Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

If Obama’s Legal Team Wins, Your Church May Lose

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If you have never been to the Supreme Court to hear cases argued, they are fascinating. This week, there is an case regarding marriage of gays. The oral presentations and responses by the U.S. Solicitor General and his staff would have you shaking your head. So, if you would like to read the transcripts which is for sure suggested, here is the document.

But when it comes to the SCOTUS decision on fundamentally redefining the institution of marriage, it could trickle down to your personal church losing. That fundamental transformation of America is underway, without so much as a whimper for you.

Obama Admin: Religious Organizations Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status If Supreme Court Creates Constitutional Right to Same-Sex Marriage

When arguing before the Supreme Court, a lawyer normally takes pains to convince the Justices that ruling in his or her favor in that particular case would not have dramatic consequences elsewhere. In Hobby Lobby, for example, Paul Clement urged that exempting his clients from part of HHS’s contraceptive mandate would not open the doors to a flood of other exemptions. Or in DC v. Heller, Alan Gura argued that the Court’s recognition of the Second Amendment’s personal right to own ordinary firearms would not entitle people to own “machine guns” or “plastic, undetectable handguns.”

A similar dynamic was seen, sometimes, at yesterday’s oral arguments in the same-sex marriage cases, Obergefell v. Hodges. Lawyers arguing that same-sex couples should have a federal constitutional right to state marriage licenses suggested that establishing such a right would not result in ministers being forced to conduct same-sex marriages. “No clergy is forced to marry any couple that they don’t want to marry,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Mary Bonauto told Justice Scalia. “We have those protections” under the First Amendment.

But given that such concerns surround this case — say, for wedding photographers or cake bakers — it was rather stunning to see Solicitor General Verrilli leave open the door to what could be the most significant consequences to eventually flow from the creation of a constitutional right to same sex marriage: namely, that religious organizations could eventually lose their tax-exempt status if they do not embrace the new constitutional right.

Such concerns are based on the Supreme Court’s approach in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), where the Court held that the IRS could strip two private religious schools of their tax-exempt status because the schools maintained racially discriminatory policies abhorrent under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bob Jones University, for example, prohibited its students from inter-racial dating.

“Entitlement to tax exemption depends on meeting certain common-law standards of charity,” wrote the Court; “namely, that an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.” To receive a tax exemption, the institution must “demonstrably serve and be in harmony with the public interest.” And because, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education thirty years earlier, America had adopted “a firm national policy to prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in public education,” neither the Tax Code nor the First Amendment allowed the schools to receive tax benefits while maintaining their repugnant racist policies. The Court’s analysis was correct in that case, given how well-established and widely respected the constitutional right against racial discrimination was. But how would the IRS and courts apply such themes in other cases, involving other constitutional rights?

To that end, in recent years some have asked whether the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage as a fundamental constitutional right could have similar impacts on religious organizations that refuse to participate in or otherwise support same-sex marriage.

Liberal proponents of same-sex marriage rights have tried to downplay those concerns. Writing in Slate two years ago, Emily Bazelon argued that States’ recognition of same-sex marriages would not affect religious organizations’ tax-exempt status, at least not until “we’re as united about the pernicious nature of anti-gay discrimination as we are about racial discrimination.” (“Maybe we should be there,” she added, “But I don’t need to tell you we’re not.” Not yet.)

But that is, of course, the core theme in favor of same-sex marriage rights: that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is no less fundamental than a right to inter-racial marriage. It has been at the heart of same-sex marriage litigation for years.

Surely the question of IRS tax exemptions came up at the “moot court” practice sessions preparing the Solicitor General for yesterday’s oral argument. If the Administration wanted to assure the Justices that the IRS — either its current leadership, or under a future Administration — would not strip, say, Catholic charities of their tax-exempt status, then the Solicitor General would have a well-rehearsed answer. Especially in light of the Obama administration’s treatment of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, not to mention the Administration’s efforts — rejected unanimously by the Court — to use federal regulations to trump religious’ schools doctrinal authority.

But when Justice Alito posed this obvious question to the Solicitor General, Mr. Verrilli offered no reassurances:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?

GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I — I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I — I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is — it is going to be an issue.

Wait, the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations is “certainly going to be an issue?”

One would have preferred that the administration could have sorted this “issue” out ahead of time. If the scenario really were as far-fetched as Bazelon and others suggest, then it would have been easy for the Obama administration to simply say so.

And so it will fall to the Justices to grapple with the issue before announcing any broad new constitutional right. They took such pains in Hobby Lobby, in Heller, and in other such cases. We can only hope they’ll do it again here.

 

War in Afghanistan is NOT over, Forbids Release of Detainee

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Finally some real truth from the Department of Justice?

Especially compelling is the notion that this detainee is from Yemen, a country that is over-run with an AQAP militant faction as well as the Houthi, an Iranian terror group presently engaged in hostilities with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, where the United States is playing an intelligence role.

Muktar Yahya Najee al Warafi is a 40- or 41-year-old citizen of Yemen. As of April 27, 2015, he has been held at Guantánamo for 12 years 11 months. As of January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force had recommended him for transfer to Yemen provided that certain security conditions were met.* The Department of Defense assessment of this detainee can be found here.

The Justice Department Just Declared That the War in Afghanistan Is Not Over

The war in Afghanistan is not ending, US government attorneys said in court documents unsealed Friday, undercutting statements President Barack Obama made last December and in his State of the Union address a few weeks later when he formally declared that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”

But Obama didn’t really mean that the war was over, the government now argues.

“Simply put, the President’s statements signify a transition in United States military operations, not a cessation …” Andrew Warden, a Justice Department attorney, wrote. “Although the United States has ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, the fighting there certainly has not stopped.”

Warden made the argument in a 34-page motion (viewable below as a PDF) filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia in response to a legal challenge by Guantanamo detainee Mukhtar Yahi Naji al-Warafi. The detainee asked a federal court to grant his writ of habeas corpus and set him free because Obama said the war in Afghanistan is over and the legal authorization the US has relied upon to hold him for the past 13 years is no longer valid.

Muktar Yahya Najee al Warafi

“The government’s position is incoherent,” David Remes, al-Warafi’s Washington, DC-based attorney, told VICE News. “The president says the war is over. The brief says the war isn’t over and will never be over. And the government says they are being consistent with what the president said. They are twisting the president’s own words. Obama was clearly making the point that the war was over, that hostilities have ended.”

Al-Warafi, a Yemeni national held by the US solely on the basis of his alleged Taliban membership, is one of a handful of Guantanamo captives who have filed so-called end of hostilities challenges in federal court arguing that Obama’s formal declaration signifying an end to the war in Afghanistan paves the way toward their immediate release from Guantanamo.

“Since the US war with the Taliban in Afghanistan is over, the government has to let a Taliban-only detainee go. There’s no need to debate whether the US war with other groups is over,” Remes told VICE News last month when he filed the habeas petition.

But the Obama administration is now arguing that the US military is still very much engaged in hostilities in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that the war there is unlikely to end anytime soon. Justice Department attorneys have filed hundreds of pages of documents to support their conclusion.

‘The president says the war is over. The brief says the war isn’t over and will never be over.’

Because the fighting is ongoing, the US argues they can continue to detain al-Warafi and other prisoners at Guantanamo under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), in which Congress granted the president the power to detain certain prisoners “under the law of war without trial until the end of hostilities.”

The government goes on to argue that, despite Obama’s statements declaring an end to the war in Afghanistan, Congress did not repeal or amend the 2001 AUMF, indicating that lawmakers are in agreement with the executive branch that “hostilities have not ceased” and the power to indefinitely detain war on terror detainees is on solid legal ground.

The government said al-Warafi has misinterpreted Obama’s statements about the Afghan war’s conclusion and has failed to understand that the “relevant inquiry is whether active hostilities have ceased not whether a particular combat mission has ended.”

“The President has not declared that active hostilities against al-Qaeda, Taliban have ceased or that the fighting in Afghanistan has stopped,” Warden wrote in the government’s motion. “Rather, the President’s public statements made clear that, in light of the continuing threats faced by the United States in Afghanistan, counterterrorism and other military operations would continue even after the end of the combat mission … [Al-Warafi’s] motion should be denied because active hostilities against al-Qaeda, Taliban and associated forces remain ongoing and have not ceased.”

Marty Lederman, a Justice Department attorney during Obama’s first term, opined in a blog post last month when al-Warafi filed his habeas petition that if the government argued that hostilities in Afghanistan are not over, then “the court would then be confronted with at least two fundamental questions: (i) What are the criteria for determining whether an armed conflict has ended, for purposes of international law (which in turn affects AUMF and other domestic-law authorities)? And (ii) who decides?

“As for the substantive question of how to determine when the conflict has ended, well… it’s very complicated, to say the least,” Lederman continued. “The intensity and regularity of hostilities between the relevant parties would certainly be important determinants. If, for example, the US and the Taliban rarely exchange fire (or other forms of attack) for an extended period of time, it would become increasingly difficult to sustain the notion that the armed conflict continues between those parties.”

The attorney added that “there’s no easy formula that explains where, exactly, to draw the line separating ‘war’ from ‘the end of the conflict,” and that the question “is typically determined by the political branches.”

The Justice Department attorneys argue that the US can still hold al-Warafi even while the administration is trying to fulfill Obama’s campaign pledge to shutter the Guantanamo detention facility and repatriate dozens of detainees by the end of the year before Congress implements measures to block transfers, according to a report published last week by the Washington Post.

The government’s position in al-Warafi’s case could conflict with Obama’s larger goal of permanently shutting down the detention facility.

“This goes beyond whether Obama closes Guantanamo or keeps it open,” Remes said. The government’s brief “is one with the administration’s position that it can detain its captives in the war on terror indefinitely. The brief provides a rationale for continuing to hold detainees captured when there in fact was a war.”

Last month, Obama announced that, at the request of Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, the US would slow the withdrawal of military personnel from the country and leave about 9,800 troops, “at 21 military bases across Afghanistan,” according to the court documents.

And if there is any doubt that US military will continue fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda, the government secured a sworn declaration from Navy Rear Adm. Sinclair M. Harris, the vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that while the US combat mission in Afghanistan known as Operation Enduring Freedom has formally ended, the US military has “commenced a new support and counterterrorism mission” in the country, dubbed Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.

Operation Freedom’s Sentinel “is executed under specified rules of engagement that delineate the circumstances and conditions under which the U.S. forces may engage [redacted],” Harris wrote, noting that the 9,800 troops who will stay behind in Afghanistan will be used to support the new mission.

Harris even laid out the timeframe for when “hostile engagements” the US will participate in will begin, which he said demonstrates why the US still considers Afghanistan “as an area of active hostilities” and why al-Warafi is wrong to assume that the war is over and he should be released.

“The height of ‘fighting season’ in Afghanistan generally lasts from April until October,” he said. “Although it is difficult to predict with specificity, it is probable that instances of hostilities between the United States and enemy forces in Afghanistan will increase throughout the coming months.”

A decision in al-Warafi’s case is expected later this year. If you want to read the DoJ’s legal findings, click here for the full document.

Muslim Brotherhood Pay-rolled by Clinton Foundation

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Per the Muslim Brotherhood website:

The  Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is reporting that Gehad El-Haddad, described as “spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood”, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2103 case known as “the media trial”.

April 13, 2015 On April 11, 2015, Gehad El-Haddad, spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood, was sentenced to life imprisonment in case 317 for the year 2013 known as “the media trial”.
Fourteen defendants received death sentences while thirty seven including Gehad were sentenced to life in prison. Among the convicted are 15 journalists and spokespersons.


According to the case evidence list (pp. 25 – 26, excerpts attached in Arabic), the evidence against Gehad is that he “conducted three interviews for the New York Times, an American TV channel (PBS), and a Spanish newspaper (Elmundo)”.
In the NYT interview, Gehad said that the MB group came “close to annihilation once under Nasser, but this is worse.” He also added that the crisis “is creating a new tier of youth leaders” and that this “happened at Rabaa.”
El-Mundo published a lengthy interview with Gehad in Spanish in which he said “we remain committed to non-violence and will continue the peaceful struggle to restore democracy.” He also added that he cannot give in to offers that exchange the freedom of the country with personal safety and that he “would rather die for the country he wishes to live under the tyranny of a dictator.”
“I’m a wanted man for saying my opinion and for standing politically in opposition to the coup” these were Gehad’s statements to the PBS. He added “They’re trying to wipe the existent, decapitate the Muslim Brotherhood. And they can’t do that. It’s an idea. You can’t kill an idea”.
Gehad’s family will appeal the verdict.
In August 2013, the GMBDW reported on the arrest of Gehad El-Haddad by Egyptian security forces. At the time, we noted that although we were the first and only Western source known to have reported on El-Haddad’s employment by the Clinton Foundation, mainstream media reports mentioning this employment failed to credit the GMBDW.

Gehad El-Haddad, the the son of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Haddad, was a Senior Adviser on Foreign Affairs to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ‘s Freedom and Justice Party, a position he held since May 2011. His resume also says that he was is a Senior Adviser & Media Spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a Steering Committee Member of the Brotherhood’s Renaissance (Nahda) Project. Mr Haddad was also the Media Strategist & Official Spokesperson for the presidential campaign of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Gehad El-Haddad’s resume reports that he was the City Director for the William J. Clinton Foundation from August 2007 – August 2012. Among his duties at the Foundation were representing the Foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative in Egypt, setting up the foundation’s office in Egypt and managed official registration, and identifying and developing program-based projects & delivery work plans.

*** It came down to Human Abedin, whose own family is deeply steeped in the Brotherhood and Sisterhood movement in Egypt and Qatar.

A senior Muslim Brotherhood operative recently arrested in Egypt worked for years at the William J. Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation has also received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and a foundation that is an Iranian regime front.

The current Egyptian government, which was put in power after the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, has launched a sweeping crackdown on the Brotherhood and calls it a terrorist organization. One of the senior officials arrested is Gehad (Jihad) el-Haddad.

From 2007 to 2012, el-Haddad was the Egyptian director for the Clinton Foundation. El-Haddad’s father is Essam el-Haddad, a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau.

POTUS sides with Turkey, Ignoring Armenian Genocide

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The first holocaust of the century began April 24, 1915, 100 years ago. The Turks slaughtered the Christians.

In both historical and more publicistic writing, the term “genocide” has been used rather promiscuously to apply to mass repression of political opponents, real or imagined. When the Genocide Convention was being debated at the United Nations in the late 1940s, the Soviet representatives strenuously held out against extending the term to political killings, which would of necessity have included Stalin’s purges, the millions lost in dekulakization, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the deadly settlement of Kazakhs, and the deportations of North Caucasians and other peoples during World War II. The American delegates also resisted any language in the convention that might be turned toward examination of racial segregation and the violence perpetrated against African Americans during the era of Jim Crow. In the interests of unanimity, political, social, and economic groups were not included in the protections of the convention that was adopted by the United Nations on December 9, 1948.

ISTANBUL      According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.


In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number – and its Ottoman source – has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.
“Nothing,” said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.
The silence can mean only one thing, he said: “My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren’t ready to talk about it yet.”


For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.
Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.

At the hands of Talaat Pasha, orders were delivered to massacre entire villages. Much later when it came to surviving children, a translated and digitized cable reads as such:

January 15th, 1916

To the Government of Aleppo:

We are informed that certain orphanages which have opened also admitted the children of the Armenians.

Should this be done through ignorance of our real purpose, or because of contempt of it, the Government will view the feeding of such children or any effort to prolong their lives as an act completely opposite to its purpose, since it regards the survival of these children as detrimental.

I recommend the orphanages not to receive such children; and no attempts are to be made to establish special orphanages for them.

Minister of the Interior,
TALAAT.

(Undated.)

From the Ministry of the Interior to the Governor of Aleppo:

Only those orphans who cannot remember the terrors to which their parents have been subjected must be collected and kept.

Send the rest away with the caravans.

Minister of the Interior,
TALAAT.

On eve of anniversary, Ottoman massacres of Armenians ‘not genocide,’ says Erdogan
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as genocide. Turkey, however, has insisted that the toll has been inflated, and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest, not genocide.

*** Obama agrees, as the historical slaughter of a Christian sect he ignores.

President Barack Obama is once again stopping short of calling the 1915 massacre of 2 million Armenians a genocide.

That’s prompting anger and disappointment from people who have been urging him to fulfill a campaign promise and use that politically significant word on the 100th anniversary of the massacre this week.

“President Obama’s surrender to Turkey represents a national disgrace. It is, very simply, a betrayal of truth, a betrayal of trust,” Ken Hachikian, the chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, said.

Officials decided against calling the massacre a genocide after some opposition from the State Department and Pentagon.

Hillary Clinton Foundation and Uranium

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Primer:

The Russian reset via Hillary appears to be uranium and Putin’s control of the same. Reminder, Russia sells uranium to ahem….Iran.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rA-vSIIyz9I#t=51

Sheesh, almost by the hour news breaks on the Clinton Foundations(s) where fraud and collusion are bubbling to the surface.

Last week Newsweek broke a story about InterPipe owned by Victor Pinchuk of Ukraine whose financial worth is estimated at $4.2 billion. He is quite close to the Clintons and generous with his money to their Foundations in exchange for policy decisions at the State Department. As an aside, Pinchuk is tied to Tony Blair, Paul Krugman, Shimon Perez, Dominique Strauss Khan, Larry Summers and well yes, even Elton John.

When it comes to Hillary’s run for the Oval Office, these actions may be coming out too soon given election day in November of 2016, but this could all be a good thing as money going into her campaign may slow to a crawl. It should also be noted that the Gowdy Benghazi Commission reports are not slated to be published either until the height of the election season in 2016.

Now let us move on to uranium and Hillary.

Gifts to Hillary Clinton’s Family Charity Are Scrutinized in Wake of Book

State Department sat on panel that approved sale of mine involving contributor to foundation

Hillary Clinton’s State Department was part of a panel that approved the sale of one of America’s largest uranium mines at the same time a foundation controlled by the seller’s chairman was making donations to a Clinton family charity, records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The $610 million sale of 51% of Uranium One to a unit of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, was approved in 2010 by a U.S. federal committee that assesses the security implications of foreign investments. The State Department, which Mrs. Clinton then ran, is one of its members.

Between 2008 and 2012, the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, received $2.35 million from the Fernwood Foundation, a family charity run by Ian Telfer, chairman of Uranium One before its sale, according to Canada Revenue Agency records.

The donations were first reported in “Clinton Cash,” a new book by Peter Schweizer, an editor-at-large at a conservative news website, about the financial dealings of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. A copy of the book, set to be released next month, was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The book is to be published by HarperCollins, a division of News Corp. NWSA 0.23 % , which also publishes the Journal.

The book adds fresh details to previous reporting by the Journal and others about potential conflicts between Mrs. Clinton’s private charitable work and her public activities as secretary of state. The Journal reported in February that at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Josh Schwerin, a campaign spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for Democratic presidential nomination, said the Uranium One sale “went through the usual process, and the official responsible for managing CFIUS reviews has stated that the secretary did not intervene with him. This book is twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories.”

The campaign on Wednesday also provided a comment from Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state who served as the department’s principal representative on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which reviewed the sale. “Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter,” Mr. Fernandez said.

In response to past questions about possible conflicts, Mrs. Clinton has said she is proud of the foundation’s work. Earlier this week, she called the book a distraction from real campaign issues.

Mr. Telfer, in an interview Wednesday, said he made the contributions not for the sake of the Clintons, but to support his longtime business partner, Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining executive and longtime Clinton friend who co-founded the program to spur development in poor countries.

“The donations started before there was any idea of this takeover,” Mr. Telfer said. “And I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton would have been aware of this donation to this growth initiative,” he added.

The Fernwood contributions don’t appear on the Clinton Foundation website, as was required under an agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. A Clinton Foundation spokesman referred questions to the Clinton-Giustra program spokeswoman in Canada, who didn’t respond.

Under the terms of the sale, the company said it wouldn’t seek an export license to send uranium out of the country, and that executives at the U.S.-based unit would control the mine, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report. Uranium One, now a fully owned subsidiary of the Russian nuclear agency, owns a 300,000-acre mine in Wyoming and could produce up to half of the U.S. output of uranium this year. Some members of Congress at the time wrote to the committee calling on it to block the sale.

The Journal confirmed some other instances detailed in the book about Mrs. Clinton’s official activities and her family charity.

In June 2009, the Clinton Giustra initiative received two million shares in Polo Resources, POL 1.33 % a mining investment company headed by Stephen Dattels, a Canadian businessman, according to a Polo Resources news release. About two months later, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh pushed the energy adviser to that nation’s prime minister to allow “open pit mining,” including in Phulbari Mines, where Polo Resources has a stake, according to a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. The company seeking to develop the mine is still waiting for government approval, according to the firm’s website.

It isn’t known whether the Clinton-Giustra program still owns the shares. Neither Mr. Dattels nor his foundation nor Polo Resources are listed as donors by the Clinton Foundation website. Mr. Dattels, who retired in 2013, and representatives for Polo Resources couldn’t be reached for comment.

Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who heads a mobile-phone network provider called Digicel, won a $2.5 million award in 2011 from a program run by the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development to offer mobile money services in post-earthquake Haiti. The firm won subsequent awards. Funds for the awards were provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while USAID administered the program, with a top Clinton aide directly overseeing earthquake aid.

Mr. O’Brien has given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation since its launch. It is unclear whether Mr. O’Brien gave while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department because of the way the foundation discloses its donations.

A USAID spokesman said the company met the criteria laid out in the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative. A spokesman for Mr. O’Brien said he couldn’t be reached and declined to comment. The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to request for comment on Polo Resources or Mr. O’Brien.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at [email protected] and Peter Nicholas at [email protected]