Wikileaks: Hillary Clinton ditched CGI meeting despite $12 million from Morrocan King

A new batch of emails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account, and published by the organization Wikileaks, reveals the star-studded guest list for the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2015 meeting in Morocco. It also reveals that those attending, including heads of state and CEOs of major global corporations, were expecting Hillary Clinton to be there.

Article by Frances Martel

Clinton did not attend, instead spending the days of the conference campaigning in Nevada and California. Aide Huma Abedin repeatedly insists in emails published today that Clinton will be at the event, warning it would “break a lot of china” for Hillary Clinton to back out, before suggesting to Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook that Clinton would cancel her appearance at the last minute.

“No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin asserted in a November 2014 email. In a subsequent email, Abedin explained that the King of Morroco had invested millions in the meeting on the condition that Hillary Clinton would attend:

“Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If hrc was not part if it, meeting was a non-starter. CGI also wasn’t pushing for a meeting in Morocco and it wasn’t their first choice. This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. 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.

She created this mess and she knows it.”

By March 2015 – two months before the CGI meeting – Abedin was less certain that Clinton would be able to make it.

“huma said it was still happeneing [sic], then said that she’s going to cancel at the last minute but it sounded a little tentative,” Mook wrote to Podesta. “Just sounded more up in the air than I thought it was.”

Clinton never made it to that meeting, instead sending her husband Bill. The Washington Post wrote that it appeared Clinton was striving to keep her husband, a former president himself, “as far away as he could get.”