From the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt:
The State Department’s Special Attention for ‘Friends of Bill’
Why should anyone think that a Hillary Clinton administration would operate any differently from Hillary Clinton’s State Department?
In a series of candid email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials during the hours after the massive 2010 Haiti earthquake, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly gave special attention to 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, then a senior State Department official who was juggling incoming offers of assistance being funneled to the State Department by the Clinton Foundation. “Most I can probably ID but not all.”
“Is this a FOB!” Klevorick writes later, when a Clinton Foundation aide forwards a woman’s offer of medical supplies. “If not, she should go to cidi.org,” she adds, directing the person deemed not to be a Clinton friend to a general government website.
If you’re a friend of the Clintons, you will get special treatment, despite their repeated insistence that nothing of the sort would ever happen or could ever happen.
The Clintons have said repeatedly that the State Department never gave favorable treatment to foundation supporters in Haiti or anywhere else.
“Nothing was ever done for anybody because they were contributors to the foundation,” Bill Clinton told CBS News’ Charlie Rose in September. “Nothing.”
“I want you to listen to me: I did not… have… directional relations with that contributor.”
The correspondence offers a glimpse into the first stages of a $10 billion Haiti recovery effort. The emails appear to show a State Department process that at times prioritized — and, some argue, benefited — people with close ties to the Clintons.
Under a Hillary Clinton presidency, why would we not expect taxpayer dollars to be used for polling for the Clintons?
While Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, U.S. officials included a question measuring Bill Clinton’s popularity in Haiti in an ongoing poll of the country’s citizens, and the State Department shared the results privately with the former president, internal government emails show.
“This is for WJC,” Hillary Clinton’s then–chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, wrote in an email to a senior Clinton Foundation official in October 2010, referring to William Jefferson Clinton. “It is not for public reference or use until we publish key elements.”
The U.S. government started polling Haitians in 2007, under President George W. Bush. The 68-page survey conducted in 2010 for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which works closely with the State Department, measured how Haitians felt about public safety, politics, Haitian leadership, the U.S. and its relief efforts in Haiti after a devastating earthquake there killed more than 200,000 people and leveled much of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
It’s not the job of the State Department to measure the popularity of former presidents in foreign countries.