Hillary Clinton's Complex Relationship With Saudi Arabia

Updated December 2016

An email exchange between Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, Ms. Clinton's campaign chair provides Americans with an interesting insider's look at a little-seen side of Washington and its relationship with its Middle East partners.  

Here's the key part of the email exchange from August 2014:

Let's emphasize the key sentence:

"While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region." (my bold)

This very clearly shows us that the former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential candidate is quite aware that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are funding the world's current most-feared terrorist group, ISIL.

Now, let's take a look at two screen captures from the donor page on the Clinton Foundation's website, showing the connection between Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Clintons:

Through to the end of June 2016, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated between $10,000,001 and $25,000,000 and the State of Qatar donated between $1,000,0001 and $5,000,000 to the Clinton Foundation over the lifetime of the charity.  Please note that this donation puts the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the second highest tier of donors after the seven individuals and groups that donated over $25,000,000.  

In an additional interesting twist, John Podesta is a partner with his brother, Tony Podesta, in Podesta Group, a lobbying and media relations company that was founded by the Podesta brothers in 1988.  Coincidentally, Podesta Group provides public relations services to The Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court and, according to The Hill, the Podesta Group is being paid $140,000 per month for its services.  Here is the document submitted by Podesta Group as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act:

What can we learn from this?  I suspect that we would have seen very little of "biting the hand that feeds you" if the Clinton family had controlled the White House.  We can also better understand why she said this about the 9/11 bill to sue Saudi Arabia aka the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act:

In politics, it always pays to hedge your bets.  The Clintons learned that lesson decades ago.