Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

Govt Tools to Deter Terrorist Travel

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Legal Tools to Deter Travel by Suspected Terrorists: A

Brief Primer

11/16/2015

FAS: The terrorist attacks in Paris last week, for which the Islamic State (sometimes referred to as ISIS, ISIL, or IS) has claimed responsibility, have renewed concerns about terrorist travel. Following reports that at least one of the perpetrators of the attacks was carrying a Syrian passport, there has been heightened scrutiny and debate concerning the resettlement of refugees from war-torn Syria to Europe and the United States. This Sidebar provides a brief overview of some (but by no means all) of the tools the federal government employs to prevent individuals from traveling to, from, or within the United States to commit acts of terrorism. In some cases, the application of these tools may depend on different factors, including whether the suspected terrorist is a U.S. or foreign national.

Terrorist Databases and Screening

Decisions by the federal government as to whether to use a particular tool to deter an individual’s travel are often informed by information collected by various agencies that link that individual to terrorism. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC)—administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—maintains the federal government’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the government’s single source repository watch list record of known and suspected terrorists. TSC provides various federal agencies with subsets of the TSDB for use in combating and deterring terrorism. Some of the many screening systems supported by the TSDB include the Department of State’s Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS) for screening of passports and visas; the TECS system (not an acronym) administered by Custom and Border Protection within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to screen and make eligibility determinations of arriving persons at U.S. ports of entry; the DHS’s Secure Flight system for air passenger prescreening; and the FBI’s National Crime and Information Center’s Known or Suspected Terrorist File. Of course, while the TSDB supplies these systems with information on the identity of suspected terrorists, these systems may also include information on individuals obtained independently from the TSDB consistent with the agency’s particular responsibilities.

No-Fly List and Selectee List

Information compiled by the TSDB may be used to deter suspected terrorists from using civil aircraft and other modes of transportation to travel to, from, or within the United States. The safety of air travel, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is an important priority for the U.S. government. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and charged it with ensuring the security of all modes of transportation, including civil aviation. Two of the most prominent means by which TSA attempts to deter terrorist travel is via two watch lists comprised of information from the TSDB – the No-Fly List and the Selectee List. Persons on the No-Fly list are prohibited from boarding an American airline or any flight that comes in contact with U.S. territory or airspace. Those on the Selectee List are subject to enhanced screening procedures.

Criminal Sanctions

Perhaps the most severe means by which to prevent persons from traveling to, from, or within the United States for terrorist purposes is through the use of criminal sanctions. A wide range of terrorism-related conduct is subject to criminal penalty under U.S. law. Many of the most relevant criminal statutes are extraterritorial in reach, covering conduct which may occur partially or (in more limited cases) entirely outside the United States. Persons who aid and abet a criminal violation may typically be held criminally liable for the underlying offense to the same degree as the person who directly committed the violation. Attempts or conspiracies to commit proscribed conduct are also typically subject to criminal punishment. Several U.S. persons accused of attempting or conspiring to assist the Islamic State, including through either encouraging others to travel abroad to join the group or planning to join the group themselves, have been charged with terrorism offenses.

Probable cause is required to arrest a person for a criminal violation, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is necessary to sustain a conviction. Law enforcement’s suspicion that a traveler may be involved in terrorist conduct (or associated with others who have terrorist ties) may not be sufficient to warrant the traveler’s arrest. As a result, government officials may sometimes deploy tools other than criminal sanctions to deter travel by persons suspected of terrorist activity.

Passport Restrictions on Travel to Specific Countries

Through the revocation or denial of passports, U.S. authorities could potentially impede the international travel of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorist involvement or association with an enemy belligerency. Federal law provides that, except as authorized by the President, a U.S. citizen may not depart from the United States and travel to another country unless he bears a valid passport. The revocation of the passport of a U.S. citizen located abroad may also have implications for his ability to remain in a particular foreign country, or travel from there to a third country. While federal statute provides that U.S. citizens also may not reenter the country unless they bear a valid passport, U.S. citizens who travel abroad appear to enjoy a constitutional right to be readmitted back into the United States.

State Department regulations identify various grounds for which passport applications may be denied or a previously issued passport may be revoked. Several such grounds may be relevant to efforts to deter international travel by U.S. citizens suspected of involvement with terrorist groups, including those permitting the denial or revocation of passports to U.S. citizens who are the subject of outstanding felony arrest warrants or requests for extradition. The regulations also provide that a U.S. citizen’s passport application may be denied or revoked when the Secretary of State “determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” However, the authority to deny or revoke passports on account of national security or foreign policy concerns is not absolute. The Supreme Court has recognized that the State Department lacks statutory authority to deny a passport solely on the basis of the applicant’s political beliefs; the denial must be based in part upon actual conduct that causes serious damage to the national security or foreign policy of the United States.

In addition to regulatory authority to deny or revoke passports, State Department regulations also permit the Secretary of State to restrict the usage of U.S. passports to travel to a country or area in certain cases – including when the Secretary has determined the country or area is a place where “armed hostilities are in progress” or there exists “an imminent danger to the public health or physical safety of United States travelers.” Such restrictions have been imposed on a number of occasions, including restricting the use of a U.S. passport to travel to Iraq from 1991 until late 2003, on account of hostilities occurring in that country and the potential dangers posed to U.S. travelers.

Immigration

Perhaps the most effective and commonly employed means to deter non-U.S. nationals (aliens) suspected of terrorist activity from traveling to the United States derive from federal immigration law. Rules governing whether and when aliens may be admitted into the United States, along with the conditions for their continued presence in the country, are primarily found in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA establishes several grounds for which an alien suspected of terrorist activity may be barred from admission into the United States, including persons seeking to come to the United States as refugees. Under INA §212(f), the President is also conferred with broad authority to act, by means of proclamation, to bar the entry of an alien or class of aliens into the United States if he deems their entry detrimental to U.S. interests, though usage of this authority has been relatively rare. While programs like the No-Fly List may prevent suspected foreign terrorists from coming to the United States via a particular mode of transportation, federal immigration rules and requirements may prevent such persons from traveling to the United States using any mode of transport.

The INA generally provides that aliens who are seeking initial admission into the country bear the burden of proving they are admissible. Moreover, judicial review of a decision by a consular officer abroad to deny an alien a visa to come to the United States, or a determination made by customs and border officials at a U.S. port of entry that an arriving alien is inadmissible on terrorism-related grounds, may be quite circumscribed or virtually non-existent. Aliens who have been lawfully admitted into the country might also be removed from the United States for the same terrorism-related reasons as aliens seeking initial admission into the country. In the case of lawfully admitted aliens, however, federal immigration authorities bear the evidentiary burden of demonstrating that the alien’s activities render him deportable before the alien may be ordered removed. There may also be greater availability of judicial review than in cases where an alien has not yet been lawfully admitted. Moreover, if a lawful permanent resident alien (sometimes described as an “immigrant”) travels briefly abroad and seeks to return to the United States, he may be afforded greater procedural and substantive protections than other aliens who attempt to travel to the United States.

Immigration rules and requirements do not apply to U.S. citizens. Whereas an alien suspected of terrorism-related travel to the United States may be barred from admission into the country, other methods would need to be employed (e.g., placement on the No-Fly List, criminal prosecution, passport restrictions) to deter U.S. citizens from traveling to, from, or within the United States for terrorist purposes.

 

 

John Kerry Said Charlie Hebdo Attacks Justified, What???

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Words matter.

Yes, and this calls for Ambassadors to be recalled. Sheesh…..Was it Kerry’s bad enunciation in French or something? Jihadi are freedom fighters fighting for a cause or jobs or climate change perhaps…. Disgusting! Demand that John Kerry be recalled. ….Something tells me the motivation in Kerry’s remarks were based in pro-Iran and anti-Israel. The sub conscience speaks.

John Kerry Justifies Charlie Hebdo Slaughter

TWS: In remarks today in Paris, France, Secretary of State John Kerry justified the terror attack earlier this year that targeted the magazine Charlie Hebdo in January. This latest attack, by contrast, was different, said Kerry.

“In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test,” Kerry said, according to a State Department transcript. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.

“This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.”

John Kerry: different from Charlie Hebdo, which had “a legitimacy…not a legitimacy, but a rational”

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Hat tip to my buddy Kyle Orton:

Kyle W. Orton‏@KyleWOrton 2h2 hours ago

The full context of Kerry’s statement on Charlie Hebdo. A horrible “rough justice” whiff to it.

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    1. 2h2 hours ago

      can’t believe he said that

       
  1. 2h2 hours ago

    Might be better if Kerry doesn’t do unscripted in future. He fell for Putin’s Active Measures over Ghouta last time.

  2. 2h2 hours ago

    “a rationale” just as bad… I pray my Country will survive the next few months until we can clean house of these incompetents.

    2h2 hours ago

    . One of the attacks were against a particular entity as retaliation for an offensive act. Don’t act like there is no difference.

 

 

Courtesy of Obama: Jihad Tourism

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Sure, not all immigrants or refugees are terrorists or connected to terrorism, but due to the fact there is no way to check and verify backgrounds from people out of the Middle East, especially Syria, it is irresponsible to even suggest all can be checked.

If one questions the pushback, then one must remember the Tsarnaev family and the Boston bombing or take a long look at Minneapolis and how that city has a history of Somalis that have left America to fight jihad.

Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19, Adnan Farah, 19, Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19, and Guled Ali Omar, 20, were arrested in Minneapolis. Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21, and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21, were arrested in San Diego after driving there in hopes of crossing into Mexico.

Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes stated that the Federal government has robust methods to verify backgrounds. That is indeed in dispute. Per Ben Rhodes, he mentioned using the National Counterterrorism Center was one of the resources, yet upon a in depth review of the website, they don’t do background checks at all.

If there is any truth at all to be told, the United Nations controls the flow and background checks of the refugees. No one wants to admit that due to the fact, an outside bureaucratic organization has control over the flow on people into countries, including the United States. The United Nations coordinates with other organizations as well including the International Rescue Committee. The UN has a wing called the Human Rights that manages who is called a refugee or those called ‘stateless’ people. In turn, the U.S. State Department has its own bureau that has charitable organizations, paid by government to place refugees in locations across the Unite States, without notice or approval of governors or mayors.

For some testimony by the State Department on the Refugee Admission Program, click here.

There is not a single person within the Obama administration that can make guarantees with full confidence that all people admitted are without any questionable background, there in lies the issue.

The White House is so panicked about so many bi-partisan governors pushing back to stop the program into their states, there is a conference call with those governors and the White House on November 17. Perhaps some will ask why no Christians but further why in America when there are other locations across the globe more conducive the migrant needs.

 

 

U.S. ‘discriminates’ against Christian refugees, accepts 96% Muslims, 3% Christians
Less than 3 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far are Christian and 96 percent are Muslim, the result of a referral system that Republican Sen. Tom Cotton says “unintentionally discriminates” against Christians.

State Department figures released Monday showed that the current system overwhelmingly favors Muslim refugees. Of the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far, only 53 are Christians while 2,098 are Muslim, the Christian News Service reported.
Mr. Cotton and Sen. John Boozman, both Arkansas Republicans, called Monday for a moratorium on resettlements, a White House report on vetting procedures, and a re-evaluation of the refugee-referral process.

“[T]he United States’ reliance on the United Nations for referrals of Syrian refugees should also be re-evaluated,” said Mr. Cotton in a statement. “That reliance unintentionally discriminates against Syrian Christians and other religious minorities who are reluctant to register as refugees with the United Nations for fear of political and sectarian retribution.”

The current system relies on referrals from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Syria’s population in 2011 was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Christian, CNS said.
At a news conference Monday in Turkey, President Obama described as “shameful” the idea of giving religious preferences to refugees, apparently referring to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s suggestion that the United States should accept Christian refugees while Muslim refugees are sent to majority-Muslim countries.
“That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” Mr. Obama said.

Figures from the State Department Refugee Processing Center updated Monday showed that 96 percent of the Syrian refugees accepted so far are Muslim, while less than 3 percent are Christian. The other 33 identified as belonging to smaller religious faiths or said they had no religion.

Ben Rhodes, Obama deputy national security adviser, said Sunday that the White House still plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees despite last week’s deadly terrorist attack on Paris. Republicans have countered that it’s all but impossible to conduct background checks on those seeking refuge.
Mr. Cotton and Mr. Boozman called Monday for a temporary moratorium on resettlements and “a requirement that the President certify the integrity of the security vetting process as a condition of lifting the moratorium.”

“The American people have long demonstrated unmatched compassion for the world’s persecuted and endangered. But when bringing refugees to our shores, the U.S. government must put the security of Arkansans and all Americans first,” Mr. Cotton said. “No terrorist should be able to take advantage of the refugee process to threaten the United States.”

 

ISIS Has 24 Hour Tech Savvy Jihad Help Desk

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Using the Darkweb is not a new weapon for jihad cells, DARPA has been working the ISIS hidden internet world for quite some time, to what success is undetermined.

ISIS Has Help Desk for Terrorists Staffed Around the Clock

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

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Authorities are now homing in on the terror group’s growing cyber capabilities after attacks in Paris, Egypt and elsewhere for which ISIS has claimed credit.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” said Aaron F. Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organization at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Brantly was the lead author of a CTC report on the Islamic State’s use of secure communications, based on hundreds of hours of observation of how the Jihadi Help Desk operates.

“They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror,” Brantly said in an interview Monday. “Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

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The existence of the Jihadi Help Desk has raised alarm bells in Washington and within the global counterterrorism community because it appears to be allowing a far wider web of militants to network with each other and plot attacks. A senior European counterterrorism official said that concerns about the recent development are especially serious in Europe, where ISIS operatives are believed to be plotting major attacks, some of them with direct assistance from ISIS headquarters in Syria.

At a congressional hearing in October, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is extremely concerned about ISIS’ increasing ability to “go dark.” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. is ” confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet.”

“While some of the contacts between groups like ISIL and potential recruits occur in publicly accessible social networking sites,” said Comey, “others take place via encrypted private messaging platforms. As a result, the FBI and all law enforcement organizations must understand the latest communication tools and position ourselves to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.”

Nick Rasmussen, director of the U.S. government’s multiagency National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview with the Combating Terrorism Center’s in-house publication that the “agile use of new means of communicating, including ways which they understand are beyond our ability to collect,” is one of his greatest concerns when it comes to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Brantly described the Jihadi Help Desk as “a fairly large, robust community” that is anchored by at least five or six core members who are technical experts with at least collegiate or masters level training in information technology. There are layers of other associates, living all around the world, who allow the service to operate — and respond to questions — at any time of the day or night. CTC researchers have spent a year or so monitoring the help desk — and its senior operatives — via online forums, social media and other means.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,” which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, Brantly said. “They are very decentralized. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

The help desk workers closely track all of the many new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online, and produce materials to train others in how to use them. The CTC has obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

ISIS also distributes the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, taking pains to link to versions of it that can be downloaded even after their social media sites are shut down.

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And once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Brantly said.

“They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies,” Brantly said. “Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”

 

 

Gotta Love Those Clintons and Hired Criminals

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Clinton Foundation Donor to Pay $95.5 Million Settlement to Justice Department

For-profit education company with ties to Goldman Sachs
FreeBeacon:

A for-profit educational corporation that has donated to the Clinton Foundation agreed to pay $95.5 million to the Obama administration as a settlement for a government lawsuit alleging that it was using illegal tactics to lure in prospective students.

The Education Management Corporation was sued by the Department of Justice in 2011 for multiple recruitment violations, including paying its recruiters based on the number of students it enrolled, and exaggerating the career opportunities that were available to graduates. The lawsuit argued that the violations made the corporation ineligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it has received since 2003.

On top of the $95.5 million settlement, the group also agreed to forgive more than $100 million in loans it made to former students, according to the Associated Press.

The Education Management Corporation contributed between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation through Brown Mackie College, one of the largest of the group’s four divisions. Goldman Sachs, which owned a 43 percent stake until it sold off much of the company to creditors last summer, has also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.

The lawsuit was filed based on information brought forth by whistle-blowers. It claimed that the corporation operated a “boiler-room style” sales team that was taught to “exploit applicants’ psychological vulnerabilities to convince them to enroll.

Among the applicants targeted by recruiters were individuals “who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs, or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer,” according to the suit.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised whistle-blowers for revealing the group’s “deceptive practices.”

“This case not only highlights the abuses in the [Education Management Corporation’s] EDMC’s recruitment system; it also highlights the brave actions of EDMC employees who refused to go along with the institution’s deceptive practices,”said Lynch at a Monday news conference.

The lawsuit alleged that the group’s aggressive recruitment practices were geared toward raking in as much government aid as possible.

Although the group agreed to the settlement, it admitted no wrongdoing and said it agreed to pay the penalty based on a desire to put “these matters behind us” and focus on educating its students.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement, but its ties to the for-profit education industry go beyond the Education Management Corporation.

The Laureate International Universities, a group of for-profit schools partially owned by the liberal billionaire George Soros, has also contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton is paid an undisclosed salary to be “honorary chancellor” of the schools, and has been described as the “face” of the massive university group.

Also contributing to the Clinton Foundation is the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, and has been criticized for aggressively targeting veterans with G.I. Bill money to spend on education. The University of Phoenix received more than $1 billion through the G.I. Bill between 2009 and 2014, but only 16 percent of its students graduate within six years.

Kaplan, which paid a $1.3 million settlement to the Justice Department in 2014 for using unqualified instructors, also contributes to the Clinton Foundation. It was specifically targeting “African-American women who were raising two children by themselves” in the hope that they would drop out after the federal funding based on their enrollment had already been received.

Despite the Clintons’ extensive ties, Hillary Clinton has spoken out against the for-profit industry on the campaign trail for targeting “service members, veterans, and their families with false promises and deceptive marketing.”

The Clinton campaign also did not return a request for comment. *** Don’t go away yet, there is more….more criminals.

FreeBeacon is still on the case….

Numerous former board members and trustees of a charity group cofounded by Bill Clinton have been accused of or convicted of insider trading, campaign finance violations, and other illegal schemes.

The American India Foundation is one of several nonprofit groups in Bill Clinton’s charitable orbit, although it has received less attention than the Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs.

The group was founded in 2001 “at the initiative of President Bill Clinton following a request from Prime Minister Vajpayee” in order to help with the recovery efforts after the Gujarat earthquake. It is currently run by CEO Ravi Kumar.

AIF was co-founded by Clinton and former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta in 2001. Clinton continues to serve as honorary chairman of the council of trustees, according to the website.

Gupta, a Clinton donor, was convicted of passing illegal trading tips to another former AIF trustee—Raj Rajarantam—in the highly-publicized 2011 case that took down the Galleon hedge fund. Gupta is currently serving out a two-year prison term and was last listed as co-chairman of the AIF board in 2010.

Gupta’s legal team highlighted his work with AIF and Bill Clinton during his sentencing.

“Rajat worked with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Victor Menezes, former Senior Vice Chair of Citigroup, to found the American India Foundation (AIF),” said his attorneys in a sentencing memo. “Under their leadership, within its first year AIF raised millions of dollars to support earthquake relief efforts.”

However, Gupta is just one of many current or former members of AIF leadership who have been embroiled in headline-grabbing legal controversies over the years.

Rajarantam, the former head of Galleon and also an early member of AIF leadership, was sentenced to 11 years in prison—the longest sentence ever handed down in an insider trading case—in 2011 for allegedly using illegal stock tips to amass a $63 million fortune.

Former AIF trustee and hotelier Sant Chatwal, pled guilty in 2014 to a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. He was accused of illegally funneling $180,000 through straw donors to political candidates, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Federal investigators reportedly recorded Chatwal talking to an informant about using contributions to influence politicians.

“Without that nobody will even talk to you. When they are in need of money…the money you give then they are always for you,” he said. “That’s the only way to buy them, get into the system. … What, what else is there? That’s the only thing.”

The Hampshire Hotels president was sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine, according to his attorney. He is still listed as a New York trustee on the AIF website.

Chatwal’s son, Manhattan socialite Vikram Chatwal, has also been an AIF trustee. He was charged with felony drug trafficking in 2013 after police say he tried to board a plane carrying heroin, cocaine and illegal prescription pills. The charges were dismissed after he completed a yearlong rehab program.

Natel Engineering, a company owned by former AIF trustee Sudesh Arora, pleaded guilty to contract fraud in 1993. The company was ordered to pay a $1 million fine for neglecting to test computer parts in military equipment it sold to the U.S. military.

InfoUSA founder Vinod Gupta, a former early AIF board member, was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with misappropriating company funds in 2010. According to a lawsuit filed by InfoUSA shareholders in 2006, Gupta spent company money on private flights for the Clintons. Bill Clinton also reportedly earned over $2 million working as a consultant for Gupta’s company.

Gupta stepped down from InfoUSA and agreed to pay a $7.4 million settlement in 2010.

Tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, a former AIF trustee, was found to have violated insider trading laws in a civil suit in 2003 and ousted as CEO of InfoSpace.

A current AIF trustee, CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings Prem Watsa, is reportedly under a civil investigation in Canada for insider trading, along with others at the company. Fairfax said it is cooperating with the probe and denied any wrongdoing.

The foundation has also honored Ramalinga Raju, the head of the now-defunct Satyam Computer Services, a company that has been dubbed “India’s Enron.” Raju was sentenced to seven years in prison in April after he was convicted of carrying out one of the largest corporate frauds in India’s history. His sentence was suspended in May pending appeal.

AIF did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A spokesperson for Bill Clinton was reached and did not comment.

Attorneys for Vikram Chatwal, Arora, and Rajaratnam could not be reached. Sant Chatwal’s attorney confirmed the details of his sentencing; the others did not return requests for comment.

AIF brought in $6.9 million in 2013, and spent just over $7 million, according to tax records. It currently has a two out of four star rating from Charity Navigator.

The charity supports education initiatives, anti-poverty programs, and disaster relief efforts in India and says it has “chang[ed] the lives of more than 2.3 million of India’s less fortunate.”

Through its high-profile fundraising events, AIF has provided a networking platform for business leaders, Hollywood stars, and political figures.

Earlier this month, the group honored Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide, at a fundraising gala in Washington, D.C.