EXCLUSIVE: Clinton Foundation Got $100M From ‘Blood Minerals’ Firm

A little known Swedish-Canadian oil and mining conglomerate human rights groups have repeatedly charged produces “blood minerals” is among the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors, thanks to a ($100 million pledge) in 2007, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.

“Blood minerals” are related to “blood diamonds,” which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords.

When the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group gave its $100 million commitment to the “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative,” the company had long been cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships in the war-torn African countries of Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia.

Lundin promoted its reputation as a fierce, hard-driving company. Adolf Lundin, who founded the company, (audaciously traveled) to the French home of Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1996 to secure mining rights for his company. A few years later, Lundin admitted he had offered a “donation” to Mobutu’s “elections campaign,” but later said he never gave the funds.

Some cross-referencing on the Congo angle of this item--I have bolded an item that makes for interesting comparison with the book Clinton Cash (see How Do You Spell Apparent Fraud? The Clinton Foundation, Shady Accounting, and AIDS):

Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity

Background: Joseph Wilson in Africa

Wilson began his State Department career in Niger from 1976 to 1978 and later served at various African posts, notably Congo (aka Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville) from 1986 to 1988 and Gabon from 1992 to 1995. He left the State Department in 1997 to serve a year as National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for African Affairs, where his duties included organizing a visit by President Clinton to Africa in March 1998 to promote a bill which would increase US investment in Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Wilson retired from government service in July 1998 and opened J.C.Wilson International Ventures Corporation, which advised American and foreign companies seeking to invest in African oil, telecommunications, and gold.

Wilson’s activity in Africa involved interaction between US and French interests on both a personal and a political level. Wilson had entered diplomatic service partly because he was interested in France and was hoping for a job that would take him to Paris, and most of his State Department assignments were in French-speaking parts of Africa. While stationed in Burundi from 1982 to 1985 he met a Frenchwoman named Jacqueline Marylene Giorgi.¹³ Giorgi had been raised in Africa and had returned there to work with the French Ministry of Cooperation (Ministere de la Cooperation aka MINCOOP), the equivalent of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which handles nonmilitary aid to foreign countries.¹⁴ In Burundi she worked with the French embassy as a “cultural counselor”,¹⁵ a position often used as a cover by France’s equivalent to the CIA, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieur (DGSE).¹⁶ Jacqueline M. Giorgi became Wilson’s second wife on July 1, 1986,¹⁷ just as he was beginning his assignment in Congo, where she would work at the World Health Organization while he worked with the US State Department.¹⁸

Congo’s economy was dominated by the influence of the French oil company Elf Aquitaine (aka Elf, a successor to a series of French oil companies and in turn succeeded by TotalFinaElf in 2000 and Total in 2003). In 1979 France had installed Congo’s President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a cousin of Gabon’s ruler Omar Bongo, who had risen to power in the 1960s while in the pay of French intelligence and had since then supported French intelligence operations in Africa and secured Elf access to one of its major oilfields.¹⁹ Sassou-Nguesso was a Marxist and received Soviet military support, but Wilson decided that Sassou-Nguesso’s government was not “the rigidly Communist regime that the American right wing liked to set up as a bogeyman” and that “his acumen and wisdom outweighed his communist background”. Against the reservations of more conservative members of the State Department, Wilson encouraged Washington to involve Sassou-Nguesso in negotiating peace in nearby Angola, where a Soviet-backed regime was fighting an insurgency backed by the CIA and French intelligence. Wilson felt that the insurgency was the main barrier to peace in Angola, and he worked with Sassou-Nguesso and later with Bongo and the Clinton administration to facilitate a peace process which had the effect of entrenching Angola’s regime against its opposition.²⁰ Meanwhile Angola emerged as one of the fastest-growing oil producers in Africa, spurring both competition and partnership between US companies--particularly Chevron, a partner of Saudi Aramco--and Elf.²¹

Interaction between US oil companies and Elf also figured into Wilson’s assignment in Gabon from 1992 to 1995. In Gabon one of Wilson’s priorities was to encourage President Bongo to support increased investment by US oil companies in Gabon’s oil industry, up to then dominated by France via Elf.²² Occidental Petroleum, linked to the financial interests of then-Vice President Al Gore, soon won several contracts in Gabon, and Occidental and other US oil companies also began increasing their influence in other parts of Africa. This increased US presence in Africa’s oil industry provoked rivalry with Elf in Gabon and elsewhere.²³ The French ambassador to Gabon Louis Dominici began encouraging the press to report that Wilson was an agent of US interests and an enemy of Gabon’s regime, which Wilson countered by cultivating closer ties with Bongo.²⁴ Wilson worked with Bongo to advance the peace process in Angola and to press for human rights reforms in Equatorial Guinea,²⁵ another emerging oil producer where France was competing for influence with Spain.²⁶

Meanwhile Bongo was also active in events in Congo involving Elf interests. In August 1992, just as Wilson began his assignment in Gabon, there was a regime change in Congo. With Soviet influence retreating from the region, Congo’s population was calling for Bongo’s cousin Sassou-Nguesso to allow free elections. Bongo and the French, seeking to give the appearance of allowing reforms without actually losing control, decided to play both sides by financing the Presidential campaign of Sassou-Nguesso’s rival Pascal Lissouba. But in a move unanticipated by the French, Lissouba, short on cash to pay his civil servants and troops, cut a deal with Occidental for funding in exchange for granting Occidental $150 million in future production rights. Alarmed at the prospect of Occidental competing for one of Elf’s most vital oil supplies, the French pressured Lissouba to cancel the deal with Occidental. After Lissouba cancelled the deal, Elf and French intelligence continued providing him ostensible support against Sassou-Nguesso’s forces, using La French Intercontinental Bank for Africa (FIBA), which was jointly owned by Bongo, to help Belgian arms dealer Jacques Monsieur launder payments for weapons sales from Russia and Iran to Lissouba’s supporters. However at the same time Elf was arming Lissouba, it was also secretly arming Sassou-Nguesso for a return to power. With assistance from Angola, supported by the French and the Clinton administration, Sassou-Nguesso overthrew Lissouba and became President again in 1997, during Wilson’s term as NSC Senior Director of African Affairs.²⁷

At the NSC, Wilson capped off his career of government service by organizing Clinton’s historic visit to Africa in March 1998. Clinton’s trip was intended partly to encourage a policy of increasing US imports of African oil, a policy encouraged by State Department spokesman James Rubin’s announcement that “Angola will soon be supplying 10 percent of U.S. oil imports, which is considerably more than Kuwait before the Gulf war.”²⁸ Clinton’s policy was also being promoted by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), a group whose events were heavily financed by oil interests.²⁹ Wilson was highly active in promoting the investment policies favored by the Clinton administration and the CCA, as one observer recalls:

During the Clinton administration, this editor operated a web site about Africa and Wilson served on the National Security Council as a senior director for African affairs, for one year, June 1997-July 1998. As a result, this editor, at the time also a member of the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), got to observe Wilson playing out his National Security Council role. In all candor, this editor was skeptical about his motives then, and remains so. The CCA at the time was dominated by oil interests. It still is.
Wilson's service on the National Security Council happened during a period when the Clinton administration was urging American businesses to get more deeply involved in Africa and was urging Congress to push forward legislation known as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which ultimately passed, but during the Bush administration. It was also a period when it was becoming patently clear to the Clinton administration that coastal Africa, especially Atlantic coast Africa, was awash in oil. One need only go back through the archives to see how many times Secretary of State Albright pointed this out to the Congress and the American people to validate how excited the Clinton administration was about African oil. Clearly they saw an alternative building to Mideast oil. My memory says Madam Albright and her team bragged with excited breath how Africa's oil exports to the US were at seven percent and would increase to 13-15 percent within the foreseeable future.
The problem was the Clinton team was dealing with rogues, such as those who ran Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Congo Republic. Nigeria had a ruthless military dictator, and while the Clinton administration took certain actions against Nigeria, it refused to place an embargo on its oil. Angola was run by a former Soviet ally and well-known ruthless and corrupt Marxist-Leninist dictator, Eduardo dos Santos. In 1993, while Wilson was ambassador to Gabon, an oil rich country run by a French puppet, Omar Bongo, Clinton declared dos Santos the legitimate president of Angola even though he had not won a run-off election against Dr. Jonas Savimbi, an election required by Angolan law. Angola is arguably as oil rich or more oil rich than Nigeria. In 1997, during Wilson’s tour of duty at the Africa desk in the National Security Council, Angola invaded the Congo Republic and, supported by France, overthrew the democratically elected government of President Pascal Lissouba and replaced him with Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a friend and relative through marriage of President Omar Bongo of Gabon.
Throughout all this, Wilson pranced about Washington telling Americans in business that Africa is the next great "Coming" in business and that they should hasten there to invest. You might recall that Clinton visited Africa, the first sitting president to do so. On Clinton’s return to the US, a gala extravaganza was thrown at a swanky Washington hotel to celebrate the great achievements of the trip, and Wilson paraded about the stage like a high school cheerleader at a championship basketball game singing the praise of Africa as a haven for investment. I recall standing there in amazement, am[a]zed that a nation of the stature of the US would have people like this acting so childishly and so unprofessionally on their stage. African diplomats in the audience did all they could to hold in their omlets.
Just after Wilson played “Madison Avenue Mister” building up Africa as a place to invest, from his perch in the National Security Council, he resigned and nearly instantly started a firm known as JC Wilson International Ventures, Corp., a firm specializing in Strategic Management and International Business Development.³⁰

As this quote indicates, after Wilson retired from his career of government service in Africa in July 1998, he began profiting from increased US interest in Africa. So did Jacqueline Wilson.

1. Jacqueline Wilson’s African interests

In the wake of Clinton’s trip Gabon’s President Omar Bongo prepared to visit the United States, hiring as lobbyists the French-American politician Pierre Salinger of the public relation firm Shandwick Public Affairs, along with Jacqueline Wilson.³¹ According to records filed with the US Department of Justice in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), on June 17, 1998, while Joseph was in his last month of service as NSC Senior Director for African Affairs, Jacqueline registered as a lobbyist for Bongo. FARA records show that Jacqueline received at least $790,000 from Gabon for lobbying services related to AIDS policy and other issues from 1998 to 2002, including $100,000 received prior to her registration in June 1998 and $250,000 in the first half of 1999. Meanwhile, in July 1998 Joseph Wilson retired from government service early at the age of 48, leaving behind an estimated $125,000-a-year job for a reduced pension of approximately $50,000 a year,³² minus any alimony and child support payments, plus income from Plame’s CIA salary and from a new business Wilson launched at that time, J.C. Wilson International Ventures Corporation. The financial terms of the Wilsons’ divorce settlement are unknown. A curious fact is that in one public record posted on a genealogy website the name “Jacqueline C. Wilson” is listed with a phone number [(202) 342-9888] associated with 4612 Charleston Terrace NW in Washington, DC,³³ a home the October 8, 1998 Washington Post records as recently being purchased from Barry Zuckerman Properties for $735,000 by Joseph Wilson and “Valerie E. Wilson”.³⁴ Wilson’s book states that he and Plame purchased this home in May 1998 after being married for one month.³⁵

2. Joseph Wilson’s African interests

At the time Jacqueline divorced him and began lobbying for Gabon, Joseph Wilson retired from government service and launched J.C. Wilson International Ventures Corporation, a business development and management company that aimed to capitalize on Wilson’s diplomatic contacts by advising companies seeking to invest African gold, oil, and telecommunications. As Wilson described it:

I opened a “boutique” consulting business to help American and international companies invest in Africa. Risk assessment, project development, and strategic management were my focus, as I wanted to take the lessons of my foreign service years and put them to use managing businesses in an international setting. . .My list of clients was small. . .my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. . .I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa--including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields--as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector. Oil from Africa was emerging as an alternative to oil from the Persian Gulf, with new discoveries in Angola and Equatorial Guinea fueling a surge of interest.³⁶

Elsewhere a profile article on Wilson added:

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