For a long time, the defense from the Clintons was that even though foreign governments were giving to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, no one could ever prove a quid pro quo, a particular circumstance where the Clintons agreed to take certain actions in exchange for donations. Bill Clinton shrugged at the complaints of favor-trading at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department: “It was natural for people who’ve been our political allies and personal friends to call and ask for things.”
Well, this morning, quid met quo.
Hillary Clinton solicited a $12 million donation from a government her State Department considered corrupt, then realized the “mess” it would cause to her presidential run, a newly leaked e-mail reveals.
King Mohammed VI of Morocco agreed to give the money to the Clinton Foundation, provided that it hold a convention in his country in May 2015 with Clinton as the keynote speaker.
But Clinton realized that the conference, slated for a month after she announced her run for president, would hurt her candidacy.
“No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI [Clinton Global Initiative] on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” top Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote to campaign manager Robby Mook in a November 2014 e-mail revealed by WikiLeaks.
In another e-mail, Abedin warned that if Clinton didn’t attend, the $12 million would be off the table.
Here’s Huma Abedin’s e-mail, explaining why Hillary had to appear at the Morocco wrote in a January 2015 e-mail to Mook and campaign manager John Podesta.
Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If hrc was not part if it, meeting was a non-starter. CGI also wasn’t pushing for a meeting in Morocco and it wasn’t their first choice. This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months. She created this mess and she knows it.
Hillary canceled her trip and sent Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton instead. Her top-level staff and supporters like Robby Mook, Podesta and Abedin seemed confused about whether she was going in late March.
It gets worse:
The meeting was officially paid for by OCP, a Moroccan-government-owned mining company that has been accused of human-rights violations.
Hillary Clinton supported the monarch when she was secretary of state, and the US-financed Export-Import Bank gave OCP a $92 million loan guarantee during her tenure, The Daily Caller reported.
Politico reported in 2015 that Clinton “was seen by [the Moroccan capital] Rabat as among its staunchest supporters in the Obama administration.”
The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice charged OCP with “serious human-rights violations,” the Daily Caller said.
All the flaws of Donald Trump don’t change any of this. Hillary and Bill Clinton have let the world’s governments know that they are ready to talk terms of what they’re willing to do in exchange for multimillion-dollar donations to their foundation. If that doesn’t deeply trouble Americans of all political stripes, our country is in deep, deep trouble.