US election 2016: What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?

Donald Trump has said the work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Haiti was a “disgrace”. What really happened?

“The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars,” says Haitian activist Dahoud Andre.

He has been leading protests outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign base in Brooklyn for the last two years.

He said protesters from his small activist group, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, will continue to level their allegations – so far all unproven – if the Democratic candidate wins the White House.

Haiti honeymoonUN special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton (C) talks with an NGO worker in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on 6 October 2010

Image copyright AP Image caption The Clinton Foundation has raised more than $2bn since its launch in 2001

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump raised the matter in the third and final presidential debate when he told Mrs Clinton: “I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida.

“And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons, because what’s happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace.”

Mrs Clinton retorted that she was proud of the foundation’s work, and pointed out her rival’s namesake charity had spent money on a lifesize portrait of himself.

The Clintons’ history with the world’s first black republic dates back to their 1975 honeymoon, when they met a voodoo priest and visited a hotel where Ernest Hemingway once stayed.

A platoon of US paratroopers inserted by helicopters secures the heavily damaged presidential palace in Port-au-Prince January 19, 2010.Image copyright AFP Image caption The January 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people

Few could have guessed the two young Americans touring the attractions that December would one day wield such influence over the impoverished Caribbean island nation.

Mr Andre is not alone among his compatriots in blaming the once-and-perhaps-future first couple for a litany of ills in Haiti.

Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC: “A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that’s for sure.”

Bill Clinton and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the grand opening of the Caracol Industrial Park in Caracol, Haiti, on 22 October 2012

Image copyright AFP Image caption Bill and Hillary Clinton at the grand opening of the Caracol Industrial Park four years ago

“The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them,” he added.

Replicated mistakes

Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State and Mr Clinton was UN Special Envoy to Haiti when the January 2010 earthquake struck, killing an estimated 220,000 people.

Some $13.3bn (£10.9bn) was pledged by international donors for Haiti’s recovery.

Mr Clinton was appointed co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.


Hillary Clinton and Haitian President Michel Martelly at Caracol Industrial Park in October 2012Image copyright AFP Image caption Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with former Haitian President Michel Martelly

But the IHRC found itself under fire as frustrations mounted at the slow pace of recovery.

Its mandate was not renewed by the Haitian parliament in 2011.

Haiti funding graphic

A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC’s decisions were “not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities”.

Mr Clinton’s own office at the UN found 9% of the foreign aid cash went to the Haitian government and 0.6% to local organisations.

The bulk of it went to UN agencies, international aid groups, private contractors and donor countries’ own civilian and military agencies.

For example, the Pentagon billed the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars for sending US troops to hand out bottled water and keep order on the streets of Haiti’s ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince.

Former President Bill Clinton and US President Barack Obama at the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York in September 2010

Image copyright AFP Image caption The Clinton Global Initiative – a part of the Clinton Foundation – is billed as an annual gathering of “foremost thinkers” and “visionaries”

Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC “it’s hard to say it’s been anything other than a failure”.

But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground.

“They relied too much on outside actors,” Mr Johnston says, “and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers.”

While the Clintons in their respective roles clearly had a say over where some of the quake relief cash flowed, their political enemies have wrongly claimed the family foundation directly controlled all the billions in funds.

The foundation itself raised a relatively modest $30m for aid projects in Haiti.

A spokeswoman for the charity told the BBC: “Every penny of the more than $30m raised was deployed on the ground, with no overhead taken by the Clinton Foundation.”

Image copyright AFP Image caption A Haitian protester outside New York’s Hofstra University, scene of the first presidential debate in September

A Haitian woman holds a banner outside Hofstra University before the first presidential debate at the Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York, on 26 September 2016‘Friends of Bill’

Mrs Clinton’s campaign has said she never did anything at the State Department as a result of donations to the Clinton Foundation.

But potential conflicts of interest have emerged.

After the earthquake, disaster capitalists flocked to the nation of 10 million people, which is about the size of the US state of Massachusetts.

Private contractors were eager to sell services, in what one US envoy described in a Wikileaks-disclosed diplomatic cable as a “gold rush”.

In email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials, a senior aide to Mrs Clinton, who was then-secretary of state, kept an eye out for those identified by the abbreviations “FOB” (friends of Bill Clinton) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).

“Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC,” wrote Caitlin Klevorick, a senior State Department official who was vetting incoming offers of assistance coming through the Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton (C) tours a Clinton Foundation project in Mirebalais, in the central plateau of Haiti, on 23 February 2015Image copyright AFP Image caption Since 2010, the Clinton Foundation has raised a total of more than $30m for Haiti

“Most I can probably ID but not all.”

Ms Klevorick told ABC News she made the comments about Mr Clinton to help pin down whether would-be contractors had a history in Haiti or with disaster relief.

The emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, have fuelled claims the Clintons were running a pay-to-play operation, though no hard evidence of this has emerged.

House Republicans are already laying the groundwork for a volley of congressional hearings into the Clinton Foundation in the event the Democratic candidate wins the White House in a week’s time.

Possibly the most enduring criticism of the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti stems from its signature project, a garment factory known as the Caracol Industrial Park.

The foundation, working with the Clinton State Department, helped arrange a US-subsidised deal with the Haitian government to build the $300m factory complex in 2012.

Several hundred farmers were evicted from their land to make way for the 600-acre manufacturing site, which produces clothes for retailers such as Old Navy, Walmart and Target.

South Korean textile giant Sae-A Trading Co, which is the main employer at the facility, subsequently donated between $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Mr Clinton declared 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order”.

But the Caracol Industrial Park has created only 8,000 jobs.

An injured Haitian receiving medical care in Port-au-Prince

Image copyright AP Image caption An injured Haitian receiving medical care in Port-au-Prince

Sae-A spokeswoman Karen Seo told the BBC: “The rate of job growth depends both on the efficiency in building facilities, as well as customer demand – including the long tail of the recession. Momentum is growing and we are optimistic.”

In its defence, the Clinton Foundation – which has raised more than $2bn from over 330,000 donors since its 2001 launch – points to its A rating from philanthropic monitors.

Charity Watch says 88% of the Clinton Foundation’s budget was spent last year on programme expenses.

But the watchdog’s president, Daniel Borochoff, told the BBC the high mark was not intended to reflect whether Mrs Clinton kept donors to her family’s foundation at appropriate arm’s length, or provided favoured access as secretary of state.

Questions ‘fester’

The Clinton Foundation rebutted any suggestion of special favours, saying that in the aftermath of the Haiti quake they worked with a “wide range” of partners to mobilise relief efforts immediately “and many people they had previously worked with responded to this call to help”.

The charity’s statement to the BBC continued: “President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation’s only goal in Haiti is to help the people of Haiti.

“Since 2010, the Foundation has worked on the ground in Haiti with a range of partners – helping more than 7,500 farmers lift themselves out of poverty; improving the Haitian environment by planting more than 5 million trees and installing more than 400 KW of clean energy; and supporting women through literacy training and job skills for over 2,000 women.”

Mrs Clinton’s presidential campaign did not respond to requests for comment from the BBC.

In the Little Haiti neighbourhood of Miami that was visited by Mr Trump this September, the head of a local women’s advocacy group has questions for Mrs Clinton.

Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, believes that Clinton-backed projects have helped global investors more than they have benefited poverty-stricken Haitians.

She told the BBC: “The more Secretary Clinton refrains from responding to the concerns and questions from the people of Haiti, this perception that she’s trying to evade responding will continue.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump makes a campaign visit to the Little Haiti Cultural Center in Miami, Florida, U.S., September 16, 2016.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Will Donald Trump’s pitch to Haitian-Americans work?

“Instead of allowing these questions to linger and fester, why not come clean? The questions will not go away, they will continue.”

As for Mr Trump’s attempt to woo Haitian-American voters, it may prove a longshot, given his threats to round up millions of undocumented immigrants.

There are an estimated 150,000 members of this electoral bloc in Florida, a crucial swing state where the presidential contest is on a knife-edge.

Jeff Lozama, chairman of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce of Florida, told the BBC that regardless of misgivings about the Clintons’ work in Haiti, his countrymen and women in the diaspora overwhelmingly hope she wins election on 8 November.

He says many of them fear what a Trump presidency could mean for their US status.

“Haitians cannot afford to have any mass deportation,” he said.

“Immigration is the number one item (among Haitian-Americans) for these candidates.”

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  1. Bret Baier: FBI Sources Believe Clinton Foundation Case Moving Towards “Likely an Indictment”
    Posted By Tim Hains
    On Date November 2, 2016

    Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI. He reveals five important new pieces of information in these two short clips:

    1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.

    2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.

    3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.

    4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.

    5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.

    Transcript:

    BRET BAIER: Breaking news tonight — two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation tell Fox the following:

    The investigation looking into possible pay-for-play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation has been going on for more than a year. Led by the white collar crime division, public corruption branch of the criminal investigative division of the FBI.

    The Clinton Foundation investigation is a, quote, “very high priority.” Agents have interviewed and reinterviewed multiple people about the Foundation case, and even before the WikiLeaks dumps, agents say they have collected a great deal of evidence. Pressed on that, one sources said, quote, “a lot of it,” and “there is an avalanche of new information coming every day.”

    Some of it from WikiLeaks, some of it from new emails. The agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case. They will be going back to interview the same people again, some for the third time.

    As a result of the limited immunity deals to top aides, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department had tentatively agreed that the FBI would destroy those laptops after a narrow review. We are told definitively that has not happened. Those devices are currently in the FBI field office here in Washington, D.C. and are being exploited.

    The source points out that any immunity deal is null and void if any subject lied at any point in the investigation.

    Meantime, the classified e-mail investigation is being run by the National Security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through former Democratic Congressman Anthony Wiener’s laptop and have found e-mails that they believe came from Hillary Clinton’s server that appear to be new, as in not duplicates.

    Whether they contain classified material or not is not yet known. It will likely be known soon. All of this just as we move inside one week until election day.

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