Skip to content
Breaking News Alert Justice Jackson Complains First Amendment Is 'Hamstringing' Feds' Censorship Efforts

State Department Gave Millions To Foundation Led By John Kerry’s Daughter

john kerry

Hillary Clinton isn’t the only secretary of State under the Obama administration to have familial connections to a private foundation that got millions in taxpayer dollars.

Share

Hillary Clinton isn’t the only secretary of State under the Obama administration to have familial connections to a private, non-profit foundation that has received millions in tax dollars.

Throughout Secretary of State John Kerry’s tenure in public office, his daughter’s private, non-profit organization received more than $9 million in taxpayer funds from government entities he oversaw, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Ethan Barton reports.

The money trail begins in 2012, when the Peace Corps awarded a $2 million contract to an organization now called Seed Global Health (SGH) launching a partnership with the Peace Corps and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provides 42 health educators to 13 sites in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Then-senator John Kerry — whose daughter, Dr. Vanessa Kerry, is the president of SGH — was serving as chairman on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which oversees State Department and Peace Corps spending when the contract was approved in 2012.

Internal memos reveal bureaucrats worked with Vanessa Kerry to ensure she would get the contract without having to compete for it and assured her of such in a 2011 meeting — a year before the partnership was approved. Peace Corps directors Buck Buckingham and Sarah Morgenthau and U.S. Ambassador Eric Goosby, who oversaw the State Department funding the contract, assured Vanessa Kerry her organization would get the contract by using a special grant mechanism fast-tracking the approval process.

Minutes from the 2011 meeting state: “Buck obtained clarity of the mechanism by which federal money will be provided to (SGH). . . The process can be fast tracked and non-competed through a specific grant mechanism.”

While John Kerry was serving as secretary of State, the State Department granted a four-year contract extension to SGH worth $6.4 million without competition in 2015. The extension seems to violate the Peace Corps’s own contracting policies, which typically limits non-competitive funding to five years.

The money trail raises questions about the integrity of the State Department. Its collusion with SGH is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the Clinton Foundation.

While serving as secretary, Hillary Clinton seemed to be influenced by those who wrote large checks to her family’s private charitable organization. Of the private individuals she met with, Clinton spent a majority of her time with Clinton Foundation donors. She also rearranged her schedule in order to accommodate Clinton Foundation bigwigs’ requests for meetings and favors.

Although John Kerry’s level of involvement in the deal remains unclear, at the very least his connections to the people who hold the purse strings certainly didn’t hurt his daughter’s endeavors to snag taxpayer funding for her project.