The Company You Keep

One of the names that has surfaced in the leak of Hillary Clinton’s emails (many of which were deleted from her computer because she said they were not work related, but have come to light through Judicial Watch) is Gilbert Chagoury. Breitbart posted a story about this man today. The mainstream media has been somewhat quiet about him. Yesterday, Fox News posted a story about some of the links between emails regarding the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State.

Fox News reports:

In one email exchange released by Judicial Watch, Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, tried to put billionaire donor Gilbert Chagoury — a convicted money launderer — in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.

…Chagoury is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and has appeared on the Clinton Foundation donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor. He’s also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for money laundering. He cut a deal and agreed to repay $66 million to the Nigerian government.

Breitbart has a list of some of the questionable activities of Mr. Chagoury. The list includes:

In 1996, Gilbert Chagoury donated $460,000 to a controversial Miami-based Democratic voter-registration group called Vote Now 96. As a foreign citizen, Chagoury is barred from donating directly to elected officials or political parties. But his three contributions of $200,000, $10,000, and $250,000, made in September and October 1996, were completely legal because Vote Now 96 was a nonprofit organization.

Just two months after making his six-figure donations, Chagoury was among the 250 guests who attended the Clintons’ White House Christmas party.

…In 2000, Switzerland convicted Chagoury of money-laundering and “aiding a criminal organization in connection with the billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria during the [Sani] Abacha years” of military dictatorship, according to a PBS Frontline report.

And finally, the icing on the cake. Breitbart reports:

It is also worth noting that Chagoury’s company, the Chagoury Group, pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009, the same year the Clinton Global Initiative awarded the Chagoury Group its annual prize for “sustainable development.” The money pledged was at the heart of Sen. David Vitter’s (R) probe into whether Chagoury’s cozy relationship with the Clintons played a roll in Clinton’s State Department’s delay of a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation on Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram; an FTO classification would have severely hampered Chagoury’s business endeavors in Nigeria.

We really do not need Hillary Clinton to bring this sort of corruption into the White House.