Hillary Hosts Fundraiser for De Blasio Co-Chaired by Convicted Criminal

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, a frontrunner to be the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate, hosted a fundraiser for New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio on Monday night. But it was no ordinary fundraiser, Breitbart News has learned. 

At least one of the main figures at the event is a convicted financial criminal, and another has come under the glare of federal authorities for alleged financial malfeasance.

According to a document published by Capitol New York, the headlining co-chairs for the event included Paul and Mary Adler and Sant Singh Chatwal.

Paul Adler once served as the chairman of the Democratic Party in Rockland County, New York, and according to a September 2000 article in the New York Times, “was one of the county’s earlier and most ardent supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton in her race for the United States Senate.”

That September 2000 article also detailed how Adler had just been arrested on corruption charges. In February 2001, the New York Times followed up with another article about how Adler admitted in federal court to attempting to bribe a town official and that he evaded paying taxes. 

“The former chairman of the Rockland County Democratic Party, an active supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate campaign, stood before a federal judge today and admitted that he had sought to bribe a town official for a vote on a development project and had evaded paying income taxes,” the Times wrote in February 2001. “Under an agreement with federal prosecutors, the man, Paul W. Adler, 42, who stepped down as party chairman after his arrest in September, pleaded guilty to two of the more than a dozen charges filed against him.”

Adler’s name, the Times wrote in February 2001, turned up on a list of high-profile guests that the Clintons hosted in the White House when Bill Clinton was the president. “And shortly after he was arrested, his name turned up on a list of 404 supporters and friends of the Clintons who had been overnight guests at the White House and Camp David since July 1999, when Mrs. Clinton began her Senate campaign,” the Times wrote.

In total, Adler pled guilty to public corruption, mail fraud, and tax evasion charges.

According to the Times, Adler understated his income by more than $200,000 in both 1996 and 1997 and took improper charitable and business tax deductions. Mary Jo White, then a U.S. Attorney and now President Barack Obama’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairwoman, said at the time that Adler was secretly taped as saying that he did not become the chairman of the Rockland County, New York Democratic Party to “lose money.”

“In one secretly tape-recorded conversation, he argued that he had not assumed the party chairmanship to ‘lose money,’ said Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York,” the Times wrote in February 2001.

In July 2002, the Times followed up again to note that Adler was sentenced to 19 months in federal prison and to pay a $4,000 fine. According to reports in the New York Daily News and New York Post from the early 2000s, Adler was also probed by authorities for allegedly being involved with a clemency-for-votes scheme. “Virtually all of New Square voted for Mrs. Clinton over rival Rick Lazio – after the community’s leaders believed she would support clemency for four men convicted in 1999 of taking federal education grants for a sham Jewish school, sources said,” the Post wrote in February 2001.

“The federal probe of a possible votes-for-clemency deal in New Square may put disgraced Hillary Clinton pal and ex-Democratic powerbroker Paul Adler under a spotlight, sources said,” the Post added.

Sant Singh Chatwal, another donor prominently featured at Hillary’s fundraiser for de Blasio, has also faced backlash from authorities for his financial dealings. “Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens,” John Solomon and Matthew Mosk wrote for the Washington Post in 2007. 

“The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their ‘bundlers’ while they press to raise record amounts,” the authors wrote. “Chatwal’s case reached from his native India to New York City. The IRS pursued him for approximately $4 million in unpaid business taxes, while New York state placed a lien seeking more than $5 million in taxes. He forfeited a building to New York City on which he was delinquent on property taxes and was sued by federal regulators seeking to recoup millions of dollars in loans from a failed bank where he served as a director.”