State Department officials raised concerns about former President Bill Clinton’s ties to Saudi Arabia in 2011 amid a flurry of ethics reviews that weighed whether his philanthropic and commercial activities posed any conflicts of interest with his wife’s duties as secretary of state.
According to documents obtained by the nonprofit Judicial Watch, the department’s legal team repeatedly discussed Clinton Foundation activities in countries around the world.
The heavily redacted emails refer to an “urgent” foundation matter in Tanzania that required legal guidance as Bill Clinton prepared to touch down in the African nation. Un-redacted portions of the emails suggest the problem involved a “specific arrangement with Tanzania post” in June 2010.
Other documents indicate that a lengthy back-and-forth took place among members of the department’s legal staff about a Clinton Foundation request involving “Saudi entities,” although three pages of emails on the subject were blacked out in the official records Judicial Watch obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Bill Clinton committed to speak at an event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in December 2012 in exchange for a reported $300,000 fee, paid by Riyadh-based Tanmiah Commercial Group, the event’s host.
As with hundreds of other public engagements during Hillary Clinton’s tenure, the paid Jeddah speech did not raise any red flags with the State Department’s ethics team.
Neither did any of the other more than 200 similar ethics reviews by State Department officials during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
A joint investigation of those reviews by the Washington Examiner and Judicial Watch found that Bill Clinton received $48 million in fees for speeches he gave while his wife was chief U.S. diplomat. The investigation also found that the State Department lawyers approved Bill Clinton’s participation as a partner in a controversial consulting firm founded by one of his closest aides.
A conversation between Cheryl Mills — a perennial Clinton hand who has served both the former president and secretary of state in numerous capacities,as well as a member of the Clinton Foundation’s board — and former Clinton White House and personal aide Douglas Band was fully redacted, but records indicate they communicated in June 2011.
Email records also show that Band, who co-founded the Teneo Holdings consulting firm in part by taking advantage of his long years of connections made through the Clintons, wrote to Mills using an email address hosted at “presidentclinton.com.”
The State Department turned over more than 1,000 documents to the Clinton Foundation in January 2014 for review before releasing them to Judicial Watch, the group said.
The latest spate of documents were part of an ongoing lawsuit against the State Department as a result of it mis-handling of a May 2011 FOIA request.
