(Headline USA) For years, speculation has swirled about the Clintons’ role in a relief effort for a 2010 Haitian earthquake.
Now, a recent Homeland Security investigation may prove to be the missing link in explaining their true motives.
The Haiti mission, which drew in bipartisan support from the two Bush presidents who bookended Clinton, as well as then-President Barack Obama, promised to redefine the post-presidency.
But it failed to live up to its promise, and ultimately many blamed the corrupt power-couple at its center.
“A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that’s for sure,” Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC in a 2016 retrospective. “The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them.”
Some—including GOP candidate Donald Trump, during his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, have speculated that the Clinton Foundation’s work in the impoverished nation was little more than a massive money-laundering operation.
“I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida,” Trump said during his third debate with Clinton. “And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons, because what’s happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace.”
But in light of the recent evidence linking Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious “Pedophile Island” and Hillary Clinton to the suspected child sex-trafficking ring brought to light by the 2016 Pizzagate scandal, the arrest of a long-suspected child abuser who founded and ran an orphanage on the island may offer new answers.
Michael Geilenfeld, 71, an American who founded an orphanage in Haiti in 1985, was charged this week with travelling to the Caribbean country to sexually abuse minors.
Geilenfeld previously sued a Maine activist over accusations he abused boys in Haiti, calling the claims “vicious, vile lies,” before an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI led to an indictment contending he traveled from Miami to the island nation “for the purpose of engaging in any illicit sexual conduct with another person under 18.”
Geilenfeld has not yet entered a plea and his attorney, Robert Oberkoetter, has declined to comment on the charges. But in the petition seeking Geilenfeld’s release, Oberkoetter wrote that a federal grand jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, had already investigated his client in 2012.
The jury subpoenaed Geilenfeld’s travel documents, including those involving the time period at issue in the new case, and interviewed witnesses about allegations of pedophilia and child abuse, but did not indict him, Oberkoetter said.
Authorities in Haiti have long investigated sex abuse allegations against Geilenfeld and arrested him in September 2014 based on allegations made against him by a child advocate in Maine, Paul Kendrick.
Kendrick accused Geilenfeld of being a serial pedophile after speaking to young men who claimed they were abused by Geilenfeld when they were boys in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital where he founded the orphanage in 1985.
Geilenfeld called the claims “vicious, vile lies,” and his case was dismissed in 2015 after he spent 237 days in prison in Haiti. At some point, Geilenfeld and a charity associated with the orphanage, Hearts for Haiti, sued Kendrick in federal court in Maine. The suit blamed Kendrick for Geilenfeld’s imprisonment, damage to his reputation and the loss of millions of dollars in donations.
Kendrick’s insurance companies ended the lawsuit in 2019 by paying $3 million to Hearts with Haiti, but nothing to Geilenfeld.
According to the Miami Herald, at one point Geilenfeld was living in the Dominican Republic country where he was arrested in 2019 and then ordered deported to Haiti after Haitian authorities re-issued a warrant on child sexual-abuse allegations and demanded he appear before a judge.
“Instead of being sent to Haiti, he was allowed to reenter the United States on a flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, with the help of the U.S. State Department and the embassy in Santo Domingo,” the Herald reported.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
