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January 6, 2018

# The Clock Ticks for the Clinton Foundation

By Daniel John Sobieski

Whether it is merely the FBI trying to restore its shattered credibility or justice finally being done, the news that the pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation are going to get renewed and serious attention is welcome. The Clintons have made a career of ignoring, skirting, and breaking the law. Up to this point, crime has paid off handsomely for the Clintons, but now they may find themselves caught between Little Rock and a hard place:

> The Justice Department has launched a new inquiry into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in any pay-to-play politics or other illegal activities while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of [s]tate, law enforcement officials and a witness tell[] The Hill.

> FBI agents from Little Rock, Ark., where the foundation was started, have taken the lead in the investigation and have interviewed at least one witness in the last month, and law enforcement officials said additional activities are expected in the coming weeks.

> The officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the probe is examining whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for largesse to their charitable efforts or whether donors made commitments of donations in hopes of securing government outcomes.

This should be a short investigation – Hillary Clinton is a ham sandwich waiting to be indicted. All that should be necessary is to empanel a grand jury and read them the known facts. The Clinton Foundation was hardly charitable except to its donors.

Any investigation should start with Haiti, where the Clinton Foundation plundered the disaster-ridden island for fun and profit. As the Washington Free Beacon reported:

> Haitian activists protested outside ... the Clinton Foundation in New York over the loss of "billions of dollars" that was meant to help rebuild after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The activists are claiming [that] the money was stolen through the Haiti Reconstruction Commission that was headed by Bill Clinton. In January 2015, the Clinton Foundation was the target of protests for wasting more than $10 billion and awarding contracts to non-Haitian companies. The activists also said Haiti is a cover for foreign governments to funnel kickbacks of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. They believe that this was done for favors that Hillary was doing for the foreign governments while she was [s]ecretary of [s]tate. "We are telling the world of the crimes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for in Haiti," said Dhoud Andre of the Committee Against Dictatorship in Haiti.

That the Clinton Foundation's operations were nothing but a cash cow scam is seen in a brilliant analysis and exposé of its operations in Colombia, a country beset by internal strife and an ongoing battle with drug cartels. The truth, as reported by Ken Silverman and the American Media Institute in Fusion, a joint venture of ABC and Univision, hardly Trump surrogates, explains in part how the Clintons amassed a small fortune without holding any job or running any business:

> Colombia should be the Clinton Foundation's best case study. Ground zero for the drug wars of the 1980s and [']90s, racked by uneven development and low-intensity conflict for half a century, Colombia has received more foundation money and attention than any other nation outside the United States. Bill and Hillary Clinton have visited the country often and enjoy close relationships with members of Colombia's ruling party. Colombia has also been home to the vast oil and natural gas holdings of the man who is reportedly the Clinton Foundation's largest individual donor, Canadian financier Frank Giustra[.] ...

> Many of the Colombian "success stories" touted on the foundation's website – the ones specific enough for us to track down – were critical about the foundation's effect on their lives. Labor leaders and progressive activists say foundation programs caused environmental harm, displaced indigenous people, and ... concentrated a larger share of Colombia's oil and natural gas reserves in the hands of Giustra[.] ...

> We interviewed young women in the foundation's job-training programs; female business owners who sought help from its programs; workers who toiled for the foundation's biggest individual donor's firms; indigenous fisherm[e]n who were promised jobs and aid; and union leaders, social[] justice activists, and progressive lawmakers. Some say they lost money. Others said they were used as props. Still others simply thought that the foundation had wasted a lot of their time. "They are doing nothing for workers," one Colombian union official told us, with disgust. "I don't even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money."

Clinton donor Giustra benefited significantly from his association, even if the people of Colombia didn't:

> When we met him (Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo) in his wood-paneled office in Colombia's [c]apitol building in May, his desk was stacked high with papers related to Pacific Rubiales's labor practices, the result of years of investigative work by his staff. He did not see the Clinton Foundation and its partnership with Giustra's Pacific Rubiales as either progressive or positive. "The territory where Pacific Rubiales operated," he said, thumbing through pages of alleged human[] rights violations, "was a type of concentration camp for workers." ...

> In September 2005, Giustra and Clinton flew to Kazakhstan together to meet the Central Asian nation's president. Shortly thereafter, Giustra secured a lucrative concession to mine Kazakh uranium, despite his company's lack of experience with the radioactive ore. As Bill Clinton opened doors for Giustra, the financier gave generously to Clinton's foundation.

As the New York Times reported, this mutual back-scratching gave Clinton donor Giustra, and later Putin's Russia, control of a significant portion of the world's uranium supply:

> Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

> Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium[-]mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic . But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton[.] ...

> Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton's charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3[-]million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra's more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton's inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges[.] ...

> In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share.

Clinton played a pivotal role in the Uranium One deal, which ended up giving Russian interests control of 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a federal crime. As Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer has noted [italics ours –ed.]:

> Tuesday on Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs Tonight, Breitbart editor at large and the author of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer[,] said there needs to be a federal investigation into the Russian uranium deal then-[s]ecretary of [s]tate Hillary Clinton's State Department approved after the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One[.] ...

> Discussing the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One, he continued, "Look[:] there are couple of things that are extremely troubling about the deal we touched on. Number one is the amount of money – $145 million. We are not talking about a super[-]PAC giving a million dollars to support a candidate. We are not talking about campaign donations. We are talking about $145 million[,] which[,] by the way[,] is 75 percent or more of the annual budget of the Clinton Foundation itself so it's a huge sum of money. Second of all[,] we are talking about a fundamental issue of national security[,] which is uranium – it's not like oil and gas that you can find all sorts of places. [There] are precious few places you can mine for uranium, [and] the United States is one of those areas. And number three[:] we are talking about the Russian government. A lot of people don't realize it now, in parts of the Midwest[,] American soil is owned by Vladimir Putin's government because this deal went through. And in addition to the $145 million[,] Bill Clinton got half a million dollars, $500,000, for a 20-minute speech from a Russian investment bank tied to the Kremlin, two months before the State Department signed off on this deal."

As Investor's Business Daily editorialized, donations to the Clinton Foundation even played a factor in the refusal of Hillary Clinton's State Department for two years to designate Nigeria's Boko Haram as a terrorist organization:

> Last May, we wondered why for two years on Hillary Clinton's watch the State Department refused to designate a Nigerian Islamist group as a terrorist organization. This group has murdered thousands as it wages a real war on women. As Josh Rogin at the Daily Beast reports, the Clinton State Department "refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011" after the group bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria.

> Sen. David Vitter, R-La., sent a letter to [s]ecretary of [s]tate John Kerry last week asking for all of Hillary's records relating to Boko Haram and her reluctance to designate it a foreign terrorist organization.

> Vitter also requested all of Hillary's communications with Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian construction tycoon who has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. Vitter noted that Chagoury had a financial interest in the potential impact of designating Boko Haram a terrorist group.

Uranium One alone is an example of criminal pay-to-play, unless we are to believe that the Russians, who are the least charitable people on Earth, just woke up one morning and decided to funnel $145 million into the Clinton Foundation out of the goodness of their Bolshevik hearts.

One would think that in addition to Hillary's shenanigans, Bill Clinton's making speeches to foreign entities seeking influence with his secretary of state wife for ungodly sums while donations poured into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments and individuals to pay, among other things, for Chelsea Clinton's wedding dress and lifestyle would be worthy of a criminal investigation.

Emails fully incriminating Hillary are part of documents obtained by Judicial Watch under a court order forcing the State Department to find the documents it said it couldn't find, didn't have, or was too understaffed to look for.

Among the examples cited by Judicial Watch in the documents:

> The new documents show that Clinton donors frequently requested and received special favors from the State Department that were connected to the Clinton Foundation.

> On July 14, 2009, Gordon Griffin, a[n] XL Keystone [sic] lobbyist, sent an email to Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band, asking if Band could get him into a Council on Foreign Relations dinner at which Clinton was speaking. Band forwarded the email to [Hillary Clinton aide Huma] Abedin, saying, "Can u get him in?" Abedin replied: "Yes will get him in." Band was a top aide to President Bill Clinton and co-founder of Teneo. Griffin was a major donor to Hillary Clinton's Senate and presidential campaigns[.] ...

> On September 11, 2009, Terrence Duffy, chairman of futures brokerage firm CME Group, a donor to the Clinton Foundation, asked Clinton to arrange "government appointments" for him in Singapore and Hong Kong. Clinton, using her HDR22@clintonmail.com address, forwarded the request to Abedin, "fyi." Abedin responded to Duffy's email, saying she would "follow up" with Duffy's secretary, Joyce. Duffy gave $4,600 to Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign; CME Group paid Hillary $225,000 for a speaking fee and has donated between $5,001 and [$]10,000 to the Clinton Foundation. ...

> On May 5, 2010, major Clinton Global Initiative member, Clinton Foundation donor[,] and real estate[-]developer Eddie Trump forwarded to "Dougie" Band a request for assistance from Russian American Foundation [v]ice [p]resident Rina Kirshner to get the Russian American Foundation involved in a State Department program. Band forwarded the request to Abedin, saying, "Can we get this done/mtg set." As Judicial Watch previously reported, the State Department doled out more than $260,000 to the Russian American Foundation for "public diplomacy."

> Major Clinton donor Bal Das, a New York financier who reportedly raised $300,000 for Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign, asked Abedin on November 11, 2009 if Hillary Clinton could address the Japan Society at its annual conference in 2010. Clinton did speak to the Japan Society's annual conference in 2011.

Hillary Clinton and her husband used her position as secretary of state to enrich themselves personally through their Clinton Foundation, a front for a criminal shakedown of donors and influence-peddlers and buyers. They placed American national security at risk for fun and profit.

Investigate her, and then lock her up.

Whether it is merely the FBI trying to restore its shattered credibility or justice finally being done, the news that the pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation are going to get renewed and serious attention is welcome. The Clintons have made a career of ignoring, skirting, and breaking the law. Up to this point, crime has paid off handsomely for the Clintons, but now they may find themselves caught between Little Rock and a hard place:

> The Justice Department has launched a new inquiry into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in any pay-to-play politics or other illegal activities while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of [s]tate, law enforcement officials and a witness tell[] The Hill.

> FBI agents from Little Rock, Ark., where the foundation was started, have taken the lead in the investigation and have interviewed at least one witness in the last month, and law enforcement officials said additional activities are expected in the coming weeks.

> The officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the probe is examining whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for largesse to their charitable efforts or whether donors made commitments of donations in hopes of securing government outcomes.

This should be a short investigation – Hillary Clinton is a ham sandwich waiting to be indicted. All that should be necessary is to empanel a grand jury and read them the known facts. The Clinton Foundation was hardly charitable except to its donors.

Any investigation should start with Haiti, where the Clinton Foundation plundered the disaster-ridden island for fun and profit. As the Washington Free Beacon reported:

> Haitian activists protested outside ... the Clinton Foundation in New York over the loss of "billions of dollars" that was meant to help rebuild after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The activists are claiming [that] the money was stolen through the Haiti Reconstruction Commission that was headed by Bill Clinton. In January 2015, the Clinton Foundation was the target of protests for wasting more than $10 billion and awarding contracts to non-Haitian companies. The activists also said Haiti is a cover for foreign governments to funnel kickbacks of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. They believe that this was done for favors that Hillary was doing for the foreign governments while she was [s]ecretary of [s]tate. "We are telling the world of the crimes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for in Haiti," said Dhoud Andre of the Committee Against Dictatorship in Haiti.

That the Clinton Foundation's operations were nothing but a cash cow scam is seen in a brilliant analysis and exposé of its operations in Colombia, a country beset by internal strife and an ongoing battle with drug cartels. The truth, as reported by Ken Silverman and the American Media Institute in Fusion, a joint venture of ABC and Univision, hardly Trump surrogates, explains in part how the Clintons amassed a small fortune without holding any job or running any business:

> Colombia should be the Clinton Foundation's best case study. Ground zero for the drug wars of the 1980s and [']90s, racked by uneven development and low-intensity conflict for half a century, Colombia has received more foundation money and attention than any other nation outside the United States. Bill and Hillary Clinton have visited the country often and enjoy close relationships with members of Colombia's ruling party. Colombia has also been home to the vast oil and natural gas holdings of the man who is reportedly the Clinton Foundation's largest individual donor, Canadian financier Frank Giustra[.] ...

> Many of the Colombian "success stories" touted on the foundation's website – the ones specific enough for us to track down – were critical about the foundation's effect on their lives. Labor leaders and progressive activists say foundation programs caused environmental harm, displaced indigenous people, and ... concentrated a larger share of Colombia's oil and natural gas reserves in the hands of Giustra[.] ...

> We interviewed young women in the foundation's job-training programs; female business owners who sought help from its programs; workers who toiled for the foundation's biggest individual donor's firms; indigenous fisherm[e]n who were promised jobs and aid; and union leaders, social[] justice activists, and progressive lawmakers. Some say they lost money. Others said they were used as props. Still others simply thought that the foundation had wasted a lot of their time. "They are doing nothing for workers," one Colombian union official told us, with disgust. "I don't even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money."

Clinton donor Giustra benefited significantly from his association, even if the people of Colombia didn't:

> When we met him (Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo) in his wood-paneled office in Colombia's [c]apitol building in May, his desk was stacked high with papers related to Pacific Rubiales's labor practices, the result of years of investigative work by his staff. He did not see the Clinton Foundation and its partnership with Giustra's Pacific Rubiales as either progressive or positive. "The territory where Pacific Rubiales operated," he said, thumbing through pages of alleged human[] rights violations, "was a type of concentration camp for workers." ...

> In September 2005, Giustra and Clinton flew to Kazakhstan together to meet the Central Asian nation's president. Shortly thereafter, Giustra secured a lucrative concession to mine Kazakh uranium, despite his company's lack of experience with the radioactive ore. As Bill Clinton opened doors for Giustra, the financier gave generously to Clinton's foundation.

As the New York Times reported, this mutual back-scratching gave Clinton donor Giustra, and later Putin's Russia, control of a significant portion of the world's uranium supply:

> Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

> Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium[-]mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic . But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton[.] ...

> Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton's charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3[-]million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra's more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton's inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges[.] ...

> In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share.

Clinton played a pivotal role in the Uranium One deal, which ended up giving Russian interests control of 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a federal crime. As Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer has noted [italics ours –ed.]:

> Tuesday on Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs Tonight, Breitbart editor at large and the author of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer[,] said there needs to be a federal investigation into the Russian uranium deal then-[s]ecretary of [s]tate Hillary Clinton's State Department approved after the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One[.] ...

> Discussing the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One, he continued, "Look[:] there are couple of things that are extremely troubling about the deal we touched on. Number one is the amount of money – $145 million. We are not talking about a super[-]PAC giving a million dollars to support a candidate. We are not talking about campaign donations. We are talking about $145 million[,] which[,] by the way[,] is 75 percent or more of the annual budget of the Clinton Foundation itself so it's a huge sum of money. Second of all[,] we are talking about a fundamental issue of national security[,] which is uranium – it's not like oil and gas that you can find all sorts of places. [There] are precious few places you can mine for uranium, [and] the United States is one of those areas. And number three[:] we are talking about the Russian government. A lot of people don't realize it now, in parts of the Midwest[,] American soil is owned by Vladimir Putin's government because this deal went through. And in addition to the $145 million[,] Bill Clinton got half a million dollars, $500,000, for a 20-minute speech from a Russian investment bank tied to the Kremlin, two months before the State Department signed off on this deal."

As Investor's Business Daily editorialized, donations to the Clinton Foundation even played a factor in the refusal of Hillary Clinton's State Department for two years to designate Nigeria's Boko Haram as a terrorist organization:

> Last May, we wondered why for two years on Hillary Clinton's watch the State Department refused to designate a Nigerian Islamist group as a terrorist organization. This group has murdered thousands as it wages a real war on women. As Josh Rogin at the Daily Beast reports, the Clinton State Department "refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011" after the group bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria.

> Sen. David Vitter, R-La., sent a letter to [s]ecretary of [s]tate John Kerry last week asking for all of Hillary's records relating to Boko Haram and her reluctance to designate it a foreign terrorist organization.

> Vitter also requested all of Hillary's communications with Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian construction tycoon who has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. Vitter noted that Chagoury had a financial interest in the potential impact of designating Boko Haram a terrorist group.

Uranium One alone is an example of criminal pay-to-play, unless we are to believe that the Russians, who are the least charitable people on Earth, just woke up one morning and decided to funnel $145 million into the Clinton Foundation out of the goodness of their Bolshevik hearts.

One would think that in addition to Hillary's shenanigans, Bill Clinton's making speeches to foreign entities seeking influence with his secretary of state wife for ungodly sums while donations poured into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments and individuals to pay, among other things, for Chelsea Clinton's wedding dress and lifestyle would be worthy of a criminal investigation.

Emails fully incriminating Hillary are part of documents obtained by Judicial Watch under a court order forcing the State Department to find the documents it said it couldn't find, didn't have, or was too understaffed to look for.

Among the examples cited by Judicial Watch in the documents:

> The new documents show that Clinton donors frequently requested and received special favors from the State Department that were connected to the Clinton Foundation.

> On July 14, 2009, Gordon Griffin, a[n] XL Keystone [sic] lobbyist, sent an email to Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band, asking if Band could get him into a Council on Foreign Relations dinner at which Clinton was speaking. Band forwarded the email to [Hillary Clinton aide Huma] Abedin, saying, "Can u get him in?" Abedin replied: "Yes will get him in." Band was a top aide to President Bill Clinton and co-founder of Teneo. Griffin was a major donor to Hillary Clinton's Senate and presidential campaigns[.] ...

> On September 11, 2009, Terrence Duffy, chairman of futures brokerage firm CME Group, a donor to the Clinton Foundation, asked Clinton to arrange "government appointments" for him in Singapore and Hong Kong. Clinton, using her HDR22@clintonmail.com address, forwarded the request to Abedin, "fyi." Abedin responded to Duffy's email, saying she would "follow up" with Duffy's secretary, Joyce. Duffy gave $4,600 to Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign; CME Group paid Hillary $225,000 for a speaking fee and has donated between $5,001 and [$]10,000 to the Clinton Foundation. ...

> On May 5, 2010, major Clinton Global Initiative member, Clinton Foundation donor[,] and real estate[-]developer Eddie Trump forwarded to "Dougie" Band a request for assistance from Russian American Foundation [v]ice [p]resident Rina Kirshner to get the Russian American Foundation involved in a State Department program. Band forwarded the request to Abedin, saying, "Can we get this done/mtg set." As Judicial Watch previously reported, the State Department doled out more than $260,000 to the Russian American Foundation for "public diplomacy."

> Major Clinton donor Bal Das, a New York financier who reportedly raised $300,000 for Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign, asked Abedin on November 11, 2009 if Hillary Clinton could address the Japan Society at its annual conference in 2010. Clinton did speak to the Japan Society's annual conference in 2011.

Hillary Clinton and her husband used her position as secretary of state to enrich themselves personally through their Clinton Foundation, a front for a criminal shakedown of donors and influence-peddlers and buyers. They placed American national security at risk for fun and profit.

Investigate her, and then lock her up.

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