State Department approved 215 Bill Clinton speeches, controversial consulting deal, worth $48m

A joint investigation by the Washington Examiner and the nonprofit watchdog group Judicial Watch found that former President Clinton gave 215 speeches and earned $48 million while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy, raising questions about whether the Clintons fulfilled ethics agreements related to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

According to documents obtained by Judicial Watch and released Wednesday in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case, State Department officials charged with reviewing Bill Clinton's proposed speeches did not object to a single one.

Some of the speeches were delivered in global hotspots and were paid for by entities with business or policy interests in the U.S.

The documents also show that in June 2011, the State Department approved a consulting agreement between Bill Clinton and a controversial Clinton Foundation adviser, Doug Band.

The consultancy with Band's Teneo Strategy ended eight months later following an uproar over Teneo's ties to the failed investment firm MF Global.

State Department legal advisers, serving as "designated agency ethics officials," approved Bill Clinton's speeches in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Panama, Turkey, Taiwan, India, the Cayman Islands and other countries.

The memos approving Mr. Clinton's speeches were routinely copied to Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's senior counsel and chief of staff.

Mills is a longtime Clinton troubleshooter who defended the president during his impeachment. In the Benghazi affair, Mills reportedly berated a high-ranking official at the U.S. embassy in Libya for talking to a Republican congressman.

Under State Department protocols, a "designated agency ethics official" is assigned to advise the secretary of state about "potential or actual conflicts of interest."

In a December 2008 memorandum of understanding, the protocols were expanded to Bill Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and related initiatives — specifically, to reviewing Bill Clinton's proposed speeches and consulting deals.

In an accompanying letter to the State Department legal adviser, Clinton lawyer David Kendall noted that Bill Clinton would disclose proposed consulting deals and, for speeches, provide "the identities of the host(s) (the entity that pay the speaker's fee)" so that the State Department "in consultation with the White House as appropriate, may conduct a review for any real or apparent conflicts of interest with the duties of the Secretary of State."

But an inspection by the Examiner and Judicial Watch of donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton's personal financial disclosure forms, and the State Department conflict-of-interest reviews shows that at least $48 million flowed to the Clintons' personal coffers from many entities that clearly had interests in influencing the Obama administration — and perhaps currying favor with a future president as well.

Saudi Arabia, for example, was a key Clinton benefactor. The oil-producing giant has had a relationship with the Clintons dating back to Bill Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas.

In 1992, while running for president, then-Gov. Clinton secured a $3.5 million Saudi donation for a Middle East studies program at the University of Arkansas.

A few weeks after Clinton was inaugurated president, the Saudis kicked in another $20 million. Both deals were brokered by a close Clinton friend, David Edwards.

Overall, the Clinton Foundation has received staggering sums from Saudi benefactors — between $18 million and $50 million. (The foundation's donations are reported in ranges, not specific numbers.)

While Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, Bill Clinton gave two speeches in Saudi Arabia, earning a total of $600,000.

In January 2011, for example, Bill Clinton spoke at a global business forum in Riyadh founded by the Saudi Investment Authority and sponsored by the Dabbagh Group, a commercial colossus with close ties to the Saudi royal family.

During Hillary Clinton's time at the State Department, Bill Clinton also gave four speeches in the United Arab Emirates, earning $1.1 million. For two speeches in Egypt, he earned $425,000.

UAE-linked entities also have donated at least $2.7 to $11.5 million to the Clinton Foundation, and Egyptian entities have donated at least $250,000 to $750,000.

While the State Department did not object to Bill Clinton's speeches in the Arab world — or anywhere else — it did turn down a proposed consultancy with a longtime Clinton friend and supporter, the Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban.

In turning down the consultancy, a February 2009 State Department memo noted that Saban "is actively involved in foreign affairs issues, particularly with regards to the Middle East, which is a priority area for the secretary."

The consultancy with Teneo and Band, the longtime Clinton adviser, was outlined in a June 2011 memo from Band himself, writing "on behalf of President Clinton," to a State Department legal adviser. Bill Clinton would advise Teneo on "geopolitical, economic and social trends."

Band requested a response within 10 business days. He got it in seven. "Please be advised that we have no objection," the State Department wrote.

Bill Clinton also was active in China, as was Hillary Clinton, who championed the notion of a "pivot" toward Asia during her time as secretary of state.

In the period after Hillary Clinton signed the ethics agreement, Bill Clinton gave four speeches in China or to Chinese-sponsored entities in the U.S., earning $1.7 million.

By comparison, between 2001 through 2007 — just after he left office, when a former president is normally most in demand — he gave seven speeches in China, earning $1.4 million.

Groups with interests in China also donated between $750,000 and $1.75 million, at a minimum, to the Clinton Foundation.

Taiwan took an interest in Bill Clinton as well. In November 2010, he spoke on global warming and social inequality at a Taipei event sponsored by Singapore-based UNI Strategic. His fee? $400,000.

The Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office donated close to $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, and the Taiwan Mobile Foundation and a semiconductor manufacturer also contributed.

Turkish sponsors paid Bill Clinton $1 million for three speeches, including one to an Arab stock exchange.

In Russia, Bill Clinton gave two speeches for $625,000. One was to the Russian investment bank, Renaissance Capital, at a 2010 event titled "Russian and the Commonwealth of Independent States: Going Global."

The State Department background memo described the bank as "focused on the emerging markets of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Sub-Saharan Africa."

In India, Bill Clinton collected $300,000 for two speeches. He also gave speeches to Indian companies and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce in Toronto, New Jersey and Disney World.

At one, a "conference on business process outsourcing/off-shoring," hosted by an outsourcing firm, the discussion centered around "the benefits and disadvantages of outsourcing IT," according to a State Department document.

In Panama, Bill Clinton earned $325,000 for one speech. And in the Cayman Islands — a notorious offshore money haven — $225,000 for a speech, noted a State Department document, "at a ticketed event that will target the business community in Grand Cayman."

For those who may have forgotten what kind of a President Bill Clinton was:

1) Clinton’s own words show his often expressed innate hostility to, and utter contempt for, the core principles of the American founding:

``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

``The purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people’’ –- Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993

``We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans…that we forget about reality.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, ``NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful’’’ by Debbie Howlett

“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly… that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare… However, now there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.” – Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995

2) Clinton inevitably pursued his own political advantage at the expense of American interests and national security. Here is just one of many possible examples:

It is well documented that Clinton and the Democrats took illegal campaign money from groups and individuals tied directly to the Chinese People’s Republican Army. It is therefore not surprising that In January 1998 Clinton went against the advice of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon experts by lifting long-standing restrictions against the export of American satellites to China for launch on Chinese rockets. Not only did he move control over such decisions from the more security-focused State Department to the Commerce Department, but he intervened in a Justice Department investigation of Loral Space & Communications, retroactively enabling Loral to sell critical missile technology to the Chinese. Interestingly enough, Clinton’s decision was made at the request of Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, whose earlier $1.3 million campaign donation made him the single biggest contributor to the Democratic election effort.

The result, as stated eloquently by syndicated columnist Linda Bowles, was that “the Democrats got money from satellite companies and from Chinese communists; China got supercomputors, advanced production equipment and missile technology; Loral got its satellites launched at bargain basement prices . . . and the transfer of sensitive missile technology gave China [for the first time] the capability of depositing bombs on American cities.” Incidentally, Loral ultimately failed to benefit from this permanent injury to America’s security interests: in July 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and in order to raise cash was forced to sell its most profitable business – a fleet of communications satellites orbiting over North America.

3) On two occasions, Clinton used military action for the specific purpose of distracting the American public from the fallout of the Lewinsky affair:

• On August 20, three days after Clinton finally admitted publicly to the Lewinsky affair, the news media was poised to focus on that day’s grand jury testimony by Monica Lewinsky. That same morning, Clinton personally went on national television to gravely announce his bombing of a Sudanese “chemical weapons factory,” and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It was the first time most Americans ever heard the name of Osama bin Laden. The factory bombing in Sudan killed an innocent night watchman, but accomplished little else. It later was proven that the plant was making badly needed pharmaceuticals for people in that poverty-stricken part of the world, but no chemical weapons.

Several months later, the U.S. Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, stated: "...the evidence indicates that the facility had no role whatsoever in chemical weapons development." Kroll Associates, one of the world's most reputable investigative firms, also confirmed that there was no link in any way between the plant and any terrorist organization. As for the Afghanistan bombing, it failed to do any damage at all to bin Laden or his organization. Clinton’s action was accurately characterized by George W. Bush when he said right after 9-11: "When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.

Clinton’s pointless and murderous military actions did not make Americans safer that day, although they did destroy an innocent life, and for all the good they did certainly could have been delayed in any case. But they did succeed in diverting media attention from Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony for a 24-hour news cycle, which was the main point. So I guess, they weren’t a total loss.

•On December 16, 1998, on the eve of the scheduled House vote on his impeachment, Bill Clinton launched a surprise bombing attack on Baghdad. As justification for this exploit, he cited the urgent threat that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction posed to America, and the need for immediate action. Almost immediately, the House Democrats held a caucus and emerged calling for a delay in the impeachment proceedings. House minority leader Dick Gephardt made a statement: "We obviously should pass a resolution by saying that we stand behind the troops. I would hope that we do not take up impeachment until the hostilities have completely ended."

Conveniently, a delay so near the end of the House term would have caused the vote to be taken up in the next session – when the newly elected House membership would be seated with more Democratic representation, thereby improving Clinton’s chances of dodging impeachment.

The Republicans did, in fact, agree to delay the hearings, but only for a day or two. Amazingly, Clinton ended the bombing raid after only 70 hours -- once it became clear that in spite of the brief delay, the vote would still be held in the current session.

Once the bombing stopped, Clinton touted the effectiveness and importance of the mission. As reported by ABC News : “We have inflicted significant damage on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, on the command structures that direct and protect that capability, and on his military and security infrastructure,” he said. Defense secretary William Cohen echoed the point: “We estimate that Saddam's missile program has been set back by at least a year.”

Whether or not one buys Clinton’s assessment of that mission, it is difficult to believe that its timing was so critical that it required commencement virtually at the moment the House was scheduled to vote on the impeachment. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that Clinton cynically deployed US military assets and placed military personnel in harm’s way for purely political reasons.

4) Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior was a threat to American national security:

Clinton and his supporters have been very effective in persuading large numbers of Americans that the Lewinsky scandal was “only about sex.” But I see a bigger issue here, because Clinton is on record as saying that he would have done anything to keep knowledge of the Lewinsky affair from becoming public.

To me, that statement raises a very serious question: What if, instead of sending her recorded Lewinsky conversations to Ken Starr, Linda Tripp had instead secretly offered them for sale, say, to the Chinese government? Or to the Russians? Or even to agents of Saddam?

What kind of blackmail leverage would those tapes have provided to a foreign government in dealing with America on sensitive trade, security or military issues? One of the few things Clinton ever said that I believe is that he would have done anything to keep the Lewinsky affair secret. Given his demonstrated track record of selling out American interests for personal or political gain (and there are more examples that I could have cited here), how far would he have gone in compromising America’s real interests in order to protect his own neck when threatened with blackmail?

Pretty far, I believe. Equally distressing is the prospect Clinton might, in fact, have succumbed to foreign black mail on other occasions in order to hide different sexual episodes that ultimately did not become public. There is no way to know, of course, but I prefer presidents for whom such a scenario is not a plausible possibility.

And don’t even get me started on the war crime in Kosovo.

WAR IN KOSOVO

During Bill Clinton’s 1999 NATO-led war in Kosovo – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)

We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.

Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.

But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanian Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a “humanitarian war.” In March 1999 – the same month that the bombing started – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.

Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations had been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague were barely been able to document a questionable figure of perhaps 5,000 “bodies and body parts.” During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanian Muslims. But none were ever found.

BILL CLINTON ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

During the election cycle of 1992, George H.W. Bush lost his job after Bill Clinton hammered him relentlessly for having caused the “worst economy of the last 50 years.”

In fact, as CNN’s Brooke Jackson has reported: “Three days before Christmas 1992, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally issued its official proclamation that the recession had ended 21 months earlier. What became the longest boom in U.S. history actually began nearly two years before Clinton took office.” See (See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/31/jackson.recession.primer.otsc/).

By the same token, Clinton is generally perceived as having a stellar economic record during his own presidency, in spite of the fact that the economy was already starting to decline during the last year of his term after the stock market crashed in March 2000.

According to a report by MSNBC: “The longest economic expansion in U.S. history faltered so much in the summer of 2000 that business output actually contracted for one quarter, the government said Wednesday in releasing a comprehensive revision of the gross domestic product. Based on new data, the Commerce Department said that the GDP — the country’s total output of goods and services — shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000.” See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3676690/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/gdp-figures-revised-downward/.

Then-Pres Clinton pursued his own political advantage at the expense of American interests and national security. It is well documented that Clinton and the Democrats took illegal campaign money from groups and individuals tied directly to the Chinese People’s Republican Army.

It is therefore not surprising that In January 1998 Clinton went against the advice of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon experts by lifting long-standing restrictions against the export of American satellites to China for launch on Chinese rockets. Not only did he move control over such decisions from the more security-focused State Department to the Commerce Department, but he intervened in a Justice Department investigation of Loral Space & Communications, retroactively enabling Loral to sell critical missile technology to the Chinese.

Interestingly enough, Clinton’s decision was made at the request of Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, whose earlier $1.3 million campaign donation made him the single biggest contributor to the Democratic election effort.

The result? Democrats got money from satellite companies and from Chinese communists; China got supercomputors, advanced production equipment and missile technology; Loral got its satellites launched at bargain basement prices . . . and the transfer of sensitive missile technology gave China [for the first time] the capability of depositing bombs on American cities.

Incidentally, Loral ultimately failed to benefit from this permanent injury to America’s security interests: in July 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and in order to raise cash was forced to sell its most profitable business – a fleet of communications satellites orbiting over North America. (hat tip to townhall.com)

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Under fire, Hillary Clinton asserts: “All of my six-figure speaking fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work."

Life-saving foundation work? Come again. So how come the Clinton Foundation gave a "grant" to Harry Reid's grandaughter's little theatre group in Brooklyn? Doesn't sound life-saving to me. (more below)

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The Harry Reid connection to the tax-exempt "Clinton Global Initiative" one of the three Clinton foundations needs to be investigated.

PUT ON YOUR TINFOIL HATS TO CONNECT THE DOTS:

(1) Harry Reid's son Rory is in business w/ the Chi/Coms on a multi-billion dollar solar energy project; Cliven Bundy and his land are standing in the way.

(2) Reports say Bill Clinton recently went to China to panhandle for his tax-exempt "Clinton Global Initiative" foundation.

(3) The "Clinton Global Initiative" (NOT KNOWN for giving out grants)---gave Harry Reid's granddaughter a grant for a Brooklyn, NY theatre she runs (what is a Brooklyn theatre's connection to "global initiatives?")

(4) A Nevada energy company also gave Reid's granddaughter's theatre group a grant.

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"Money laundering" comes to mind. Could the Chinese be financing the Reid's solar project through donations to the Clinton Foundations....which is then laundered to Reid's granddaughter?

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REFERENCE----HARRY REID IS LIVID THAT HIS GRAND-DAUGHTER HAS BEEN OUTED AS A RECIPIENT OF LAUNDERED CAMPAIGN CASH---Reid lashed out at reporters, saying, “My granddaughter has been the target of harassing phone calls, strangers tracking her down, knocking on her door and negative, unwanted attention on the Internet.” “This has gone too far and it needs to stop now,” Reid said. “I deeply regret any role I had in creating this situation but now, as a grandparent, I say enough is enough.”

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Besides the "jewelry company" financed by her grandfather, Ryan Elisabeth Reid runs the Sprat Theater Company, a small theater in Brooklyn, which is also coming under scrutiny. According to Sprat’s Theatre Company Web site, it has received grants/contributions from:

<><> the Clinton Global Initiative (connected to global terrorism via Muslim Brotherhood employee),
<><> two major Las Vegas foundations:
Caesar’s Foundation, and the NV Energy Foundation.

NOTE NV Energy Foundation---is a non-profit division of NV Energy (a public utility). The NV Energy utility is a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company which took over in 2013....and is now owned by a Warren Buffet unit.

BTW, here's Harry w/ his grand-daughter....the one who got $31,000 in laundered campaign funds for her "jewelry company" and grants from Clinton and Nevada energy foundations.

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