by WorldTribune Staff, June 26, 2017
When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she signed an ethics agreement promising the Clinton Foundation would notify the State Department if a new foreign government planned to donate or “increase materially” its contributions.
One of the thousands of John Podesta’s emails published by WikiLeaks shows that Hillary Clinton failed to inform the State Department that officials from the government of Qatar gave $1 million to the Clinton Foundation to celebrate Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday.
According to a Reuters report, Clinton Foundation officials “acknowledged they sometimes evaded the agreement with the Obama administration, but blamed oversights.”
At least eight other countries in addition to Qatar gave new or increased funding to the foundation, most often for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the report said.
Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011; in April 2012 Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, sent an email acknowledging the Qataris wanted to meet Bill Clinton “for five minutes” in New York City.
Clinton Foundation spokesman Brian Cookstra told Reuters that the $1 million gift was not a “material increase” in Qatar’s contributions. But Qatar had given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation in total, meaning the $1 million gift represented between a 20 percent to 100 percent increase.
The State Department told Reuters it had no record of the Qatar donation.
In 2016, the Clinton Foundation admitted that the Clinton Health Access Initiative had not published a list of its donors since 2010, although Hillary Clinton had promised she would offer an annual list.
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