The latest hacked email released by WikiLeaks details how one of Bill Clinton’s closest aides helped rake in tens of millions for the former president while his wife was serving as Secretary of State.
The 12-page memo was sent by Clinton’s former aide Doug Band in 2011 to him, his daughter Chelsea, several board members of the Clinton Foundation and its lawyers as well as its then special advisor John Podesta.
Published on Wednesday by Wikileaks, after a hack of thousands of emails from Podesta’s account, it details how Band helped run what he called ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’
Band and another aide helped secure $66million from ventures, including speaking fees, according to the memo.
He wrote that, using his role as the president of his own consulting firm Teneo, Band worked to raise funds for the Foundation and Clinton personally.
Band also wrote that he helped obtain ‘in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal, travel, hospital, vacation and the like.’
‘Throughout the past almost 11 years since President Clinton left office, I have sought to leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo to support and raise funds for the Foundation,’ Band wrote.
‘This memorandum strives to set forth how I have endeavored to support the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton personally.’
Under a section called ‘For-Profit Activity of President Clinton (i.e. Bill Clinton, Inc)’ Brand said he and another aide, Justin Cooper brought Clinton all four of his advisory arrangements at the time.
These yielded more than $30million in personal income – with a further $66million to be paid out over the next nine years should he continue with them.
One of these roles was serving as honorary Chairman of Laureate International Universities, a chain of for-profit colleges, which paid Clinton $3.5million a year from 2010 until 2015, when the contract ended and his wife started her run for president.
Band also mentioned that neither he nor Cooper were compensated for the work.
They were not paid a fee or percentage of the income, but only received their Foundation salaries.
Band also said that Teneo was responsible for negotiating a number of speaking fees for Clinton, including $1.15million from Ericson and $900,000 from UBS.
He said he also used his partner role at the company, established in June 2011, to solicit clients to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
This included $4.33million over six years (from 2004 through 2010) from The Coca-Cola Company and more than $1million from Barclays Capital over four years.
Band’s partner at Teneo, Declan Kelly, helped introduce Clinton to several top executives of clients including UBS Global Wealth Management and Dow Chemical.
After these meetings, these companies often upped their contributions to the Clinton Foundation.
For example, Kelly introduced Clinton to a top executive at UBS Global Wealth Management in 2009, at a charity dinner.
In the following years, the UBS upped its contributions to the foundation, started paying Clinton for speeches and signed on as a Teneo client.
The company’s records show that they paid Clinton $2million for speaking fees between 2011 and 2015 and also paid Hillary $225,000 for one 2013 speech.
Another complicated relationship was between the Clinton Foundation and Dow Chemical.
While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she assigned Kelly as an unpaid economic envoy to Northern Ireland (from 2009 until 2011).
During this time, Kelly was the head of a separate consulting firm that had clients including Coke, UBS and Dow.
Hillary then lauded Dow at a State Department event in 2010, for creating jobs in Northern Ireland. She thanked Kelly for his work on the issue as well.
Meanwhile, Kelly arranged for the former president to meet the company’s CEO Andrew Liveris in August 2009, over a round of golf.
After this day at the links, the company increased it’s support in the foundation. contributing $705,000 in 2010 and 2011.
Dow has tried to brush off these contributions, saying that they had contributed to the foundation as early as 2007 and that the charity was ‘aligned to core business and citizenship strategies that have positively leveraged the resources and capabilities of our company’.
At the same time, Dow was signed on as a Teneo client, paying the firm $2.8million for consulting services in 2011, and then increasing that amount to $19.4million in 2012.
Again the company tried to excuse the suspicious jump in fees, saying that the drastic increase reflected an internal decision to consolidate several consulting contracts with one firm.
Those fees nonetheless raised flags for an internal investigator at the company, who wrote that: ‘It appears Dow is paying Teneo for connections with Clinton.’
Band’s memo was also sent to lawyers who were conducting a review of the charity.
It came as Chelsea Clinton was taking a bigger role in leading the foundation and after she expressed her concerns about Band’s roles at the charity as well as at Teneo.
Chelsea became extremely concerned when she learned that a member of his staff – who reported to Band – was making calls to British lawmakers ‘on behalf of President Clinton’ for Teneo clients including Dow Chemical.
She said her dad did not know about the calls and that they would ‘horrify’ him. She added that she feared Teneo was ‘hustling business at CGI’.
After voicing her concerns, the foundations went through changes and Clinton separated from Teneo, returning all but $100,000 of the money he had been paid.
In a statement to the Post, Teneo said ‘as the memo demonstrates, Teneo worked to encourage clients, where appropriate, to support the Clinton Foundation because of the good work it does around the world.
‘It also clearly shows that Teneo never received any financial benefit or benefit of any kind from doing so.’
