More Clinton Shenanigans in Haiti Emails show the State Department and the Clinton Foundation collaborated on policy. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-clinton-shenanigans-in-haiti-1474235175
On Jan. 27, 2011, Clinton Foundation Chief Operating Officer Laura Graham sent an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills, voicing concern about a rumor. Ms. Graham had heard that Foggy Bottom was thinking about revoking the U.S. visa of Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive. “Wjc will be v unhappy if that’s the case,” Ms. Graham warned Ms. Mills, using the initials of the former president.
Ms. Graham, who was also chief of staff to Mr. Clinton at the foundation, had other reasons to worry: “I’m also staying at [Mr. Bellerive’s] house fyi so exposure in general and this weekend in particular for wjc on this.”
So Clinton Foundation staff was hobnobbing with a powerful Haitian politician and using connections at the State Department to try to influence U.S. policy decisions involving that same politician. That’s unethical and it is also contrary to what Mrs. Clinton promised when she went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2009 as president-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state nominee.
Back then she boasted that the foundation and the incoming administration “decided to go beyond what the law and the ethics rules call for to address even the appearance of conflict” of interest with a “memorandum of understanding” to “address potential concerns” and ensure transparency.
Now a string of State Department emails from January 2011—made public through a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request by Citizens United—demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton’s State Department did not separate itself from the Clinton Foundation but instead collaborated with it.
In her Jan. 27 email Ms. Graham also offered advice: “Nor do I think u need remove his visa. Not sure what it gets u. Remove elizabeth’s and prevals people,” she wrote, referring to the wife of Haitian President Rene Preval and his staff.
The next publicly available email from Ms. Mills to Ms. Graham reads, “You also should consider the message it sends to others that you stay at his house.” Ms. Graham shot back that she had “discussed staying at his house w both u and wjc long ago and was told good strategic value.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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