In the years before Hillary Rodham Clinton announced she would run again for the US presidency, her top aides expressed profound concerns in internal e-mails about how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and former US president Bill Clinton’s own moneymaking ventures would affect the Democratic candidate’s political future.
The e-mails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month, are also revealing how efforts to minimize potential conflicts at the foundation led to power struggles and infighting among aides and Hillary Clinton’s family.
One top aide to Bill Clinton, Douglas Band, said in an e-mail that the former president had received personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”
Chelsea Clinton accused her father’s aides of taking “significant sums of money from my parents personally,” of “hustling” during foundation events to win clients for their own businesses and even of installing spyware on her chief of staff’s computer.
Hillary Clinton, another e-mail showed, had promised to attend a Clinton Foundation gathering in Morocco at the behest of its king, who had pledged US$12 million to the charity.
Her advisers worried that would look unseemly just as she was beginning her presidential campaign in earnest.
“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Hillary Clinton in an e-mail in January last year.
For months, the Clintons have defended their family foundation, making public proclamations that it went above and beyond what the law required in terms of transparency while Hillary Clinton was at the US Department of State.
The e-mails, which came from the account of John Podesta, who had a leadership role at the foundation and is now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, show pronounced worries among the Clintons’ closest advisers about the millions of dollars coming into the foundation, and to Bill Clinton personally, and how they could inoculate Hillary Clinton from criticism over it.
“Do they plan to do big events next year?” Robby Mook, her campaign manager, asked about the foundation last year, shortly after Hillary Clinton began her presidential campaign. “Possible for those to be smaller and lower key in 16?”
FUNDRAISING
Founded in 1997, when Bill Clinton was still president, the foundation has raised about US$2 billion to fund projects around the world, helping African farmers improve their yields, Haitians recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake and millions of people gain access to cheaper HIV/AIDS medication, among other accomplishments.
Some of the former president’s staff members followed him from the White House to the foundation, and the e-mails provide an extraordinary look at the soap opera that unfolded years later as people close to the couple felt their power threatened.
“This is the 3rd time this week where she has gone to daddy to change a decision or interject herself,” Band wrote about Chelsea Clinton in 2011.
At the time, she was beginning to exert influence at the foundation, expressing concerns that Band and others were trying to use the charity to make money for themselves, and accusing another aide in her father’s personal office of installing spyware.
E-mails released on Tuesday contained a memo from Band essentially defending his work for the foundation, and for Bill Clinton personally, even as Band was building up his political consulting firm, Teneo.
The memo said that some foundation donors had indeed been clients of Teneo, but also that Band and Teneo had helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the foundation from individual, foreign and corporate donors, without taking a commission.
Band also wrote that some of those donors he had cultivated were paying Bill Clinton privately to make speeches or to do other work.
One such donor, Laureate International Universities, a for-profit education company based in Baltimore, was paying Bill Clinton US$3.5 million annually “to provide advice” and serve as its honorary chairman, Band wrote.
In another e-mail, Band wrote that Bill Clinton had even received gifts from some donors.
The tensions came to a head when Chelsea Clinton helped enlist an outside law firm to audit the Clinton Foundation’s practices.
‘QUID PRO QUO’
Some interviewees told the audit team that the donors “may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gift.”
The audit suggested the foundation “ensure that all donors are properly vetted and that no inappropriate quid pro quos are offered to donors in return for contributions.”
The advice proved prescient as Hillary Clinton faced intense scrutiny about whether donors to the Clinton Foundation had received special access to her State Department or other rewards.
In August, the foundation said it would no longer accept foreign donations should Hillary Clinton win the White House.
Hillary Clinton has dismissed criticism of the charity as politically motivated.
Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin declined to verify the authenticity of the e-mails, but said the hack was part of the Russian government’s efforts to use cyberattacks to influence the election in favor of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Band’s firm released a statement saying: “Teneo worked to encourage clients, where appropriate, to support the Clinton Foundation because of the good work that it does around the world. It also clearly shows that Teneo never received any financial benefit or benefit of any kind from doing so.”
Behind the scenes, Hillary Clinton’s aides grappled with how to sever her from the problematic optics of some of the philanthropy’s fundraising practices.
In an October 2014 e-mail, Mook asked whether Hillary Clinton’s name would be used in connection with the foundation, which is formally known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
“It will invite press scrutiny and she’ll be held accountable for what happens there,” he wrote.
The next year, when Hillary Clinton was on the verge of declaring her candidacy, Cheryl Mills, a lawyer and top aide, said she discussed with Hillary Clinton various “steps” to take to adjust her relationship with the foundation, including her resignation from the foundation’s board.
By fall last year, Hillary Clinton’s aides had fine-tuned her response to questions about foreign donors.
“As president, I won’t permit any conflicts between my work for the American people and the Foundation’s good work,” aides advised Hillary Clinton to say in a coming debate.
The e-mails give insight into the periodic fires that Hillary Clinton’s advisers thought they had to put out. Hillary Clinton ultimately did not attend the foundation event in Morocco that Abedin had complained about; her husband and daughter did go. It is unclear if the king had given the US$12 million he was said to have pledged; he is not listed among the foundation’s donors.
In March last year, Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel magnate who had given more than US$10 million to the foundation, was “relentlessly” requesting a meeting with Bill Clinton, according to an aide, Amitabh Desai.
If the former president declined, the relationship would be damaged, Desai wrote in an e-mail.
“No is better. Is that viable?” wrote Podesta, who by then was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
It is unclear if the meeting took place.
‘NOT TOP 10’
That same year, during a discussion over a potential meeting between Bill Clinton and the Saudi king, Podesta replied, using the former president’s initials: “Not something that would be on our top 10 list of WJC requests.”
Podesta took a leadership role at the charity when Bruce Lindsey, a former White House counsel and longtime friend of Bill Clinton who had been chief executive of the foundation, had a stroke in 2011.
His role at the foundation, coupled with his later capacity as the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, put Podesta in the middle of internal workings of both operations and, by default, the delicate battles unfolding between Chelsea Clinton and her father’s top aides.
The day Hillary Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, died in 2011, Chelsea Clinton e-mailed Podesta.
“Doug called and yelled and screamed at my Dad about how could he do this,” she said, an apparent reference to the internal scrutiny going on at the foundation. “My mother is exhausted, we are all heartbroken but we need a strategy and my father needs advice/counsel.”
Band has said the exchange described in the e-mail never happened.
Band, who helped Bill Clinton build the foundation, clearly felt irritated by Chelsea Clinton’s stream of implications that he had padded his own pockets from his work for her father.
When Chelsea Clinton, using a pseudonym “Diane Reynolds,” that she also sometimes used to check into hotels, sent Band a complimentary e-mail in January 2012, he forwarded it to Podesta and Mills.
“As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far,” he wrote. “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking the knife in the back, and front.”
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