“Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer reported on the US taxpayer money and contracts in Haiti profited Clinton Foundation donors and Clinton relatives on Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel special “The Tangled Clinton Web.”
First, anchor Bret Baier gave an overview of how companies with ties to the Clintons profited in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in the country.
The report then turned to Haiti’s Prime Minister at the time of the earthquake, Jean-Max Bellerive, who said that Bill Clinton had the ability to attract media attention and “I believe in his role of President of the [Interim Haiti Recovery] Commission he did well…[but] perhaps we were asking too much of President Clinton, and he has his own agenda obviously…so perhaps we were leaning too much on what he could bring.”
Fox News Senior National Correspondent John Roberts then reported on Digicel, which, according to Schweizer, was the “chief beneficiary” of an initiative to have a service that allowed money to be transferred via cell phone in Haiti pushed by the Clintons. Schweizer said, “shortly after the Clintons began reconstruction in Haiti, and began handing out contracts, sometime during that period of 2010 or 2011 he [Digicel’s owner Denis O’Brien] made a multi-million dollar contribution to the Clinton Foundation.” And that O’Brien also arranged for three “lucrative” speeches by Bill Clinton.
Schweizer then reported, “two of the speeches that Bill Clinton gives, actually, are sandwiched around Digicel being given a grant, by the taxpayers for $100,000 as part of the HMMI Award. At the same time, you have taxpayer money, $2 million being committed to the Digicel Foundation in Jamaica.”
He continued, discussing the mining contract in Haiti given to VCS Mining. “Tony Rodham [Hillary’s brother] meets the executives from VCS Mining in September of 2012 at a Clinton Global Initiative seminar. Three months later, the Haitian government grants the gold exploitation permit to VCS Mining. And literally within the year, Tony Rodham is placed on the board of VCS Mining,” despite Rodham’s lack of a background in either Haiti or mining.
The report concluded with Caracol Industrial Park, that received “more than $100 million” in US taxpayer money. According to Schweizer, “the three biggest beneficiaries [from the cheap labor the park provides] are actually three retailing companies closely tied to the Clintons. Gap, Target, and Wal-Mart.
Roberts also reported that building the park required kicking people in the area of their land and bulldozing their crops. One of the people interviewed by Roberts said the farmers were ordered to leave at gunpoint. He also spoke to a worker at the textile factory that is the park’s biggest tenant, who said he is paid about $5 a day.
The report concluded that there are only about 5,000 jobs at Caracol, not the 65,000 promised by the US State Department.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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