The allegations in Peter Schweizer's hit piece,
Clinton Cash, basically go like this: Company or country gives donation to the Clinton Foundation or hires former President Bill Clinton to give a speech, then gets preferential treatment from Hillary Clinton's State Department. Schweizer never has any proof of linkages, and in a lot of cases he doesn't have proof of preferential treatment at all, as in the uranium mining deal in which the State Department was
one of many agencies to sign off and Hillary Clinton was never involved in the decision. Now Buzzfeed is flagging an instance where Schweizer
didn't just exaggerate wildly, but got the facts wrong.
Schweizer claims that an Irish company got $2 million in telecommunications contracts in the Haitian earthquake recovery effort after having paid Bill Clinton $600,000 for speeches, and that these contracts were the first time the company had gotten USAID contracts.
But according to Clinton spokesperson Matt McKenna, neither the former president nor the Clinton Foundation was paid for two of the three speeches Clinton gave in Ireland, and that while the Foundation did receive a donation following his Sept. 29, 2010 speech, Clinton himself was not compensated. [...]
Schweizer’s contention that Digicel had not received USAID grants prior to its involvement with Clinton also appears to be incorrect. According to federal records, Digicel received more than $29,000 in contracts from USAID in 2007 and 2008.
Also, an additional speech was given a year before Digicel got its first USAID contract, not weeks before as Schweizer alleged.
This is exactly the kind of screw-up Schweizer has been making for years, except that from his point of view, they're not really screw-ups. Schweizer doesn't need to be right, he just needs to be plausible enough to get the media to cover his claims prominently—the corrections and retractions won't be as prominent, so he will have gotten his story out. As a Republican operative, that's his goal. But his book was published by HarperCollins. Will the publishing house be offering a retraction or correction on this?