Clinton Cash (15 page)

The chummy nature of the correspondence between Elliott and senior officials in the State Department enraged environmental groups. “I think we’ve gone way beyond bias,” said Damon Moglen, the director of the climate and energy program for Friends of the Earth. “We now see that the State Department has been complicit in this entire affair.”
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TransCanada certainly seems to have gotten its money’s worth from Elliott. Meanwhile the provincial government of Alberta, where the oil sands were located, hired another Clinton aide. Hilary Lefebre, who served as the director of broadcast media strategy for Hillary’s presidential campaign, received a $54,000 consulting fee to “blunt” criticism of the project from environmental groups.
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Environmental activists continued to accuse the State Department of failing to offer a truly independent review of the Keystone XL project. To offer an environmental assessment, State hired a company called Environmental Resources Management (ERM). But there was a problem: environmental activists pointed out that ERM had financial ties with TransCanada. State Department officials attempted to cover that fact up, redacting the biographies of the study’s authors to hide their previous work for TransCanada.
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Meanwhile, in May 2011 Bill was paid $280,000 for appearances in Fredericton and Antigonish.
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The Clinton speech submissions to State Department ethics officials (per the Obama administration memorandum of understanding described in chapter 1) didn’t indicate that TD Bank was a major investor in Keystone XL. Three months later, in August, the State Department released a final environmental impact statement that was seen as largely supportive of the pipeline.
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Throughout the process, Hillary remained relatively quiet. The political winds for Democrats were difficult. While organized
labor favored the deal, environmentalists, Hollywood, and numerous high-dollar contributors opposed it.
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By late 2011 events appeared to be reaching a crescendo. As hearings commenced in Washington, Hillary sent word that there should be no Canadians present. “Canadian officials saw the request as a suggestion that Ms. Clinton supported the project, and didn’t want a Canadian presence to further disturb the peace.”
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And there was muted evidence that Hillary was quietly pushing the deal through. At an appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, she had been asked about energy policy in general and the Keystone XL pipeline in particular. While explaining that she had not yet decided whether to approve the project, Hillary declared, “we are inclined to do so, and we are for several reasons.” She touted the project on the grounds of “energy security.” “We’re either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the [Persian] Gulf or dirty oil from Canada,” she said, leaving the audience with the impression that she favored the latter.
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Vocal opposition continued to mount, as President Obama came under increasing pressure from environmentalists. During an October 26 speech, Obama was heckled about the pipeline. “I know your deep concern about [Keystone XL],” he said. “We will address it.” In a series of interviews with local media outlets through the Midwest, where the pipeline was supposed to run, he was pressed on the issue.
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After officials in Nebraska demanded that the pipeline be rerouted to avoid sensitive environmental areas, President Obama decided to delay approval of the project.
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In late February 2012 Bill finally issued his statement of support for the project at (of all places) a Department of Energy conference for clean technology start-ups. With a group of bureaucrats and green-energy investors looking on, Bill told the crowd in Maryland that America should “embrace” the pipeline.
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Later the same afternoon, Hillary was at the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, discussing the pipeline. Naturally, she was asked about her husband’s remarks.

“He’s a very smart man,” she responded, causing a smattering of chuckles in the crowd. For Canadians, this was another hopeful sign. As the Canadian press put it, “Bill Clinton’s comments will almost certainly cause a stir given his wife has already been accused of a pro-pipeline bias by the sea of American environmentalists who oppose Keystone XL.”
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Obama’s edict that the pipeline issue not be settled until after the 2012 elections effectively sealed its fate, at least as it related to Hillary’s ability to get it approved. By January 2013 she was gone from Foggy Bottom.

Since she left office, Hillary has used the fact that because she was involved in the process, she can’t talk about her views on the Keystone Pipeline. As she told one crowd, “I’ve said before in Canada as I’ve traveled around your country avoiding answering questions about the Keystone pipeline because I really can’t, having been part of the process.” So her involvement prevents her from talking about Keystone, but it didn’t prevent her husband from making millions from its largest shareholder.
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As Charles Calomiris, a professor of financial institutions at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, explains, the speeches were not really about speeches. What they really wanted was to buy Hillary’s goodwill by paying Bill. “I’m not sure it would
matter if those speeches had taken place in Clinton’s bathtub,” he said. “What matters is that they paid him.”
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W
hile much of the media attention to Clinton’s speaking has focused on his fees from Wall Street and pharmaceutical companies, it has been the outsized payments from overseas that have really brought in the money. In 2011 Bill Clinton made $13.3 million in speaking fees for giving fifty-four speeches.
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But of those speeches paying $250,000 or more, nearly 40 percent, or $5.1 million of those fees, came from just eleven speeches given outside the United States. Overall, these mega-paying speeches for over $250,000 generated nearly $40 million in income for the Clintons from 2001 to 2013.

In short, Bill Clinton’s best years—with much higher than average fees being consistently paid by foreign entities—occurred while his wife was at the pinnacle of her power as secretary of state, a perch with enormous influence over issues that directly affected foreign governments.

A few examples make the point.

Beginning in 2009, the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson came under US pressure for selling telecom equipment to oppressive governments, some of which used those technologies to monitor and control their own people. In late 2010 the SEC sent a letter to Ericsson about sales to countries that were considered state sponsors of terrorism by Hillary’s State Department.
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The regimes included Sudan and Syria, where Ericsson sold and maintained telephone-switching equipment, and Iran, where it was selling “commercial grade systems to public network operators for mobile communications.”
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Hillary was a well-known hawk on Iran and used economic tools against regimes that were considered sponsors of terrorism.
According to US diplomatic cables, State Department officials were “regularly and increasingly” raising these transactions involving Ericsson with the Swedish foreign minister.
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In April 2011 Ericsson was named in a State Department report for supplying telecom equipment for the oppressive regime in Belarus.
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Separately, on Capitol Hill pressure was mounting and a bill would later be introduced in December 2011 in the House of Representatives to “stop the sale of surveillance technologies to repressive regimes.”
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In June 2011 the State Department started drawing up a list of which goods and services might be covered under expanded sanctions on Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism.
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Meanwhile, Ericsson decided to sponsor a speech by Bill Clinton and paid him more than he had ever been paid for a single speech: $750,000. According to Clinton financial disclosures, in the previous ten years Ericsson had never sponsored a Clinton speech. But now it apparently thought would be a good time to do so.

On November 12, 2011, Bill appeared at a telecom conference in Hong Kong and talked in general terms about the role that telecom plays in our lives. One week later, on November 19, the State Department unveiled its new sanctions list for Iran. Telecom was not on the list.
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On December 8, Hillary discussed the issue of telecom companies and their sales to repressive regimes for the first time since Bill’s speech. She argued that companies like Ericsson needed to make “good decisions” about whom they do business with but proposed no further action.
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In April 2012, President Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on telecom sales to Iran and Syria. But those sanctions did not cover Ericsson’s work in Iran. The Swedish company said that it was planning to scale down its work in the
country because of public pressure, but internal documents obtained by Reuters found that the company planned to honor existing contracts in Iran.
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I
n 2011 much of the Arab world was in upheaval, dealing with the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which had sparked widespread protests across the region. In Egypt and Tunisia, large crowds took to the streets and demanded political change. Many of these protests turned violent.
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Even countries considered relatively stable, including Bahrain and Yemen, were dealing with violent upheavals.
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The events left small but wealthy countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) feeling very vulnerable. The UAE was being pressured by the United States to tighten its grip on economic ties with Iran.
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In May two oil and shipping companies faced sanctions for their trade with Iran. On June 20, 2011, the Obama administration designated six UAE-based shipping firms for sanctions over their business dealings with Iran.
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Three days later, the United States charged several other parties in the UAE with trading parts for fighter jets and attack helicopters to Iran.
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The UAE was in a precarious situation because it feared the Iranian regime. But it feared something perhaps even more: being abandoned by the United States. In a secret State Department cable, the crown prince said his country was “being left out of our [US] Iran sanctions consultations.” He explained to a visiting congressional delegation that the royal family was “left wondering what will happen to them in any deal the US and Iran reach through back-channel conversations.”
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Amid this uncertainty, the royal family decided to pay Bill Clinton $500,000 to come and speak in Abu Dhabi.
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Bill arrived in Abu Dhabi and stayed at the Emirates Palace hotel.
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His speech was on collecting environmental data. “The lack of environmental data hurts,” he said. “On top of all environmental issues, the financial crisis is making the world’s stability even worse. The only way out, though, is a green economy.”
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What is striking about the speech is not what Clinton said but the timing of the payment. Even as Bill was being introduced to the audience by the crown prince of the UAE, the prince’s brother (the foreign minister) was en route to Washington for meetings with none other than Hillary. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan arrived in Washington on December 12 and met Hillary the day after Bill collected his half million. Based on the Clintons’ financial disclosures, it does not appear that the UAE royal family had ever paid for a Clinton speech before.
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This was not the first time Bill collected large checks for speeches paid by foreign governments, such as Thailand and Turkey.
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It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

T
he year 2010 was a tense time for US-Chinese relations. The problems were piling up: the Chinese government reduced its military ties with the Pentagon following US arms sales to Taiwan; Google disclosed that it had been a victim of a Chinese cyber assault; Barack Obama hosted the Dalai Lama in Washington amidst public outcries in Beijing; relations grew stiff when officials disagreed on trade issues and China’s alleged manipulation of its currency. Meanwhile, China was flexing its military muscle, sending a submarine to the bottom of the South China Sea where it planted a Chinese flag on the ocean floor to signify China’s claim to the mineral-rich area.

At the center of US policy toward China was Hillary Clinton, who was the architect of the Obama administration’s strategic “pivot” to Asia.

At this critical time for US-Chinese relations, Bill Clinton gave a number of speeches that were underwritten by the Chinese government and its supporters. That might not be apparent if you look at the Clintons’ public financial disclosures. For example, on October 21, 2011, Bill gave a speech before something called the Silicon Valley Information Business Alliance in Santa Clara, California. But who underwrote the speech? According to correspondence between Bill’s office and the State Department, the cosponsors were a coalition of Chinese government entities and organizations. Bill received $200,000 for the speech (well above his average for speaking in the United States) and the sponsors were the China Electronic Commerce Association (an entity launched and chaired by an official from the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry);
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the Suzhou People’s government (a municipality around Shanghai); the China Association of Science and Technology Industry Parks (this third sponsor sounds pretty innocuous, but it is a government-run entity in China); and the California State Friendship Committee, a small California-based organization designed to foster US-Chinese relations.
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