed by President Clinton as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and
labor.
58
Speaking of ethics problems, some of Bill’s largest paydays for speaking fees have come from
scandal-plagued Nigeria. As we will learn in the next chapter, the Clinton financial ties to the
continent of Africa run deep, and often include those with troubling reputations and rich histories of
corruption.
8
Warlord Economics
THE CLINTONS DO AFRICA
It was an unusually hot July in 2009 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Kinshasa, the
sprawling capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC (previously named Zaire)
had for decades been a house of horrors. Ruled by corrupt dictators, populated by child soldiers,
plagued by tribal fighting, and suffering from invasions by neighboring countries, few places on earth
are more hellish than the DRC.
As a senator, Hillary had taken the lead in rooting out DRC corruption and violence. In 2006 she
was one of the first to sign on as a cosponsor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief,
Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006—one of only twelve cosponsors in the Senate. The
legislation—which was authored by then senator Barack Obama—included provisions on human
rights, corruption, and sexual violence. It also addressed the issue of conflict minerals, the illicit
trade in valuable minerals that fuel much of the country’s violence. The bill had teeth, giving the US
secretary of state real power and authority to combat the country’s problems. The bill was passed by
the Senate and House, and President George W. Bush signed it into law.
1
Hillary was also a vocal supporter of the Enough Project, an initiative launched by the liberal
Center for American Progress. The project called for an international certification system that would
require DRC mining companies and end users to account for their minerals’ origins. A similar
program had been established several years earlier for the diamond trade. Soon after Hillary arrived
in Kinshasa, former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo, who was from Congo, took her on a tour of a
hospital built in honor of his late mother. Mutombo worked with both the Clinton Foundation and the
Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) on projects in the region.
2
Hillary spoke with students about her commitment to helping Congo turn things around. “We know
that the promise of the DRC is limitless,” she told them. “We will help you build a strong, civilian led government that is accountable and transparent.” From Kinshasa she hopped aboard a UN plane
(her US aircraft was too big) to visit President Joseph Kabila in the eastern city of Goma. There she
talked about efforts to reduce the rapes and sexual violence that had terrorized the population. She
talked about the lucrative mining trade in the country, too. “I am particularly concerned about the
exploitation of natural resources, like the mining and the timber, where the resources do nothing to
help the people of this country,” she said in front of the international media.
3
Her words were strong. But her actions during her tenure as secretary of state came nowhere near
the positions she had taken while in the US Senate. As one scholar from Johns Hopkins University put
it, the law she had cosponsored was “never implemented” by Secretary of State Clinton.
4
Furthermore, in 2011 the DRC government held national elections that were widely condemned. But
the State Department showed little interest in trying to remedy them. When the Congolese government
changed its constitution midelection in favor of President Kabila, the State Department called it an
“internal affair.” When the United Nations Group of Experts linked Congolese militia groups to the
neighboring government in Rwanda, it was proof of Rwanda’s military intervention into Congo that
had contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some have asserted that Hillary’s State
Department sought to block or delay the publication of the damning portion of the investigation and
“quietly” asked Rwanda to stop its support for the rebellion.
5
What happened between 2006, when Hillary took those strong positions, and 2009, when she
became secretary of state? Did she change her position? And if so, why? We can’t ultimately know
why she carried out the policies that she did, but we can notice where changes in policies conformed
with the interests of Clinton Foundation large donors.
On January 20, 2007, Hillary Clinton sat on a gold-colored sofa in her Washington, DC, home and
announced via the Internet that she was forming an exploratory committee and filing with the Federal
Election Commission (FEC) to seek the presidency. “I’m in,” Hillary declared. “And I’m in to win.”
6
Poll numbers gave her reason to be confident. With George W. Bush’s poll numbers in a free fall,
there was a sinking feeling in Republican circles that the GOP would have a hard time keeping the
White House. And among Democrats, Hillary was the early front-runner.
Pundits, pollsters, and the American public were not the only ones paying attention. Hillary’s
announcement, in the weeks and months to follow, sent a cascade of foreign dollars flowing into the
Clinton Foundation and into the Clintons’ own pockets. Significant funds came from foreign investors
with massive investments in troubled corners of the world. Securing access to African business
opportunities had often required paying bribes to government officials. Now these investors were
looking for access and political cover at the highest levels of power in Washington.
A few months after Hillary’s presidential announcement, on July 6, 2007, the Clinton Foundation
announced that a reclusive Swedish mining investor named Lukas Lundin was committing $100
million through a charity called Lundin for Africa. According to the announcement, “the Lundin for
Africa commitment will be aimed, in large part, at approved projects in Africa, where the Lundin
Group has significant mining, oil, and gas interests.”
7 Lundin lived in Vancouver, Canada, and used a
series of offshore trusts to manage his business affairs. A friend of Frank Giustra, Lundin was the
head of a sprawling enterprise that cut deals with African warlords and dictators to gain access to
valuable minerals and oil. As one longtime observer put it, the company “pursued a strategy of
operating in countries under sanctions” and “building assets in countries such as Libya, Iran, and
Sudan, where many other competitors were unable to operate.”
8
This kind of business could be enormously profitable if you were willing to look the other way on
corruption and human rights. But the strategy also posed enormous risks. By 2007, when he made his
commitment to the Clinton Foundation, his company was under considerable political and legal heat
in the United States and Europe for some of its business dealings. The Lundin Group was one of only
two Western oil companies drilling in the Sudan, which was not only the focus of media attention for
massive human rights violations but was also on the US State Department’s list of terrorism sponsoring nations. Human rights activists were pushing for pension funds to divest stock in the
company. Even more troubling, the Lundin Group was under investigation by the International
Prosecution Chamber in Stockholm for complicity in “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” (In
2012, the chief prosecutor decided not to press charges.)
9
In announcing the donation to the Clinton
Foundation, the family’s spokesman explained, “This is not to soothe a bad conscience but we want a
positive impact in countries in Africa where mining is conducted.”
10
That may be true, but it does not explain why the Clinton Foundation saw fit to accept such a large
contribution from such a questionable source.
The Lundin Companies were founded by Lukas’s father, Adolph, who had made a lot of cash
mining in apartheid South Africa after the United Nations applied international sanctions. While other
companies had fled the country in the face of international pressure, Lundin stayed. When Adolph
died in 2006, Lukas continued where his father left off, working in the darker corners of Africa,
where few companies ventured. The Africa Oil Corporation, in which they owned a controlling
share, was active in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, a region run by a corrupt dictatorial regime. Lundin also
had a spin-off called Horn Petroleum that was drilling in Somalia even though the government there
collapsed in 1990 and the country was essentially run by warlords.
11 Lukas Lundin was also
chairman of a company called NGEx Resources that was mining in Eritrea, a region that was
attempting to break away from Ethiopia.
12 The company also had a heavy stake in gold mining
operations in Mauritania and Ghana.
13
But perhaps the most lucrative mining operations in the Lundin portfolio were in the war-torn
DRC, which has known more death, corruption, and fighting than perhaps any other area of Africa.
The Lundin's got their foot in the door by striking a bargain with a Marxist warlord. In early 1997
the Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila, who had once worked with Che Guevara, was in the
middle of a campaign to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, the country’s longtime strongman ruler. To
finance his rebel campaign, he sent a representative to Canada to talk to mining companies about
“investment opportunities.” His proposal was simple: give me money and I will give you lucrative
mining rights in my country once I seize power. One of the first to bite was the Lundin family, which
signed an agreement with the rebels and provided them with most of the funds they needed to march
into the capital. The Lundin's reportedly paid $50 million to Kabila’s “finance minister,” the first
installment of $250 million they would give to the rebels. The rebels wanted cash and by all accounts
didn’t know what they were doing. Kabila’s minister of mines, Kambale Mututulo, had never seen
one. “He asked us to send him some books on how to run one,” noted one executive who met with
him.
14
For the Lundin's, this was an enormously lucrative opportunity. “There are moments in the history
of mining when you can make deals like this under excellent terms,” said Adolph Lundin at the time.
15
By the time Lukas Lundin made his $100 million pledge to the Clinton Foundation, the Congo
operation was making the company “staggering profits.”
16 But for the profits to remain staggering, US
policy needed to remain unchanged. The 2006 Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion
Act, which Hillary had cosponsored, placed those investments at serious risk, because they
threatened to overturn the political leadership in the country. What benefited Lundin was the status
quo in Congo. That status quo was preserved by Hillary’s disappointing failure as secretary of state
to implement any of the key provisions in the law that she had strongly advocated only a few years
earlier—before Lundin made his contribution. According to a July 2012 article in Foreign Policy, the
law had real teeth and empowered the secretary of state to intervene in a number of important ways.
Yet for reasons unknown, Hillary chose not to do so.
This failure to act could at best be described as a sin of omission—though it is a sin compounded
by her many promises as a senator to bring real change to the DRC. But Hillary was apparently
willing to intervene directly when other well-connected mining companies saw their interests
threatened, including foreign mining companies she had no real reason to support. In 2009 a DRC
government commission claimed that a Canadian company called First Quantum Minerals Ltd. had
won a lucrative concession for a Lonshi mine (worth $1 billion Canadian) through questionable
methods. According to the commission, First Quantum won the Lonshi concession without any
competitive bidding. The company had allegedly offered “cash payments and shares” to some
government officials to get it. DRC officials wanted to cancel the contract and suspend the company’s
license. But according to Le Monde Diplomatique, a prominent French publication, Hillary
intervened and tried to pressure the government to restore the company’s license. In January 2012
First Quantum received $1.25 billion for its Congolese assets.
17
Why did the US State Department seek to intervene for a Canadian company doing business in the
DRC, especially when 90 percent of the mine’s yield ended up in China? We do not know. But it is
certainly worth noting that First Quantum was founded by Canadian businessman Jean-Raymond
Boulle, a longtime Clinton friend and benefactor. It was Boulle who had put together the diamond
deal in Arkansas back in the 1980s when Bill was governor. Hillary wore one of his diamonds to the
Clinton inaugural ball.
But Boulle was not the only Clinton donor or ally who was seeking to exploit the DRC’s vast
mineral wealth.
Former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo has worked with the Clinton Global Initiative as a partner
and was appointed by Hillary to the State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative in 2010. In
October 2011 he was a member of an official State Department delegation to Sudan. The following
month he joined forces with a Hillary presidential campaign bundler named Kase Lawal on a $10
million venture to transport 4.5 tons of gold out of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
18 According to
a UN report, the deal involved some of the most notorious war criminals on the planet, including
“individuals operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and committing serious violations of
international law involving the targeting of children or women.”
19
Lawal, a Nigerian and devout Muslim who lived in Houston, was the head of CAMAC, an energy
company that did considerable business in Nigeria. He also had a long history with the Clintons. In
the 1990s, Bill had appointed Lawal to his Trade Advisory Committee on Africa.
20 When Bill visited
Africa in 1998 as president, Lawal accompanied him. Lawal’s CAMAC featured on its board former
Clinton energy secretary Hazel O’Leary and former Clinton senior White House official Dr. Lee
Patrick Brown.
21
According to a 2012 report in the Atlantic Monthly, Lawal leased a Gulfstream V jet from Dallas based Southlake Aviation and sent his half brother Mickey Lawal (vice president of CAMAC), along
with Reagan Mutombo (Dikembe’s nephew) and employees from his company, to Africa to secure the
prize. Also involved was a Texas-based diamond trader named Carlos St. Mary. If all went well, the
expected profit was a quick $20 million.
22
All did not go well. The Gulfstream ended up in Goma, Congo. The man they were dealing with to
secure the gold was a notorious warlord named Bosco Ntaganda. There are plenty of nefarious
criminal leaders in Africa, but Ntaganda belongs near the top of the list. The International Criminal
Court indicted him in 2006 for using child soldiers. He was also categorized as a sanctioned
individual on the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control list. The consequences:
US citizens doing business with him faced the possibility of up to twenty years in prison.
As text messages obtained by UN investigators make clear, Kase Lawal knew he was dealing with
the notorious Ntaganda. And from the beginning he knew that the gold was from the DRC. To combat
the export of gold by warlords and criminal bans, the DRC government banned unregulated exports of
gold out of the country.
23 Lawal denied any involvement in illegal activities.
The “delegation” from Lawal and Mutombo transferred $5 million of the cash and awaited their
gold. But then DRC customs officials seized the Gulfstream and arrested everyone onboard.
24
The owner of the leased jet, David Disiere, got a call in the dead of night informing him that the
$43 million jet was loaded with ten boxes of gold but was now being held by authorities in Goma.
Detained by Congo authorities for the violation of several laws, Lawal and Mutombo contacted the
State Department to get them released. As the Texas diamond trader St. Mary described it later in a
legal deposition, “He [Mutombo] said that . . . he had lobbied a lot on our behalf with Washington,
D.C. and he indicated that—that Kase was quite impressed with his ability—his ability to lobby at
the U.S. State Department on our behalf and was surprised at the number of people that he knew
because he was the former ambassador to the Congo under Clinton’s administration.”
25
They were released from jail following State Department intervention. No one involved has faced
criminal charges in the United States.
Meanwhile, at the same time that Lukas Lundin made his $100 million commitment to the Clinton
Foundation, another major foreign investor with much at stake in Africa was doing the same thing.
Less than three months after Hillary announced her presidential bid, Bill was in London for a
meeting with a reclusive Saudi sheikh named Mohammed al-Amoudi. Amoudi was the head of a
sprawling conglomerate called the Mohammed International Development Research and Organization
Companies (MIDROC), which had extensive interests in Ethiopia including mines, agriculture, hotels,
hospitals, steel, and cement.
26
Born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian mother and a Yemeni father, Amoudi grew up in Saudi Arabia and
became the kingdom’s second richest man.
27 Much of his wealth derived from his close relationship
with Ethiopia’s repressive government, which sold him government assets—mines, concessions, and
land—for deeply discounted prices. An enormous amount of his wealth was tied up with that
government and he took acts likely aimed at helping it stay in power.
28
On May 14, 2007, in a small ceremony, the sheikh announced that he was committing $20 million
to the Clinton Foundation. He started things off with a check for $2 million.
29
Amoudi was familiar with the money ways of Washington. His lobbying firm in Washington
included Senators George Mitchell, Lloyd Bentsen (who had been treasury secretary when Bill was
president), and Bob Dole as paid advisers.
30
In May 2007, when he made his commitment to the Clinton Foundation, the Ethiopia Democracy
and Accountability Act (H.R. 2003) had just been introduced by Congressman Donald Payne. The bill
quickly acquired eighty-five cosponsors in the House and passed on October 2, 2007. The United
States was sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to Ethiopia every year: the bill called for
tying that aid directly to progress on human rights. For Amoudi’s interests, a bill pressuring the
regime that had given him so much to reform would be a disaster. Amoudi’s business interests were
protected by the ruling regime in Ethiopia. Indeed, some of his businesses had been purchased at
bargain-basement prices during the privatization of government assets. A democratic election
bringing in new leadership would put them at risk.
As the bill moved to the US Senate, many looked to see where Senator Clinton would come down.
After all, she was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time and
chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
An Ethiopian human rights organization sent a letter in 2009 to former president Clinton at the
Clinton Foundation warning that the donation was an attempt to influence US policy toward Ethiopia.
“We have reason to believe that the huge donation to the Clinton Foundation was made on behalf of
the Ethiopian government. . . . Although we believe in philanthropy, there is something troubling with
this picture. By all accounts, Sheikh Amoudi, the owner of Ethiopia’s famous Sheraton Hotel, is not
known for much philanthropy.”
The letter, a copy of which was also sent to Hillary at the State Department, further noted what
observers in other countries had seen. “Local AIDS organizations that appealed to the billionaire
[Amoudi] for paltry sums were turned down,” the Ethiopians wrote to Clinton. “So why would a
wealthy man from one of the poorest countries in the world say no to organizations in his country and
yet easily cough up $20 million for an American organization 10,000 miles away? Is this just a
coincidence that the donation was made at the start of U.S. presidential elections?”
31
The letter also asserted that the Clinton Foundation had a close working relationship with the
oppressive government. “The work of the Clinton Foundation in Ethiopia is loosely intertwined with
government operations. We urge you to go beyond the government and to seek out independent
community organizations that are closely working with the poor.”
32
Neither Bill nor the foundation ever responded. Instead, as we will see, when Hillary became
secretary of state, Amoudi’s companies received special benefits from the US State Department,
including taxpayer funds.
Much of Amoudi’s wealth came from his relationship with Ethiopia’s longtime dictator, Meles
Zenawi. A diminutive man with a goatee and arched eyebrows, Zenawi had joined a rebel group
fighting the Marxist Mengistu regime. He quickly rose through the ranks. When they seized power in
1991, Zenawi was thirty-six and became head of the country.
33
It is hard to overstate how closely Amoudi’s wealth was tied to Zenawi’s rule in Ethiopia. (When
Zenawi died in 2012 of a mysterious stomach ailment, Amoudi would say, “I lost my right hand.”)
34
Amoudi had been able to buy 70 percent of Ethiopia’s National Oil Corporation from the government.
One of the sheikh’s companies, Saudi Star, was given leases on tens of thousands of acres of
Ethiopian land.
35 The sheikh controls Ethiopia’s steel production and is the country’s exclusive gold
exporter, with one of his mines (also purchased from the government) producing more than ten
thousand pounds of gold and silver per year.
36
Zenawi’s policies pushed local people off their lands, decimated forests, and encroached on game
reserves.
37 The list of his offenses is immense, reported Britain’s prestigious The Lancet, including
politically manipulating the foreign aid the United States and other countries provide: “badly needed
food and agricultural aid that had been given by foreign donors was being denied to hungry village
communities not allied with the ruling party.”
38
Zenawi was a shrewd technocrat known for “imprisoning his political opponents, withholding
development assistance from restive areas, stealing elections, and cracking down on civil society
NGOs.” He sentenced journalists (including two Europeans) to lengthy jail terms. As The Atlantic put
it, “From a human rights perspective, Zenawi’s rule has been abusive, heavy-handed, and self interested.”
39
On the plus side, under his rule Ethiopia also experienced rapid economic growth. And it was this
economic growth that had led Bill Clinton to praise him as part of a “‘new generation’ of African
leaders.”
40 Zenawi’s ability to curry favor with some in the West while being a brutal dictator at
home led one observer to note, “He was a charmer in Geneva and London. He was a stern, even
brutal, autocrat at home.”
41
Despite his mixed record, many in the West—including the Clintons—embraced and legitimized
him. According to a leaked State Department cable, in 2007, on his way to attend the G20 summit in
Pittsburgh, Zenawi was invited to attend Clinton Foundation events in New York.
42
When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in January 2009, Ethiopian officials interacted
confidently with US diplomats. Despite public statements coming from Washington about promoting
human rights in Ethiopia and Africa, Ethiopian officials remained unfazed. In February 2010 Hillary’s
undersecretary of state, Maria Otero, met with the dictator and raised questions about the plight and
arrest of an opposition figure named Birtukan Midekssa. Zenawi told her that Midekssa will
“vegetate in jail, forever,” according to leaked State Department cables obtained through WikiLeaks.
As far as opposition groups were concerned, he said, “we will crush them with our full force.”
43
It was a shocking display of disrespect, given that the United States was sending his government
half a billion dollars a year. As Foreign Affairs put it, “Washington has expressed its concern about
these issues to the Ethiopian government, and the Ethiopian government has reacted not only
negatively but also insultingly—despite receiving $533 million in U.S. assistance in fiscal year
2010.”
44
Zenawi aggressively went after not only domestic political opponents but also American
organizations, like the US Chamber of Commerce and Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center, that were
working in the country. According to another WikiLeaks State Department cable, diplomats raised
concerns with Zenawi about his new policy requiring organizations like the US Chamber of
Commerce and the Carter Center to seek government approval to use US money sent from the United
States in Ethiopia. Zenawi said as far as the Carter Center was concerned, “Maybe we are better off
if they do not come.” He was equally dismissive when diplomats raised questions about how the
government restricted access to Western food aid in certain regions for political reasons.
45
In 2012 Ethiopia was among the top sub-Saharan African recipients of US aid, with $707 million
in planned aid. As secretary of state, Hillary was required to evaluate whether countries receiving
American aid were transparent in how the money was spent. “The Department of State, Foreign
Operations, and Related Programs Appropriation Act prohibits U.S. assistance to the central
government of any country that does not meet minimum standards of fiscal transparency.” Unless, that
is, Hillary decided to grant the country a waiver.
46
State Department officials determined that Ethiopia failed to meet the transparency requirement.
According to leaked cables from the embassy,
Ethiopia does not, however, have specific laws or regulations governing the public disclosure of revenues and expenditures in
national budgets. There are no independent auditors of government budget data, so information is taken at face value. International
economists generally focus their criticism on the number of extra-budgetary items that are omitted from the national budget.
Notably, the national budget does not include over 100 state-owned enterprises or the over 70 “endowment” companies owned by
the ruling political party.
The list of offenses continued and concluded by noting, “In the past year, there have not been any
events that affected Ethiopia’s budget transparency and the Government of Ethiopia has not made any
steps towards improving its fiscal transparency.” When US diplomats asked the Ethiopian minister of
finance about the national budget, he “maintained that he does not have access” to complete books
either. Diplomats raised the “message to GOE [Government of Ethiopia] officials regarding
Ethiopia’s need to comply with USG [US government] fiscal transparency guidelines; however, this
message has fallen on deaf ears and only seems to aggravate relations.”
47
Despite the lack of compliance and the apparent lack of interest in moving toward transparency,
Hillary granted the government of Ethiopia a waiver, which allowed it to avoid transparency
requirements.
48
Someone who has directly benefited from US assistance to Ethiopia is Sheikh Amoudi. Amoudi
owned Ethiopia’s Dashen Bank, which he used to finance his other companies and projects.
According to Dashen’s annual reports, the bank reaps financial reward through the USAID’s
Development Credit Authority, which is funded by US taxpayers and provides Ethiopian loan
guarantees.
49 The USAID also brokered a long-term contract in November 2009 specifically for
Almeda Textiles (which is owned by Amoudi) to import textiles into the United States.
50
When Hillary was appointed secretary of state, she brought in a group of advisers to shape
American policy toward Africa. But two individuals largely responsible for forming it didn’t have a
direct portfolio at State. Husband Bill was considered to be Hillary’s closest Africa adviser. He had
good contacts with several African presidents and traveled there regularly.
51
The other key unofficial adviser was former ambassador Joe Wilson, regarded as Hillary’s “grey
eminence for Africa.”
52 Wilson had served as ambassador to several countries in Africa. In 1997 he
was appointed special assistant to President Clinton and senior director for African affairs in the
White House. Wilson had the responsibility to “plan and execute” then president Bill Clinton’s first
trip to Africa, which supposedly raised his consciousness concerning the continent.
53
Wilson is perhaps most famous for the role he played in a controversy involving his wife, Valerie
Plame, a former CIA agent who had been outed by officials in the Bush administration. Wilson
charged that this was an intentional act of retaliation against him for debunking the administration’s
claims about Saddam Hussein’s seeking yellowcake uranium in Africa. It later turned out that the leak
of Plame’s identity came from the State Department, not the White House. Nevertheless, husband and
wife made something of a career out of the episode: Plame published a book about her experience,
which in turn became a movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. Wilson’s claims about the
yellowcake uranium were later debunked by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
54
Wilson was close to the Clintons. “He was very active with the Hillary Clinton [presidential]
campaign,” his wife noted. Wilson penned articles declaring that in contrast with then senator Obama,
Hillary had real-world diplomatic experience. On the campaign trail in Portland, Oregon, in April
2008, he said that Hillary was “easily the better candidate.” Joe Wilson also traveled with Bill
Clinton to Africa as part of a Clinton Foundation delegation.
55
Once Hillary was nominated for secretary of state, many believed she wanted to appoint Wilson to
a senior State Department post for African affairs. But the reality of facing a difficult Senate
confirmation deterred her. Many Republicans strongly disliked him. Still, Wilson was a strong
presence at the State Department despite his lack of an official post. “Wilson’s presence in the wings
is still strongly felt and the future incumbent in this post will constantly have him under their feet,”
noted one African business publication.
56
In January 2007 Wilson became vice chairman of a New York–based investment firm called Jarch
Capital.
57 A holding company focused on natural resources like oil, uranium, and gold, it specialized
in cutting deals in countries where it expected “sovereignty changes.” That’s a nice way of saying
countries that are at war.
58
“Ambassador Wilson will be instrumental in the growth of Jarch as it expands in Africa,
sometimes in politically sensitive areas,” noted the company in a press release. In other words, like
Adolph Lundin did in Congo, Jarch would be striking deals with warlords fighting local governments,
hoping to cash in when power changed hands. (As Jarch founder Philippe Heilberg, a former Wall
Street banker, explained his strategy of cutting deals with warlords, “You have to go to the guns, this
is Africa.”)
59
The venture was clearly off the grid as far as the Bush State Department was concerned. As
Harper’s quoted a knowledgeable observer in 2007, “The State Department isn’t supportive of
Jarch’s involvement because it knows that once Americans go after oil in the south any hope of a
national unity government collapses.”
60
But Jarch Capital pressed on anyway. Wilson was of particular help because he had dealt with
Sudanese warlords while he had served in the Clinton administration. He knew the region, and was a
master negotiator. These skills proved extremely valuable to Jarch.
Jarch was close to several warlords operating in the Sudan. In 2009, shortly after Hillary was
appointed secretary of state, Jarch took out a fifty-year lease on 400,000 hectares (or one million
acres—about the size of Vermont) in Unity State, South Sudan.
61
In addition to the rights to farm the
land, it procured oil and uranium rights as well. As the Financial Times put it, the deal had “a
decidedly 19th century flavor to it.”
62
Sudan was in the middle of a civil war and the United States had placed restrictions on US
companies wanting to do business in the country. So Jarch set up a subsidiary, Jarch Management,
which was registered outside of the United States, “making it easier to circumvent such
restrictions.”
63
Jarch acquired the land by striking a bargain with Gabriel Matip, the eldest son of General Paulino
Matip Nhial, who was deputy commander in chief of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)
and former head of the South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF). The general was also put on the Jarch
advisory board. SSDF bragged, “This company is set to become the largest producer of oil and gas in
South Sudan.”
64
Wilson’s firm continued signing up warlords and enriching their family members in exchange for
lucrative leases on rebel-held territory. In 2010 it signed up Sudanese General Gabriel Tanginya as
an “adviser” and leased a huge area of his native Jonglei state in what was called “Africa’s largest
land deal.”
65 Tanginya, who has been accused of instigating violence against civilians in southern
Sudan, was apparently a very welcome addition to the firm. Jarch declared that General Tanginya
“will give the Company much needed expertise in Jonglei and expand its expertise in Greater Upper
Nile.”
66
By the time there were national elections in 2011, the newly minted vice president of South Sudan
was Riek Machar, who was also an adviser to Jarch. Machar had been a rebel leader and later
apologized for his role in the Bor Massacre, in which thousands of people had been killed.
67
As South Sudan struggles with factional fighting following its independence in 2011, Jarch
Capital–linked warlords are in the thick of the fight. General Peter Gadet, a former member of the
Jarch Capital advisory board, is the target of international sanctions. According to the BBC, the
international sanctions are in response to “reports of atrocities committed in the first half of 2014.”
68
The cluster of donors and advisers to the Clintons who rely on warlords and corrupt dictators is not
confined to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, or Sudan. It extends further south on the
continent and includes a longtime Clinton benefactor with close ties to the corrupt regime in Nigeria.
Nigeria is widely recognized as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It has also been one
of the most lucrative countries for the Clintons. Over the course of more than fifteen years, they have
collected large speaking fees, campaign-related funds, and large contributions for the Clinton
Foundation from those who have made fortunes by working in the corrupt world of Nigerian politics.
In his first eight years on the global lecture circuit, Bill had never been paid to speak in Nigeria.
But once Hillary was appointed secretary of state, he booked two of his top three highest-paid
speeches ever by traveling to Nigeria, pulling in a whopping $700,000 each.
69
The two speeches were allegedly underwritten by Nigerian media mogul Nduka Obaigbena, who
owns Nigeria’s ThisDay newspaper. Obaigbena, a solidly built man “with a taste for bespoke Lanvin
suits,” professes “to live modestly and discreetly,” all the while maintaining a home in Lagos, a large
estate in Nigeria’s Delta State, and a sleek penthouse at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, DC.
70
Obaigbena casts himself as a rebel fighting Nigeria’s corrupt political establishment. But he’s
known more for his lavish parties and concerts, which have brought Beyoncé and Jay-Z, as well as
Bill Clinton, to Nigeria at enormous expense. Often these lavish events come at a price for ordinary
Nigerians. When Clinton appeared at a ThisDay award event in 2013, he handed out checks to
schoolteachers as a reward for their work. But while Clinton collected his fee, the teachers saw their
checks from ThisDay bounce.
71
Obaigbena is close to the Nigerian government of President Goodluck Jonathan, to whom he serves
as an unofficial adviser. Jonathan has been accused of corruption by numerous international
organizations. (As the Associated Press puts it, Obaigbena has “close ties to major business leaders
and those in the ruling People’s Democratic Party.”) Hillary’s State Department said that Jonathan’s
tenure is marked by “massive, widespread, and pervasive corruption” at all levels of the Nigerian
government.
72 And yet, as with Ethiopia, Hillary granted the country a waiver for corruption so it
could continue to receive US assistance. Back in 2006, when Jonathan was the governor of Bayelsa
State, he authorized the transfer of $1 million from the government’s poverty alleviation fund to
Obaigbena’s organization so he could bring Beyoncé to Nigeria.
73
One longtime Clinton benefactor is businessman Gilbert Chagoury, who has also been implicated
in corruption and bribery in Nigeria. Born in Lagos, Chagoury comes from a Lebanese family and has
dual citizenship in Lebanon and the United Kingdom. He built a financial empire in Nigeria with the
help of General Sani Abacha, a Nigerian dictator whose five-year tenure was “known for its
corruption and brutality.”
74
Chagoury served as a “front for the general’s extensive business empire.” And the two had a
business partner in their activities: Marc Rich, the fugitive oil and commodities broker. Chagoury
apparently worked with Rich to sop up oil assets in Nigeria and sell them on the oil market for the
benefit of General Abacha and his associates. The Nigerian media declared in 1999 that the “Gilbert
Chagoury-Marc Rich alliance remains a formidable foe.”
75
Abacha and Chagoury met when the future dictator was a young army officer. After Abacha carried
out a coup in 1993, Chagoury received prized oil concessions and government construction
contracts.
76
In exchange, Chagoury helped the general siphon off money and get it out of the country.
Abacha’s rule was highly criticized in Washington, where hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign
assistance were disappearing into European bank accounts.
77 During his rule, Abacha funneled
billions of dollars to foreign bank accounts. Nigeria’s lead anticorruption prosecutor at the time,
Nuhu Ribadu, put Chagoury at the center of the scheme. “You couldn’t investigate corruption without
looking at Chagoury,” he said. According to Ribadu, Chagoury helped steer more than $4 billion into
bank accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Jersey.
78
Recognizing that it helped to have highly placed friends in Washington, Chagoury started funneling
money to the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee. He
contributed $460,000 to a Miami-based voter registration group tied to the DNC. (Because Chagoury
is not an American citizen, he is unable to legally contribute directly to a campaign.) As the
Washington Post put it, the nearly half-million-dollar contribution was given to “curry favor with
Clinton’s administration on Abacha’s behalf.”
79
Apparently it worked: in 1996, Chagoury and his wife attended the White House Christmas party.
80
More significantly, Bill effectively changed US policy toward Nigeria with a single sentence. The
United States government had been pressuring Abacha to step down and hold elections. Abacha was
expected to go. But President Clinton said in 1998, “If [Abacha] stands for election, we hope he will
stand as a civilian.”
81
In short, Clinton signaled that Abacha could stay; he simply needed to run as a
civilian. The New York Times called it a “shift” in US policy.
When Abacha died in 1998 (allegedly in the company of two prostitutes), the Nigerian government
and European authorities began investigating the missing money.
82 They quickly fingered Chagoury. In
2000 he was convicted in Geneva, Switzerland, of money laundering and “aiding a criminal
organization in connection with the billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria during the Abacha years,”
as PBS’s Frontline put it. (As part of a plea deal the conviction was later expunged.)
83 Chagoury cut
a deal with the Nigerians and Swiss, returning $300 million of his own profits in exchange for legal
immunity. Subsequently, the tiny island state of St. Lucia appointed him as its envoy to the United
Nations Education, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing him diplomatic immunity
and preventing prosecution in other European countries.
84 Why St. Lucia bestowed this honor on him
is unclear.
Chagoury’s apparent complicity in the looting of Nigeria by a brutal dictator might be enough to
deter most people from doing business with him. But not the Clintons. If anything, their relationship
has blossomed. Clinton has recently been described as Chagoury’s “close friend.”
85
Since his conviction in Europe, Chagoury has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009,
shortly after Hillary became secretary of state, he pledged a whopping $1 billion to the Clinton’s
legacy project.
86 During a speech Bill delivered in St. Lucia, the island’s prime minister extended
thanks to Chagoury for arranging the visit.
87 He was also an invited guest to Bill’s sixtieth birthday
party and attended the wedding of Bill’s longtime aide Doug Band. The Chagourys were also active
in Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid. Michel Chaghouri, a nephew in Los Angeles, was a bundler for
the campaign and served on the campaign staff.
88 Numerous other relatives gave the maximum $4,600
each to her campaign.
89
Chagoury’s legal troubles continued. In April 2010 Gilbert Chagoury and his brother Jack were
indicted by the US Justice Department in a massive bribery scandal involving $6 billion and
Halliburton. Bribes had allegedly been paid to secure contracts in Nigeria. Eventually Chagoury and
his brother were dropped from the case, and Halliburton settled with the federal government for $35
million.
90
Bill has lavished praise on Chagoury over the years. In 2005 Chagoury was presented with the
Pride of Heritage award from the Lebanese community by Bill.
91 And in 2009 the Clinton Global
Initiative gave Chagoury’s company an award for sustainable development.
92
In 2013 Bill showed up
in Nigeria for a public ceremony involving one of Chagoury’s construction projects.
Why the Clintons continue to associate with, take money from, and have transactions with Gilbert
Chagoury remains a mystery. No less an expert than Marc Rich, who had years of experience working
with Chagoury and Nigeria, once described the country as “the global capital of corruption.”
93
The Clinton Foundation has made its work in Africa a centerpiece of its global work on HIV/AIDS
and development. Unfortunately, many of those who are paying it and providing it with funds have
profited off the worst excesses on the continent. One has to wonder why the Clintons would permit
themselves to be so closely tied to such a corrupt group of individuals.
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