Clinton Foundation’s Ties to Qatar, Islamists under Fresh Scrutiny - Op-ed

US President Donald Trump dissatisfied with the slow process of release of the controversial emails that Hillary Clinton stored on a private server when she was the secretary of state, recently called on Secretary Pompeo to declassify these documents.

They contain a priceless, well-documented record of US foreign policy under the Obama administration.

Trump’s concern was revealing the truth about the “Russia hoax” – the narrative Hillary Clinton started pushing out in summer 2016 that her Republican challenger and his campaign had allegedly colluded inappropriately with various Russian officials to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

This chain of events later revealed the relationship between the Obama administration, the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and various US security agencies and private actors and their joint effort to promote this narrative, which even involved inappropriate surveillance of Trump and members of his campaign.

The unintended consequence of this pre-election “October surprise” for the Democrats, however, has included further revelations about unethical arrangements with Qatar involving both Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

Her emails build on the information revealed in the 2016 hack of her email, which forced Clinton to admit to accepting a $1 million donation from Qatar to the Clinton Foundation without making legally required disclosures to that effect, in what amounted to compensation for political access and influence, and what has become widely perceived as a primary example of Clinton's corrupt “pay-to-play” schemes.

The foundation remained active while Clinton remained in office as secretary of state, and by all indications, was used as a conduit for foreign-influence peddling in Washington.

The declassified emails give the readers a glimpse of the second part of the story – what Doha was receiving in exchange for its generous contributions.

In one of the emails, Clinton and Qatar could be observed making an arrangement to secure through Doha's donation to the Clinton Foundation. Doha would make a sizeable donation to the Clinton Foundation, as per the terms of the arrangement, which the Clinton Foundation would be using in part towards the support for the media in support of the Arab Spring.

This fund was dedicated in 2011 when protests over corruption broke out all over the Middle East and North Africa region. Later turned into organized mass events and riots, which had ended up toppling a number of regimes and installing Islamist parties in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and elsewhere, and leading to mass violence and chaos in Bahrain, Libya, and other countries.

The echo chamber of press outlets favorable to these events popped up at around that time, closely reflecting Al Jazeera's talking points and giving further coverage to the Islamist-leaning candidates.

President Barack Obama's tacit and active support for Islamists during his administration rested on several ideological pillars: the first was the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood was working well with Iran, and Obama did not wish to alienate Tehran while secret nuclear deal talks were ongoing.

Second, the Obama administration's intelligence agencies claimed that elected “moderate Islamists” would be an effective bulwark against violent jihadists, ignoring a number of important factors, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s history of pursuing both political and violent paths to advance its supranational Caliphate agenda, and funding violent organizations while in pursuit of political office.

It is doubtful, at this point, that the agencies could believe their claim, given that the most violent of Islamists often emerged from the same circles as the political candidates, and shared the same ideology, the same preachers, and the same texts.

Third, Obama's foreign policy agenda firmly reflected a Marxist revolutionary approach, which espoused grassroots movements and popular revolutions as the purest form of democracy, and believed in the democratic process giving the majority a voice far more than it put its faith in the US constitutional constraints against the tyranny of the majority.

It further valued the process of populist democracy far above liberal values or civic institutions or law and order required for the successful implementation of such outcomes. However, the fourth factor that should not be ignored is banal corruption among fellow travelers.

There was money to be made from continuing to work with established Islamist institutions, which, as far as the Obama administration could see at the time, were the most likely to prevail in the long run.

Al Jazeera at the time was a rising star in a changing media firmament. Popular protests against state-backed corruption and the lack of a voice to air grievances via the local media appeared to have given it some level of political legitimacy.

The good old boys’ club of intelligence agencies and their Islamist contacts in the Arab world was flourishing, and the media was benefiting too from these arrangements.

Hillary Clinton and other high-level functionaries did not wish to lose access to these actors and wanted to ensure the continuity of these promising relationships. Clinton got a glimpse of what would happen in the event these plans did not pan out when the late Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal slammed down the phone when Clinton came out in support of the Arab Spring riots in Bahrain, asking him not to send KSA's forces to put down the uprising in 2011.

Qatar's offer, therefore, was most opportune for maintaining the status quo. Qatar's involvement in the Arab Spring is by now well documented; Qatar has had a continuous policy of looking to become a dominant power in the Arab region and to weaken Saudi Arabia especially.

A leaked secret recording of the former emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, going back years before the Arab Spring, shows that the plans to destabilize the Kingdom were being put in motion long before the West had been sold the idea of “democracy imposed by revolution.”

Aside from setting aside funding for promoting the Arab Spring through various American NGOs, many of which were later thrown out of Egypt, emails reveal that there was a plan to dedicate $100 million in funding, in countries such as Egypt, to Islamist “democratic” and “independent” media backed by the US.

These media, such as Mada Masr in Egypt, function as AJ+, catering to leftist progressive agenda on one level while promoting Islamist political candidates and Al Jazeera talking points. Some of these publications are functioning to this day.

Far from merely funding these publications, however, Hillary Clinton had visited Al Jazeera and, through emails, had arranged visits with high-level officials.

The coordination between Hillary Clinton and Qatar, therefore, goes well beyond some level of political access and lobbying. A deep-rooted collision of agendas and political action and the clear influence of Doha over US foreign and domestic policy can be observed from these revelations.

Will this “October surprise” prove ruinous for the alliance between the corrupt political leadership of the Democratic party and the Islamists? Will it sway the outcome of the election? The current information may not be sufficient to turn the tide of these alliances at the current juncture, but it may and should give the American public an understanding of where the real collusion with foreign governments lay.

Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney and analyst based in New York.