An aide says he once arranged for $50 million in payments for Bill Clinton
WASHINGTON — A close aide to Bill Clinton said he arranged for $50 million in payments for the former president, part of a complicated mingling of lucrative business deals and charity work of the Clinton Foundation mapped out in a memo released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.
The report was written by Doug Band, who has transitioned from his job as a Clinton aide to a partner in Teneo Consulting, a company whose client roster now includes some of the biggest companies in the world.
Along the way, Band wrote, he also pushed his clients and contacts to donate millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and to help win business deals for Bill Clinton.
Band wrote the memo in November 2011 to John Podesta, now chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and sent copies to other key Clinton aides, apparently to explain and justify his work in the face of criticism from others in the Clinton orbit – notably Chelsea Clinton.
WikiLeaks has been releasing thousands of hacked emails from Podesta’s account in recent weeks, revealing the rivalries and controversies roiling inside the Clinton family network as Hillary Clinton prepared to run for president.
Earlier that month, another hacked email shows, Chelsea Clinton had written Podesta, saying it was time to professionalize the foundation’s operations and complaining that her father had heard of “multiple examples of Teneo ‘hustling’ business” at Clinton Global Initiative meetings.
In the memo, Band depicts himself as the indispensable linchpin of the Clinton family’s finances even as he acknowledges that the arrangement is unusual: “We appreciate the unorthodox nature of our roles,” Band wrote.