Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier reported on the money made by companies with ties to the Clintons after Haiti earthquake in a preview of an upcoming special based on Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash” on Friday’s “America’s Newsroom” on the Fox News Channel.
Baier reported that after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, “Hillary’s State Department, working with USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, would oversee America’s relief effort. The government of Haiti set up the IHRC, Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, to coordinate, two men were named co-chairs of the IHRC Executive Committee, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, and Bill Clinton himself.”
Author Peter Schweizer, whose statements were featured through the report, said that “shortly after the earthquake took place, the US Ambassador in Haiti sent a cable to the State Department, the title of which was ‘The Gold Rush Is On,’ and the memo was about the fact that businessmen and companies were showing up in Haiti trying to seek lucrative contracts.” Baier added that “it was the job of IHRC to oversee this process, and to ensure no one took advantage of the situation.”
Schweizer then stated “a number of members of the IHRC actually wrote a letter expressing their concerns that they were not involved in the process, that all of the decisions were being made by Clinton and Bellerive. In addition, they claimed and argued that the national priorities of Haiti were basically being totally disregarded by the decisions that were being made.”
Baier characterized the situation as one where “many projects were initiated, often with US money and a connection to the Clintons.”
He then gave examples, such as the Haitian Mobile Money Initiative, where a system was created to transfer money via cell phones, the exploitation of Haiti’s mineral deposits for money, and the Caracol Industrial Park. Baier then added that “so many of these deals seem to come back, at some point, to the Clintons,” which was echoed by Schweizer’s declaration that “what quickly became apparent to many people, was that if you wanted a contract, if you wanted to do business in Haiti, you had to have relationships with a Clinton.”
Baier then reported that the company that made over $50 million in revenue in Haiti, according to Schweizer, off the Haitian Mobile Money Initiative, Digicel, “is run by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who set up lucrative speeches for Bill Clinton, as well as donating millions of his own money to the Clinton Foundation.”
He continued, “one company that got a rare gold permit was VCS Mining, which didn’t actually have much mining experience, but would soon have Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, on its board.” And that the anchor tenant of the Caracol Industrial Park “is a Korean manufacturer, which supplies to major US retailers, who also happen to be big Clinton supporters. And while the State Department promised 65,000 jobs, to date, only 5,000 have been delivered.”
Baier concluded, “there’s a lot of talk about smoking gun, the campaign came out and said there’s no shred of evidence, and all this talk about the bar being high. Just talking to some lawyers about where the bar is in bribery cases, for example, goes back to two cases, United States v. Annabi, a federal Second Circuit court case, and United States v. Bruno, and this is what they came to, and this is settled law, in cases involving government officials, ‘a jury can…infer guilt from evidence of benefits received and subsequent favorable treatment‘.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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