The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time. The Post found that the foundation, begun by former president Bill Clinton, has raised nearly $2 billion since its creation in 2001.
Foreign governments and individuals are prohibited from giving money to U.S. political candidates, to prevent outside influence over national leaders. But the foundation has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political limits.
– From the Washington Post article: Foreign Governments Gave Millions to Foundation While Clinton Was at State Dept.
Of all the idiotic wars that the dangerously inept American politicians propagandize the public into accepting, the latest ISIS conflict is the most Orwellian and terrifying. Not only was the emergence of ISIS the direct consequence of the chaos left over by the Iraq war — which in itself was based on lies and inaccurate information — but the primary funders of the latest existential terrorist threat du jour are America’s Persian Gulf allies.
This is something I’ve covered before. For example, in last summer’s piece, America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq, I highlighted:
But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.
The Gulf monarchs didn’t attain absolute power by being teddy bears. They are devious, ruthless experts in playing one side against the other. Incredibly, many of these same countries allowing funds to flow to ISIS were simultaneously padding the coffers of the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. The Washington Post reports:
The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.
Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.
The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.
Can you believe that the Secretary of State’s foundation is able to accept donations from foreign governments while she is the chief diplomat of the nation? Truly mind-boggling.
The new disclosures, provided in response to questions from The Washington Post, make clear that the 2008 agreement did not prohibit foreign countries with interests before the U.S. government from giving money to the charity closely linked to the secretary of state.
In one instance, foundation officials acknowledged they should have sought approval in 2010 from the State Department ethics office, as required by the agreement for new government donors, before accepting a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government.
The money was given to assist with earthquake relief in Haiti, the foundation said. At the time, Algeria, which has sought a closer relationship with Washington, was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues.
While the foundation has disclosed foreign-government donors for years, it has not previously detailed the donations that were accepted during Clinton’s four-year stint at the State Department.
Some of the donations came from countries with complicated diplomatic, military and financial relationships with the U.S. government, including Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.
Kuwait and Qatar, if you recall from earlier in the piece, are two of the countries specifically highlighted as providing a financial spigot to ISIS. What about everybody’s favorite, Saudi Arabia? More on that later…
Rarely, if ever, has a potential commander in chief been so closely associated with an organization that has solicited financial support from foreign governments. Clinton formally joined the foundation in 2013 after leaving the State Department, and the organization was renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time. The Post found that the foundation, begun by former president Bill Clinton, has raised nearly $2 billion since its creation in 2001.
Foreign governments and individuals are prohibited from giving money to U.S. political candidates, to prevent outside influence over national leaders. But the foundation has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political limits.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the foundation had accepted new foreign-government money now that the 2008 agreement has lapsed.
A review of foundation disclosures shows that at least two foreign governments — Germany and the United Arab Emirates — began giving in 2013 after the funding restrictions lapsed when Clinton left the Obama administration. Some foreign governments that had been supporting the foundation before Clinton was appointed, such as Saudi Arabia, did not give while she was in office and have since resumed donating.
When the foundation released a list of its donors for the first time in 2008, as a result of the agreement with the Obama administration, it disclosed, for instance, that Saudi Arabia had given between $10 million and $25 million.
Naturally, the Saudis had to be in there somewhere. Perhaps the most evil regime on earth, and certainly one of the greatest sponsors of terrorism worldwide.
The donation from Algeria for Haiti earthquake relief, they said, arrived without notice within days of the 2010 quake and was distributed as direct aid to assist in relief. Algeria has not donated to the foundation since, officials said.
The contribution coincided with a spike in the North African country’s lobbying visits to the State Department.
That year, Algeria spent $422,097 lobbying U.S. government officials on human rights issues and U.S.-Algerian relations, according to filings made under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The country was a concern for Clinton and her agency.
A 2010 State Department report on human rights in Algeria noted that “principal human rights problems included restrictions on freedom of assembly and association” and cited reports of arbitrary killings, widespread corruption and a lack of transparency. Additionally, the report, issued in early 2011, discussed restrictions on labor and women’s rights.
“Algeria is one of those complicated countries that forces the United States to balance our interests and values,” Clinton wrote in her 2014 book, “Hard Choices.”
Which interests precisely, fundraising targets for the Clinton Foundation?
A State Department spokesman referred questions about the ethics-office reviews to the charity. Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, declined to comment.
Lugar also called on the foundation to release more information about its donors, including how much each gives annually. (Since 2008, the foundation has released only how much donors have given cumulatively over time.) He said ethics officials should review donations from all foreign sources, not just governments, because of the close ties in many countries between wealthy interests and government officials.
Think about how completely creepy all of this is. The woman who very well might end up President of the United States has extraordinarily close financial relationships with some of the most autocratic regimes on earth. Regimes which at the very least turn a blind eye to the funding of ISIS. Oh, and just in case you think they only funded ISIS in the early days, but have since pulled back, think again.
The Independent reported the following over the weekend:
Islamic State is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathisers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official.
The US has being trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (Isis) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000.
Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: “There is sympathy for Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for IS, also known as Isis] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.” He pointed out that until recently financial aid was being given more or less openly by Gulf states to the opposition in Syria – but by now most of these rebel groups have been absorbed into IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, so it is they “who now have the money and the weapons”.
Mr Hussein would not identify the states from which the funding for IS comes today, but implied that they were the same Gulf oil states that financed Sunni Arab rebels in Iraq and Syria in the past.
Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement “gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it”, he says. “Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.”
Of course, it’s not just her financial ties to terrorist funding regimes that are a huge concern. As highlighted in the piece, Hillary Clinton Exposed Part 1 – How She Aggressively Lobbied for Mega Corporations as Secretary of State, she is more in bed with large multi-national corporations than perhaps any other American alive today. As noted:
That approach, which Mrs. Clinton called “economic statecraft,” emerged in discussions with Robert Hormats, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations and became an undersecretary of state. “One of the very first items was, how do we strengthen the role of the State Department in economic policy?” he says.
Early in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, according to Mr. Hormats, Microsoft’s then Chief Research Officer Craig Mundie asked the State Department to send a ranking official to a fourth annual meeting of U.S. software executives and Chinese government officials about piracy and Internet freedom. Mr. Hormats joined the December 2009 meeting in Beijing.
Mr. Hormats says there was no relation between Microsoft’s donations and the State Department’s participation in the China conference.
Before every overseas trip, says Mr. Hormats, the former undersecretary of state, he helped prepare a list of U.S. corporate interests for Mrs. Clinton to advocate while abroad.
Hillary Clinton is beholden to many interests, unfortunately, the American public isn’t one of them.
The revelations in this piece should alone disqualify Hillary Clinton from being President, but it won’t. Why? Oligarchy stupid.
For related articles, see:
This is Why Rand Paul is Hillary Clinton’s Worst Nightmare
Glenn Greenwald on Hillary Clinton: “Soulless, Principle-Free, Power Hungry…”
How the Washington D.C. Money Machine Stopped a Documentary on Hillary Clinton
Jeb Bush Exposed Part 1 – His Top Advisors Will Be the Architects of His Brother’s Iraq War
Jeb Bush Exposed Part 2 – He Thinks Unconstitutional NSA Spying is “Hugely Important”
Jeb Bush to Present the “Liberty Medal” to Hillary Clinton
