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Clinton emails reveal more ‘shenanigans’ in Haiti

hillary_clinton_haiti2From Caribbean News Now

NEW YORK, USA — In an article entitled “More Clinton shenanigans in Haiti”, Mary Anastasia O’Grady writing in the Wall Street Journal has reported that on January 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 rumour that the State Department was thinking about revoking the US visa of then Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive.

“Wjc will be v unhappy if that’s the case,” Graham warned Mills, using the initials of former president William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton Foundation staff therefore used connections at the State Department to try to influence US policy decisions involving a powerful Haitian 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,” O’Grady wrote.

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.

However, a string of State Department emails from January 2011 — made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Citizens United — demonstrates that Clinton’s State Department did not separate itself from the Clinton Foundation but instead collaborated with it.

The US did not revoke Bellerive’s visa, and it is not clear whether the State Department contemplated doing so.

Bellerive was an important Bill Clinton ally. After the January 2010 earthquake, he worked with the State Department and inside the Haitian parliament to pass emergency legislation that created the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). He and Clinton became its co-chairmen.

“Perhaps if former Saint Lucia minister Richard Frederick had donated money to the Clinton Foundation instead of resorting to the courts, he would have stood a better chance of resolving his own visa revocation issues,” said regional commentator Melanius Alphonse.

According to reliable sources, some Clinton era State Department emails exist that contain extremely disparaging comments, including racial slurs, about Frederick and his sister, attorney at law Lydia Faisal.

On August 23, 2015, Caribbean News Now filed an FOIA request with the State Department for all email and other communications from January 1, 2009, to present, referring to or otherwise relating to Richard Frederick, a former Saint Lucia government minister and a member then of the Saint Lucia parliament, including but not limited to communications originating in or from the US Embassy in Bridgetown, Barbados, and/or the State Department in Washington, DC, and including any emails sent and/or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her private email server as subsequently turned over to the State Department.

One year later, the State Department has still not responded substantively to our request.

Meanwhile, the Daily Caller reported that the former Senate president of Haiti, Bernard Sansaricq, told a crowd of Donald Trump supporters last Friday that Bill Clinton once tried to bribe him.

Speaking at a Trump campaign event in Little Haiti in Miami, Sansaricq said that he became president of the Senate in 1994, a year during which the Clinton presidency attempted to oust the oppressive military regime in Haiti by threat of invasion. Sansaricq said that in order to try to “appease” him at the time, Clinton sent Bill Richardson, a former US Representative of New Mexico.

Sansaricq said he spoke with Richardson for four hours during the visit in an attempt to persuade him not to invade Haiti, asking him to “take the message back to President Clinton.”

A week later, the American embassy sent an anonymous messenger back to Sansaricq, who allegedly told him that if he “sided” with Bill Clinton in the invasion, he would become “the richest man in Haiti.”

Sansaricq said he declined the offer because he “loves [his] country.” He added that a week later, by executive order, Clinton revoked his visa.

The Clintons are no stranger to controversy regarding Haiti, notably, their highly questionable involvement there after the 2010 earthquake.

Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from January 21, 2009, to February 1, 2013. In December, 2012, her brother’s company got a lucrative and unprecedented gold mining contract in Haiti. During her time there, the State Department through its US Agency for International Development (USAID) disbursed $3.6 billion for Haitian “earthquake relief”.

Hillary Clinton, as US secretary of state, therefore handed out billions in USAID money in Haiti. At the same time, her husband Bill Clinton was taking money for his private foundation from foreign governments that Secretary Hillary dealt with in an official capacity.

Then the day she resigned from the State Department in February 2013, Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham just happened to be lucky and was appointed a director of the company that had acquired the gold mining contract in Haiti, something the company claimed happened virtually out of the blue and the public was asked to believe involved no antecedent discussion during the time Clinton was secretary of state and her husband had control of billions in post-earthquake aid.

Leading Haitian lawyer and human rights activist, Ezili Dantò, has charged that Bill Clinton, as head of the Haitian relief fund, was responsible for some US$6 billion of international relief aid received.

“Less than one percent of this amount made it to the Haitian government. Bill Clinton had total control of the balance,” Dantò claimed.

IMAGE: hillary_clinton_haiti2.jpg
Then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waves to joint, international, interagency and nongovernmental organization representatives participating in Continuing Promise 2009 as Navy Capt. Robert G. Lineberry Jr., commodore of USNS Comfort, gives her a tour through one of two medical sites his crew set up to treat Haiti’s poorest residents, April 16, 2009. Photo: US Navy

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/topstory-Clinton-emails-reveal-more-‘shenanigans’-in-Haiti-31851.html

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