King of Morocco paid $12 million for Clinton visit

WASHINGTON—Shortly before Hillary Clinton kicked off her presidential campaign she struck a $12 million pay-to-play deal with the king of Morocco, according to emails newly released by WikiLeaks.

In January 2015, several of Clinton’s top aides discussed an upcoming trip to Morocco in exchange for a $12 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. Campaign manager Robby Mook emailed campaign chairman John Podesta and Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin, to say Clinton was having second thoughts about making the visit so close to the campaign kickoff.

“She created this mess and she knows it,” Abedin responded, referring to Clinton. “Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If [Clinton] was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.”

The emails suggest King Mohammed VI of Morocco agreed to host a Clinton Global Initiative event and make the hefty donation with the condition that Clinton deliver the meeting’s keynote address, in May 2015.

Clinton’s staff knew the meeting would look bad, with her presidential campaign set to kick off in April. Mook suggested they find a way out of making the trip while still keeping the donation.

Abedin said in the email chain the deal was Clinton’s idea and it was too late to back out because the Moroccans believed they were doing it at Clinton’s request.

“The king has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting,” Abedin said. “It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months.”

Clinton ended up skipping the meeting, but her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, went instead and secured the donation.

This is not the first time the former secretary of state has been linked to a pay-to-play scandal. Her critics say donors—many of them foreign governments—gave money to the family charity in exchange for access to Bill or Hillary Clinton, or possibly preferential treatment from the U.S. State Department during her 2009-2013 tenure.

During the final presidential debate, before news of the Morocco donation leaked, moderator Chris Wallace asked Clinton about the alleged corruption of her family’s charity. She dodged the question and redirected to the Clinton Foundation’s work fighting AIDS and other diseases.

“I am happy, in fact, I’m thrilled to talk about the Clinton Foundation because it is a world-renowned charity, and I am so proud of the work that it does,” she said.

But after the latest emails surfaced, her campaign couldn’t slip past the controversy quite as easily. During Fox News Sunday, Wallace asked Mook how the new emails don’t verify a classic pay-to-play scenario.

“There’s nothing new here,” Mook replied, and then tried to deflect to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s poor poll numbers.

But Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward told Wallace there’s no way Mook can honestly believe this isn’t a scandal.

“The mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department which she ran are all intertwined,” Woodward said. “And it’s corrupt. You can’t just say it’s unsavory.”

While campaigning last week, Trump used the leaked emails to attack his opponent.

“Even as she was preparing to run for president, WikiLeaks emails show, Hillary was trying to get $12 million from the King of Morocco in yet one more pay-to-play scheme,” he said.

The leaked messages come from Podesta’s hacked email account. WikiLeaks claims it has more than 50,000 of Podesta’s messages. The site has posted about half of them so far.

The Clinton campaign has not confirmed whether the emails are legitimate but has yet to deny their authenticity. After the latest release, a Clinton spokesman accused WikiLeaks of playing favorites in the presidential race.

“WikiLeaks makes its Trump endorsement official—not that it was a secret prior to now,” Brian Fallon tweeted.