Subject: Re: Scarborough says Algeria donated to Clinton Foundation when it wanted off 'terror list' | PunditFact
From: Adrienne Elrod <[email-masked]>
To: Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>
Cc: Josh Schwerin <[email-masked]>, hrcrapid <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 18:51:13 -0400
List-Id: <hrcrapid.googlegroups.com>

Really great.

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 28, 2015, at 6:47 PM, Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>
wrote:

excellent!

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:43 PM, Josh Schwerin <[email-masked]
> wrote:

> Scarborough’s claim rates False.
>
>
> http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/28/joe-scarborough/scarborough-says-algeria-donated-clinton-foundatio/
>
> Scarborough says Algeria donated to Clinton Foundation when it wanted off
> 'terror list'
>
> Television pundits are raising a lot of questions about *foreign
> government donations*
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html?hpid=z2>
> to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of
> state.
>
> But not everyone get all the details right. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s *Morning
> Joe *flubbed describing the situation in the April 27 show.
>
> He was discussing *a column*
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sloppiness-and-greed/2015/04/24/e4d53446-eaa9-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html>
> by the *Washington Post*’s Ruth Marcus, whose op-ed highlighted an
> unreported donation to Bill Clinton’s foundation by Algeria in 2010 as an
> example of sloppiness. The donation, and others like it, raises questions
> about whether Clinton went "soft" on Algeria for contributing to her
> husband’s cause under the appearance of earthquake relief in Haiti, Marcus
> wrote.
>
> Scarborough said the situation will "stink to high heaven" even if it’s a
> legal gray area.
>
> "I think it was Algeria, maybe, that had given a donation that went
> unreported at a time when they wanted to be taken off of the terror list in
> the State Department," Scarborough said. "They write the check, they get
> taken off the terror list. ... At the same time, and then it goes
> unreported by the Clinton Foundation."
>
> "Is there a quid pro quo there? I don't know, that's really hard to tell,"
> he said.
>
> Scarborough went on to break down to his panelists how easy it would be to
> explain to voters what might have occurred.
>
> "This is pretty simple stuff. So Algeria is on the terror list, they want
> off the terror list, the State Department's making a decision to do it,
> they write a check for what? How much? How many million dollars do they
> write a check for? I don't know, but Algeria writes a check. You're from
> Boston, you know how politics works. They write a really big check to the
> Clinton Foundation," Scarborough said. "The Clinton Foundation takes the
> check, and then just, out of nowhere the State Department then decides,
> well, they are going to take Algeria off the list. Now why did Algeria
> write a big check to the Clinton Foundation at the time they want something
> from the State Department? That's pretty simple for most voters."
>
> The problem with all of this isn’t the donation, or questions about a quid
> pro quo with Algeria. It’s the fact that Algeria wasn’t ever on the terror
> list. (*Media Matters*
> <http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/04/27/msnbcs-scarborough-invents-algerian-terror-conn/203435> first
> pointed out what Scarborough said.)
>
> *An ally against terror*
>
> The list Scarborough mentions is a serious designation given to just four
> countries the State Department considers *state sponsors of terrorism*
> <http://www.state.gov/j/ct/list/c14151.htm>: Syria, Iran, Sudan and Cuba.
> President Barack Obama is poised to *remove Cuba*
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/world/americas/obama-cuba-remove-from-state-terror-list.html>
> from the list as a show of improved diplomatic relations. (Libya, Iraq and
> North Korea are the only countries that have been removed.)
>
> Algeria is actually a key partner of the United States in fighting
> terrorism in North Africa and "has a long history of fighting terrorism,"
> the *State Department says*
> <http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2013/224823.htm>.
>
> The country spent about 20 years locked in a civil war between the
> military and various Islamist groups after an Islamist group won a 1991
> election that was scrapped. The country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika,
> lifted a state of emergency in April 2011.
>
> But the country continues to *struggle with radical violence*
> <http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/170479.pdf> in neighboring
> countries. Algeria was attacked by the group that calls itself al-Qaida in
> the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb almost 200 times in just 2013 in the form
> of improvised explosive devices, bombings, kidnappings, and fake roadblocks.
>
> *Human rights violations hamper relations*
>
> The Algerian government is not a state sponsor of terror. But its hands
> are not clean when it comes to human rights, which is most likely what
> Scarborough was trying to recall on air.
>
> The *Washington Post* story that revealed the Algerian embassy’s donation
> of $500,000 also mention that the one-time gift coincided with increased
> lobbying visits to the State Department about human rights violations.
>
> In 2010, Algeria spent more than $420,000 lobbying American officials on
> inter-country relations and on "human rights issues," the *Post* found,
> citing documents filed as part of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The
> year also saw an increase in meetings between State Department officials
> and lobbyists representing Algeria, growing from "a handful" of recorded
> visits in the years before and after to 12 visits in 2010, the *Post*
> reported.
>
> The Algeria donation came soon after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake in
> Haiti, the *Clinton Foundation said*
> <https://www.clintonfoundation.org/press/facts#sthash.CbslGu5F.dpuf>. It
> was unsolicited and went to the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund,
> "where the entire amount of Algeria’s contribution was distributed as aid
> in Haiti." Algeria had not donated before and has not donated since, a
> foundation spokesman said.
>
> The foundation acknowledged it did not alert the State Department about
> the gift for vetting, which was required under a memorandum of
> understanding between the Obama administration and the Clintons in an
> effort to prevent foreign governments from trying to curry favor with
> Hillary Clinton’s State Department by donating to Bill Clinton’s
> philanthropy.
>
> So what are the human rights issues Algeria was lobbying on?
>
> Reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the State
> Department outline the activities of a strict authoritarian government that
> represses its people’s freedom of assembly and association, overuses
> pretrial detentions, and employs a judicial system that is susceptible to
> corruption.
>
> The State Department’s 2010 report of human rights issues in Algeria
> highlights more issues including reports of arbitrary killings, the
> government failing to account for people who disappeared during the civil
> war in the 1990s, violence and discrimination against women, and continued
> restrictions for workers’ rights.
>
> The *government of Algeria*
> <http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/nea/154458.htm> has resisted
> inspections by independent human rights groups.
>
> MSNBC's Diana Rocco said Scarborough deserves some credit for indicating
> he "wasn’t sure it was" Algeria, and that the exchange that followed
> "clearly shows he’s using it as a hypothetical scenario to make his larger
> point about how the quid pro quo scenario may have unfolded."
>
> None of that, though, means that Algeria was on the terror watch list in
> the first place.
>
> Neither Algeria nor other governments revealed to have given to the
> foundation — Australia, the Dominican Republic, Kuwait, Norway, Oman and
> Qatar — are sponsors of terrorism, either.
>
> *Our ruling*
>
> Scarborough was trying to recall the details of a news story about Clinton
> Foundation donations from foreign governments when he brought up Algeria’s
> donation to the foundation to try getting off the "terror list."
>
> There are parts about the donations that may not look good for Clinton.
> Maybe it becomes a legal problem, maybe it’s just a political one. But to
> claim the foundation took donations from a country on the terrorist list is
> inaccurate.
>
> Scarborough’s claim rates False.
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
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