The fax machine struggle wasn’t the only odd tidbit to come out of the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails. It also appears that Hillary received a favor from a Clinton Foundation donor while she was Secretary of State.
Towards the end of the 3,000-page bundle of emails from her secret, off-books e-mail account is this back and forth between Clinton and her support staff:
At first blush, it seems a little odd that the CEO of the Knight Foundation and Chairman of the Newseum Freedom Forum, Alberto Ibargüen , would be willing to let Hillary Clinton host a State Department event at the swanky museum for free, but then things get even weirder.
In case you forgot, this is the same Knight Foundation that, along with roughly a dozen other media organizations, came under fire in April for their donations to the Clinton Foundation. According to Politico, the Knight Foundation gave between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years.
Upon closer examination, it seems that Ibargüen and the Clinton Foundation like to help out the same charities. The Knight Foundation has donated over $215,000 to TECHO, an organization aimed at reducing poverty in Latin America. Some of those funds were given to the organization upon Ibargüen’s request, tax records reveal. TECHO’s website lists the Clinton Global Initiative as an associated organization, and the Clinton Global Initiative’s website reveals that the Clinton organization also supported TECHO’s work in the past.
TECHO submitted 6 H1-B visa requests in 2014, all of which were accepted.
The demand for H1-B visas has far outstripped supply over the last several years. This year, there are 233,000 applicants for 85,000 visas. Immigration attorneys have helped companies file multiple applications for the same person, in anticipation that some would be rejected, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Which brings us back to the event at the Newseum: Clinton spoke about internet freedom and promoted competitive grants the State Department was planning to give to the “best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need.”
If you’re not sure what exactly that means, Hillary Clinton didn’t seem like she did either. In e-mail exchanges between Clinton and her staff, the former Secretary of State remarked that a draft of the speech made her sound like a “techie (which is good, albeit a stretch).”
In April, The Federalist reported that the Clinton Foundation only spent 10 percent of its budget on charitable grants. The Clinton Foundation also had to refile its tax returns earlier this year after failing to disclose foreign donations while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
