Emails recently released by the Obama administration expose just how intertwined was Clinton’s State Department, her family’s non-profit, and a controversial consulting firm called Teneo Holdings.
From Daily Caller
All three entities had close ties to Dow Chemical, the multinational chemical manufacturer headquartered in Midland, Mich.
Emails released by the State Department — some of which were provided to the watchdog group Citizens United — show that Dow’s CEO, Andrew Liveris, had such access to Hillary Clinton that he was able to personally pass the then-secretary of state a letter in 2010 that he hoped would help his company as it faced a political firestorm in India.
The emails also show that Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s former body man and a Clinton Foundation adviser, reached out to Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, to inquire on Liveris’ behalf about the letter, which was intended for Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister at the time.
The document concerned the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, which led to the deaths of 8,000 rural Indians. Dow Chemical bought the faulty pesticide plant from Union Carbide in 2001. But activists and some Indian politicians wanted Dow to be held responsible for the tragedy. Liveris hoped to limit the company’s exposure.
At the same time that Band was leaning on Hillary Clinton via Abedin, he was in the final stages of creating Teneo Holdings, a consulting firm that would later have Dow Chemical as a client and former President Clinton as an “honorary chairman.”
The connections
J.T. Mastranadi, the political director at Citizens United, said that emails his group obtained show that the Clintons cultivated relationships like the one with Liveris and Dow for financial and political gain.
“It appears that part of the Clinton mission during the four years at the State Department was finding ways to keep big donors engaged for the future,” Mastranadi told The Daily Caller.
Dow has donated heavily to various Clinton Foundation projects. In 2007, the company guaranteed $30 million in loans through the Clinton Global Initiative to build water systems in India. And in 2011, Dow’s charity donated $5.2 million to the Clinton Global Initiative to help develop a science and technology learning program for young girls.
Liveris has appeared at several Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative functions. He also loaned Bill Clinton a Dow company airplane to help out with a humanitarian mission in 2009 to free two American citizens from North Korea.
Dow paid even more money to Teneo than it did to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. And it is the Clintons’ relationship with the consulting firm that padded the former first family’s pockets.
Reuters reported last year that Dow paid Teneo $2.8 million in 2011 and another $16 million in 2012. During that same time period, Bill Clinton was set to be paid $3.5 million as honorary chairman at Teneo, which Doug Band co-founded with Declan Kelly, a former Hillary Clinton campaign financier and State Department appointee.
Kelly’s multiple roles in the Clinton orbit expose another potential conflict of interest.
Kelly, who was appointed by Clinton as the State Department’s special economic envoy to Northern Ireland in 2009, was paid $2.4 million by Dow, Politico reported earlier this year.
And he appears to have been working on Dow’s behalf at the same time he was at State. In March 2011, Kelly was quoted in a news article as Liveris’ spokesman. He left the State Department that May.
Huma Abedin, who is now vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, also pulled double duty. She was hired by Teneo in 2012, while still at State and while she held a position at the Clinton Foundation.
Teneo benefited enormously from its relationship with Bill Clinton.
“They used the Clinton connection to launch it,” a former Teneo employee told Politico. “The pitch was: ‘Yes, we’ll be just as good as anybody else at doing the substantive work that you need a consulting firm to do for you — but we’re going to bring all these relationships to the table at the same time.”
Clinton reportedly kept only $100,000 of the $3.5 million because of the controversy that later erupted over his relationship with the firm.
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