Emails raise further questions over possible Clinton pay-to-play tactics

Emails raise further questions over possible Clinton pay-to-play tactics
Oct. 11, 2016 4:12pm Jon Street

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Newly released emails show Hillary Clinton’s State Department and her family’s Clinton Foundation seemingly coordinated with so-called “friends” of former President Bill Clinton following the 2010 earthquake that rocked Haiti.
The emails are the latest in the ongoing saga over whether the State Department may have been involved in any pay-to-play actions while Clinton was heading the agency from 2009-2013. The messages were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee and were then passed along to ABC News, which published the documents.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaign in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC [William J. Clinton],” Caitlin Klevorick, a senior State Department official at the time, wrote in one email. “Most I can probably ID but not all.” In another email, Klevorick asks a Clinton Foundation aide if a woman offering medical supplies to the impoverished Caribbean nation is an “FOB,” or “friend of Bill.”
Klevorick then adds, “If not, she should go to cidi.org,” the website for the Center for International Disaster Information.
The emails could suggest that those who gave to the Clinton Foundation received preferential treatment when it came to securing contracts for recovery efforts. One possible example is that of a Jamaican-based “WJC VIP,” who was specifically mentioned in one email: “This WJC VIP just called again from Jamaica to say Digicel is being pushed by US Army to get comms back up but is not being cleared by [the U.S. government] to deploy into Haiti to do so,” the message reads. The “VIP” who reportedly asked for the State Department to intervene said he was having difficulty deploying resources “through conventional channels.”
Jake Johnston, an analyst for the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research, has called into question the tactics employed by the Clinton State Department and Clinton Foundation, saying it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins.
“I think when you look at both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in Haiti, that line was pretty faint between the two,” Johnston told ABC News.
“You had a lot of coordination and connection between the two, obviously. And I think that raises significant questions about how they were both operating,” Johnston added.
None of the emails obtained by ABC News show any direct involvement by either Bill or Hillary Clinton.
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