Hacked emails have revealed Bill and Hillary Clinton received $1m from Qatar for the Clinton Foundation while she was still in office as Secretary of State despite Hillary publicly promising the U.S. government that while she served as Secretary of state, the foundation would not accept new funding from foreign governments without seeking clearance from the State Department’s ethics office.
The hacked email is among thousands published over the last week by the pro-transparency group Wikileaks from the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in the email from 2012, a senior official from the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation informed colleagues that a planned donation by Qatar’s government to mark Bill Clinton’s birthday came up in a meeting he had with Qatar’s ambassador in Washington.
In the email, the ambassador said that he asked “to see WJC ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC’s birthday in 2011,” Amitabh Desai, the foundation official, writes in his email, using the former U.S. president’s initials.
But the email doesn’t show if the money was sent as a birthday gift to Bill Clinton or the family’s foundation although the family’s foundation’s website lists the State of Qatar as having given that figure.
Meanwhile, the U.S State Department in a statement said it cannot cite any instances of its ethics officials reviewing or approving new donations from foreign governments to the foundation while Clinton served as the country’s top diplomat from 2009 until 2013.
“You would need to ask the Foundation whether there were additional matters that it should have submitted for State Department review,” the department said in a statement..
Bill Clinton announced in August that, if Hillary won the presidency, the foundation would cease to accept money from foreign or corporate bodies and Bill would resign from the board. Hillary Clinton has not served on the board since April 2015.
Source: CNN / Fox News
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