July 21, 2021

HAITI: Sharing Information I Just Found Out About Regarding Bill And Hillary Clinton, The Clinton Foundation, Hillary's Brother Who Was Given Rare Gold Mining Contract, Them Devastating Agriculture

National Review
written by Brenden Bordelon
Thursday May 28, 2015

Sitting in a courtroom three years ago, after skipping out on a sizable legal bill, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s youngest brother struck a reassuring tone: Don’t worry, the money is coming.

“I deal through the Clinton Foundation,” Tony Rodham said, according to court transcripts uncovered by the New York Times. He gave his word that Hillary and Bill were setting him up with Haitian-government permits to build a $22 million housing development in the earthquake-stricken country.

“I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from,” Rodham explained, promising a $1 million check once the Haitian-government paved the way, enough both to cover the outstanding legal fees and take his family to Disney World.

The construction deal fell through, but Rodham managed to settle his debt. And the next year, he got another crack at making money in Haiti’s heavily-regulated economy when he joined the advisory board of a company, VCS Mining, which was developing a gold mine on the island. He’d met the company’s CEO at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. “I go to see old friends [at the meetings,]” Rodham told the Washington Post, “but you never know what can happen.”

From the moment the Clintons walked through the White House doors in January of 1993, Rodham has proven remarkably adept at harnessing their political horsepower for his personal gain. His schemes don’t always pan out, and they have caused numerous headaches for Hillary and Bill. But Rodham’s fortunes have always been tied to theirs, his bank account waxing and waning in time with the Clintons’ political prospects. He may lack their sophistication, but to many observers, Tony is the unvarnished embodiment of the Clintons’ decades-long dance with crony capitalism.

Rodham sits atop of a pile of money acquired through a vast tangle of enterprises just a little less secret and complex than those of his sister and brother-in-law. “There’s really no better definition of what this is,” says David Bossie, president of the conservative group Citizens United and a longtime Clinton foe. “This is a person who is not directly the principal, but he’s the brother – or, in the 1990s, the brother-in-law – of the president, using these open doors of family to shake people down.”
Tony is the unvarnished embodiment of the Clintons’ decades-long dance with crony capitalism.
“A sibling’s power is tremendous,” says presidential historian Doug Wead. “In many parts of the Third World, the sister gets the Coca-Cola franchise and the brother gets to build the big shopping center. Now, unfortunately, that kind of corruption exists in the United States.”

Reporters understand that presidential siblings sometimes behave badly, and are naturally reluctant to press too hard on a politician’s family. Recent news that Rodham, in cahoots with Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, received special favors from the Department of Homeland Security to secure visas for foreign nationals, came and went with little fanfare. But as Rodham’s malfeasance becomes more brazen once again in the wake of his sister’s presidential run and the Clintons reel over scandals involving their own money, some wonder if that era of invulnerability is nearing its end.

“It’s the same dynamic, the same phenomenon you see all through history — from James Monroe to modern times,” says Wead. “But you never see it quite on this level — this flagrant, this in your face, this arrogant.”

Rodham led a hard-scrabble life before his brother-in-law’s ascension to the White House. He struggled in school, trying twice but ultimately failing to earn a college degree. He worked as an insurance salesman, a repo man, and a prison guard — sometimes relying on the Clintons to secure even these unglamorous gigs. For nearly ten years he lived with older brother Hugh Rodham in a south-Florida condo, working as a private detective and a process server.

Everything changed after Bill Clinton’s 1992 nomination, when Rodham suddenly gained employment as a constituency-outreach consultant with the Democratic National Committee. He didn’t hold the job long — from the get-go, he seemed more interested in leveraging his White House connections to pursue exotic business ventures.

In 1997, while working as a consultant for a company trying to break into post-Soviet Russia, Rodham arranged a meeting between Bill Clinton and the mayor of Moscow, who was rumored to have mob ties. That success led to more work in the former Soviet bloc, and in 1999, he and his brother Hugh worked with politicians and government officials from the ex-Soviet state of Georgia to develop a $118 million hazelnut-exporting business. The Rodham brothers caused an international crisis when a rival of Georgia’s U.S.-backed president touted his meeting with them as a White House seal of approval. The deal was ultimately scuttled, but Rodham continued to meet with other third-world strongmen, including the autocratic prime minister of Cambodia.

His foreign ventures died down for a time after the Clintons left office, and his finances crumbled. Hillary Clinton would later say that this was the time her family was “dead broke,” so her brother, of course, suffered too. By 2007, he was behind on his mortgage payments and owed his ex-wife $158,000 in alimony and child support.

But, as usual, Rodham’s fortunes rose with those of his sister: His work picked up again when Hillary was tapped as secretary of state in 2009. Using the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work in Haiti as a vehicle, Rodham energetically sought business opportunities in the island nation’s tightly controlled economy. By 2013, he was working for VCS, the company developing a controversial gold mine in Haiti.

The mining company’s CEO told the Washington Post that family ties had nothing to do with Rodham’s hiring, explaining instead that Rodham’s work at investment firm Gulf Coast Funds Management gave him access to the investors needed for the Haitian project.
‘This isn’t, “Oh, that stumbling, bumbling brother.” This rises to the level of potentially illegal activity.’
Rodham was hired as president and CEO of Gulf Coast Funds in 2010, by its then-chairman Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton friend and ally who was elected governor of Virginia in 2013. The group worked to secure U.S. visas for wealthy foreign investors, primarily to fund McAuliffe’s green-energy company GreenTech Automotive, which itself drew scrutiny from multiple federal agencies.
I added snapshot above.

When the Department of Homeland Security blocked the visa of one Chinese investor due to national-security concerns, Rodham and McAuliffe pooled their political clout to pressure deputy DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to grant the request. The department’s inspector general found evidence of ethics violations and improper political influence — sparking a massive scandal and setting off investigations from the FBI and the SEC.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh, that stumbling, bumbling brother,’” says Bossie. “This rises to the level of potentially illegal activity.”

Reached for comment, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill recycles a statement first provided to the New York Times. “Secretary Clinton loves her family more than anything,” he says. “Her brothers have always been there for her, and she will always be there for them. Each though have their own lives, their own jobs, their own ups and downs. It is for them to decide how much of their private lives to share publicly in the context of their sister’s campaign.”

Former Clinton White House counsel and “friend of the family” Lanny Davis speaks to National Review on behalf of Rodham himself. “Tony lives his own life,” he says in a statement, “and while these charges are false — the same innuendo contradicted by the facts — he is not going to [comment] as part of a political charade.”

“[Rodham] hopes his desire for privacy is understood by both the Republicans and the media,” Davis continues, “but either way he plans on vigorously guarding his own family’s privacy by not responding to purely political attacks on someone who is not a public official.”

Tim Graham, the director of media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center, says the complexity of Rodham’s many shady business dealings explains the media’s relative disinterest. “The Clintons count on there being so much information that [the press] can’t master it all,” he says. “So many scandals, so many scandal figures, so many different things going on.”

Graham also sees a partisan element to the media blackout. He notes that when Neil Bush, the son of George H. W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush, was implicated in a savings-and-loan scandal, the television coverage was extensive. But he says that Tony’s behavior may be testing the limits of a docile press corps. If so, Wead predicts the coverage will be “like a volcano.”

#related#A slew of new Rodham stories from outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico may herald the end of the Clintons’ immunity on the issue. Bossie says Tony Rodham will be an important element in the presidential campaign for “a very simple reason: Hillary’s never been the nominee before.”

But that doesn’t mean Rodham will lie low come 2016.

“If you’re a guy who has made a living over the last 20 years off of your sister and brother-in-law — if you make hay, this is the time you make hay,” says Bossie. “If she’s the candidate for president and then becomes president, ‘Katie, bar the door.’”
The Washington Post
written by Kevin Sullivan and Rosalind S. Helderman
Friday March 20, 2021

MORNE BOSSA, Haiti — Drive down the rutted dirt road a couple of miles to the guardhouse, then hike 15 minutes up to the overgrown hilltop, and there it is: a piece of 3 1/2 -inch-wide PVC pipe sticking out of the ground.

This is what, at least for the time being, a gold mine looks like.

It also has become a potentially problematic issue for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she considers a second presidential run, after it was revealed this month that in 2013, one of her brothers was added to the advisory board of the company that owns the mine.

Tony Rodham’s involvement with the mine, which has become a source of controversy in Haiti because of concern about potential environmental damage and the belief that the project will primarily benefit foreign investors, was first revealed in publicity about an upcoming book on the Clintons by author Peter Schweizer.

In interviews with The Washington Post, both Rodham and the chief executive of Delaware-based VCS Mining said they were introduced at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative — an offshoot of the Clinton Foundation that critics have long alleged invites a blurring of its charitable mission with the business interests of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their corporate donors.

Asked whether he attends CGI meetings to explore personal business opportunities, Rodham responded, “No, I go to see old friends. But you never know what can happen.”

All sides deny that the Clintons had any role in Rodham’s appointment to the VCS advisory board.

Rodham said he has not been involved in any other deals through connections made at CGI. He said that he has never spoken to his sister or her husband about the Haiti project and that he does not think VCS chief executive and president Angelo Viard, a Democratic donor, approached him because of his family ties. Rodham declined to say who introduced him to Viard; Viard said he could not ­remember.

“I’m a very accomplished person in my own right,” Rodham said. He said his work with the company is to try to find investors, which he said has been challenging because of a lack of interest in Haiti.

“I raise money for a lot of people,” he said. “That’s what I basically do.”

Rodham, a former repo man, prison guard and private detective, has long been a source of controversy for the Clintons. Among other things, he and his brother, Hugh, caused consternation in the Clinton White House in 1999 for trying to operate a hazelnut-processing business in the Republic of Georgia with political opponents of the Georgian president, who was a U.S. ally at the time.

[Tony Rodham linked to Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe ]

Viard said that he paid to become a member of CGI so he could attend two of the organization’s meetings, and that he met Rodham at a gathering in 2012. (Foundation officials said Viard paid a $20,000 membership fee in 2013.)

“You try to be a member so you can meet people in the same industry,” Viard said. He said he attended CGI as “a pure marketing operation.”

He said he ultimately stopped attending CGI meetings after realizing that they were largely designed for charities to mingle with possible donors. He said he thinks commitments made at CGI have done a lot of good in the developing world.

Rodham joined the board in October 2013, nine months after Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state. Viard said he put Rodham on the board not because of his family connections, but because he worked for a firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management, that had access to ­investors.

Viard said that he and Rodham never discussed the Clintons, and that he never talked to the Clintons about Rodham. A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said that Bill Clinton does not know Viard, and a spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she also does not know him.

In December 2012, VCS won one of the first two gold-mining permits the Haitian government had issued in more than 50 years. The project was immediately slammed by members of the Haitian Senate, who called it a potential environmental disaster and “a waste of resources.” The backlash caused the government to put the permits on hold.

Viard stressed that Rodham was not involved in the effort to win the permit from the Haitian government, which was granted months before Rodham joined the board.

He said Rodham was compensated with stock options that will not vest unless the project is a success. He said Rodham has not landed any investors, adding, “It sounds like people were not interested in Haiti.”

Rodham confirmed that he has received stock options in VCS and that they have not yet vested, saying, “Never seen ’em.”

“I’m just trying to help him out a little bit. If it ever accomplishes anything, great,” Rodham said of Viard, adding that the people of Haiti “got a bad deal” — saddled with poverty and then hit in 2010 by a devastating earthquake — and that he hoped the gold mine could help the country recover.

The Clintons have been longtime advocates for development in Haiti, especially since the earthquake. Bill Clinton, as the United Nations’ special envoy to the nation, and Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, were primary forces in the emergency relief response and later efforts to create long-term development plans for the ravaged country.

But the Clintons’ image in Haiti has slipped in recent months as Haitians increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country’s elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor Haitians.

Defenders of the Clintons call such criticism untrue and unfair and largely pressed by the Clintons’ political enemies. They argue that Clinton-funded programs have brought millions of dollars in investment to Haiti and have created jobs for thousands of Haitians.

But news that a Clinton family member is helping the mining company attract more foreign investors has deepened ­suspicion.

“Rodham is an independent guy, but this is tricky; it’s not a good sign for him to be on the board of a mining company here in Haiti,” said Leslie Voltaire, a former Haitian government official who worked closely with the Clintons after the earthquake. “The Clintons are seen as being in power here. You have to be very cautious that your family does not intervene in business here.”

Jean-Max Bellerive, a former prime minister and a potential presidential candidate in elections expected this year, joined the VCS advisory board at the same time as Rodham.

When the mine permit was suspended in early 2013, Bellerive said, Viard hired him for $8,000 to help him understand Haitian governmental procedures, as well as to introduce him to Haitian senators and advise him on how to persuade them to support the mine project.

Bellerive said that Viard offered compensation when he joined the advisory board a few months later, but that he refused it. He said he had mixed feelings about the project because he was worried about potential environmental damage and unsure whether the Haitian government was equipped to regulate such a complex enterprise.

He said he hoped that by joining the board, he would help ensure that the project was handled “responsibly.” But he said he has had “close to zero” involvement with it.

Bellerive said he was comfortable with his decision to join VCS, but thinks Rodham made a mistake.

“If I was Tony Rodham, I would not have been on the board,” he said. “He knows he did nothing illegal, but it has a high political price for his sister.”

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 10:45 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)