Former top Clinton Foundation staffer Doug Band wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta warning him that a probe into Chelsea Clinton’s use of “foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade” could hurt the entire organization, according to a Wikileaks email dump.
“The investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents,” Band wrote to Podesta in a January 2014 email.
“I hope that you will speak to her and end this,” Band said, adding, “Once we go down this road….”
The mention of Chelsea Clinton using “foundation resources for her wedding” evokes, however oddly, Hillary Clinton’s March 2015 comments about how she turned over any emails “that could possibly be work-related,” excluding only emails related to her family funeral arrangements or Chelsea’s wedding plans.
Band, who had served as a top aide to President Bill Clinton in the nineties and assisted in creating the Clinton Global Initiative, was writing to Podesta and top Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills to address “chatter” he claims Chelsea Clinton and her chief of staff Bari Lurie were engaging in.
“I have heard more and more chatter of cvc and bari talking about lots of what is going on internally to people,” Band wrote referring to Chelsea Clinton by her initials CVC.
The “chatter,” Band wrote, concerned “a call” that he received “from a close friend of [Bill Clinton] who said that cvc told one of the bush 43 kids that she is conducting an internal investigation of money within the foundation from cgi to the foundation.”
“The bush kid then told someone else who then told an operative within the republican party,” Band wrote, adding that Chelsea’s alleged gossip was “not smart.”
Band’s emails were the result of a particularly contentious clash between him and Chelsea Clinton. Their burgeoning power struggle was apparently in regards to increased concerns about conflicts of interest within the Clinton Foundation and in the direction the charity was headed.
The clash between Band and Chelsea Clinton was likely intensified by an internal review — apparently requested by Chelsea — of the Clinton Foundation which revealed that even the charity’s own employees gave it poor marks for effectiveness, rating it at a four or lower on a scale of 1 to 10.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson
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