Clinton Foundation got millions from Saudi government before Hillary vetted massive arms deal

Another day, another new fracture in the façade of the massive edifice the Clinton family has constructed to conceal its corrupt intermingling of charitable giving and public policy.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2011 cleared an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that allowed for the sale of $29 billion worth of military aircraft, supplied by U.S. contractors, to bolster the Saudis’ air force. The deal angered Israel, as well as human rights watchers concerned that the U.S. sends the wrong message by continually affirming the Saudis’ retrograde domestic policies.

A new report revisits that deal’s pre-history, highlighting the Clinton Foundation’s then-recent enrichment at the hands of Saudi government money.

“[I]n late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the [Saudi] sale, asserting that it was in the national interest,” International Business Times reported Tuesday:

At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for [Hillary] Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

The Saudi airplane contract just happened to comprise a huge chunk of a much larger total, with more than a dozen countries — all former Clinton Foundation donors — inking arms deals with the U.S. while Clinton was secretary.

At the State Department, a pattern was emerging. “Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion” in military sales to 20 countries that had all previously donated to the Clinton Foundation, IB Times reported.

“That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term,” the report states.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Clinton’s State Department also cleared $151 billion in additional arms sales to a number of countries under a separate Pentagon program, and all of them had at least one thing in common: prior donations to the Clinton Foundation. And the U.S. defense industry did its part, too, making donations not only to the Clinton Foundation, but also forking over “personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements,” according to IB Times.

Read the full report here.

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