It’s been a long time since the last Clinton Corruption update. I meant to crank this one out when news of the Qatar bribe “donation” first broke, but the press of events got in my way.
Back in November, it was revealed that the Clinton Foundation received $1 million in “donations” from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new or significantly increased support from foreign governments.
Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark the 65th birthday of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton’s husband, and sought to meet the former U.S. president in person the following year to present him the check, according to an email from a foundation official to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta. The email, among thousands hacked from Podesta’s account, was published last month by WikiLeaks.
Clinton signed an ethics agreement governing her family’s globe-straddling foundation in order to become secretary of state in 2009. The agreement was designed to increase transparency to avoid appearances that U.S. foreign policy could be swayed by wealthy donors.
If a new foreign government wished to donate or if an existing foreign-government donor, such as Qatar, wanted to “increase materially” its support of ongoing programs, Clinton promised that the State Department’s ethics official would be notified and given a chance to raise any concerns.
Clinton Foundation officials last month declined to confirm the Qatar donation. In response to additional questions, a foundation spokesman, Brian Cookstra, this week said that it accepted the $1 million gift from Qatar, but this did not amount to a “material increase” in the Gulf country’s support for the charity. Cookstra declined to say whether Qatari officials received their requested meeting with Bill Clinton.
Officials at Qatar’s embassy in Washington and in its Council of Ministers in the capital, Doha, declined to discuss the donation.
The State Department has said it has no record of the foundation submitting the Qatar gift for review, and that it was incumbent on the foundation to notify the department about donations that needed attention. A department spokeswoman did not respond to additional questions about the donation.
That’s the same Qatar that’s been a leading financial backer of jihadist terrorism for some time, and was accused of funding the Islamic State.
Speaking of the Clinton Foundation, Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch notes that the recent DOJ “investigation” into the Clinton Foundation was a “whitewash.”
We at Judicial Watch were skeptical that Huber would turn up anything either. Huber was appointed by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who did so on the recommendations of his career professional staff. You know who they are: the Sally Yates-Bruce Ohr clone army subversively staffing Justice Department headquarters.
To paraphrase my colleague Tom Fitton, you shouldn’t be surprised to have a non-finding from a non-investigation. Recall that Huber skipped a critical congressional hearing on the Clinton Foundation in December 2018, and his investigators kept “losing” thousands of pages of evidence handed over by whistleblowers who did testify (and whose names we know, incidentally). It has long been clear that the Huber effort was a charade.
Besides, the Huber “investigation” was not going to lead to indictments in any case because that was not its mandate. Huber was simply surveying a wide array of issues to see if further investigation was merited.
Judicial Watch meanwhile has been investigating Clinton corruption for many years. We have documented that Hillary Clinton repeatedly broke the law and lied to investigators and the American people. Our persistent efforts have forced the government to admit that it recovered at least 5,000 of the 33,000 emails Clinton admitted she deleted. The FBI and Justice Department have done everything they can to keep this information from seeing the light of day, slow-rolling their release and redacting large sections of the records they do hand over, usually when compelled by court order.
Most of the emails deal with official government business, which means Clinton lied when she said they were all about yoga and wedding planning. Many contain classified information, the transmission of which in the clear is a criminal offense. We even know now that she regularly transmitted sensitive security information about her schedules — which placed her life and those around her in danger. The number of such documented security violations increases with each new tranche of emails the FBI is forced to release because of Judicial Watch litigation.
Transmission of classified information through unsecure channels is a crime whether Clinton intended to or not. But intent can be proven as well. In a June 17, 2011 email then-Secretary Clinton instructed senior State Department adviser Jake Sullivan to strip security markings from a classified document to send it to her over nonsecure channels. That is a felony.
The most recent record release revealed that Hillary was conducting official and sometimes classified business via text messages, something that had been suspected but not proved until now. So now we have the matter of how many texts she sent and what they contained, for which we have no answers — yet. But it does make clear why her staff demolished cell phones with hammers.
More Judicial Watch background on their Clinton Foundation ivestigation can be found here.
So: Any other Clinton corruption news as of late? Well:
Oh, and the Hillary comments slamming Bernie Sanders will be in Monday’s Clown Car Update…