Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a visit to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 30, 2011. Photo: Getty Images
By
WALL STREET JOURNAL – Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Sept. 18, 2016 5:46 p.m. ET
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.”
The U.S. did not revoke Mr. Bellerive’s visa, and it is not clear whether State contemplated doing so. The U.S. had pulled the visa of another Preval-government minister on electoral fraud allegations under Haitian protests, Mr. Bellerive told me in an email on Saturday. But he said he was never informed by the U.S that his visa was in jeopardy.
Mr. 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 Mr. Clinton became its co-chairmen.
The IHRC handled the contracting of hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development and from international donors—with little to show for it as I explained in a May 2014 column. In a December 2010 letter to the IHRC co-chairmen, 12 IHRC commissioners complained that they were never consulted, or even informed about, hiring staff or consultants. Haitians whispered that the lucrative contracts went to the politically connected.
In another email to Ms. Mills, dated Jan. 24, 2011, Ms. Graham expressed the foundation’s desire to retain Mr. Bellerive as co-chairman of the IHRC. “With JMB we are rarely challenged in taking the path we want.” A new co-chairman would mean “potentially roadblocks in doing what we want/how we want it/etc.” It seems the foundation was running the IHRC and didn’t want interference.
Delaware-based VCS Mining announced in a December 2012 press release that it was awarded a permit to mine for gold in northeast Haiti. The release said that it was one of only two gold-mining permits issued by Haiti in 50 years. The permit was suspended in early 2013 because of Haitian Senate objections. According to a March 2015 Washington Post article, Mr. Bellerive said that VCS Mining chief executive Angelo Viard then hired him for $8,000 to help VCS navigate Haitian politics in an effort to win support for the mine.
Clinton Foundation officials confirmed to the Post that Mr. Viard paid $20,000 in 2013 to become a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. That year both Tony Rodham, Mrs. Clinton’s brother, and Mr. Bellerive joined the company’s advisory board. Mr. Bellerive told the Post that he declined compensation on the board.
My requests last week for comment from VCS went unanswered, but 2015 press reports quote company officials denying any “quid pro quo concerning the Clinton Foundation.” In March 2016 both Mr. Rodham and Mr. Bellerive resigned their VCS advisory board posts, according to a company press release.
Large parts of these 2011 State Department emails are redacted. But reading between the blank spaces, much is revealed—and none of it boosts confidence in Mrs. Clinton.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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