WASHINGTON • The latest trove of Hillary Clinton emails includes a push in 2009 for a meeting between then-Secretary of State Clinton and top officials of St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the now-bankrupt company that was trying to expand its global footprint at the beginning of the Obama administration.
The meeting was requested by well-known St. Louis-area Democratic operative Joyce Aboussie, who gave the Clinton Foundation between $100,000 and $250,000, records show.
Aboussie mentioned her connections with former Rep. Dick Gephardt, the one-time leader of the House Democrats who is now a lobbyist whose clients have included Peabody.
She did not mention her contributions to the foundation in the string of emails, but she did mention the “relationship” she and Gephardt had with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“I really would appreciate your help on this,” Aboussie wrote to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin on June 8, 2009, about five months after Clinton became secretary of state. “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s.”
It is unclear if the meeting ever took place. Peabody had no immediate comment.
The Peabody-related documents were part of a new cache of Clinton emails revealed Monday by the conservative group Judicial Watch. The group portrayed the Aboussie email as illustrative of how donors to the Clinton Foundation — a global nonprofit set up by Bill and Hillary Clinton — sought favors with Clinton while she was secretary of state.
Judicial Watch said that the “Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as secretary of state.”
Aboussie and Gephardt did not respond to messages left at their offices.
Clinton’s campaign said she did nothing to favor donors to the foundation.
“Once again this right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s is distorting facts to make utterly false attacks,” Josh Schwerin, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said in an email. “No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog, Peabody paid Gephardt’s lobbying firm $600,000 in 2009 and in each of the following two years, with annual amounts ranging from $240,000 to $540,000 since then.
Aboussie’s email of June 8, 2009, came about two months after Peabody Vice President Cartan Sumner had written Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s special assistant, requesting a meeting between Clinton and Peabody Chairman and CEO Gregory H. Boyce, and Peabody’s Senior Vice President of Government Relations Fredrick D. Palmer.
Peabody was described as “the world’s largest private sector coal company” with mining operations in the United States and Australia, and “more than 300 customers on six continents.”
The company’s coal fueled 10 percent of the U.S. electricity generation, and 2 percent of the world’s, the April 1, 2009, letter said. Sumner’s email said that “Peabody is advancing the development of clean coal technologies around the world,” mentioning projects in China and Australia.
“In particular, we would look forward to updating the secretary on Peabody’s clean energy and sustainability initiatives in the U.S., Australia and Asia as well as our ongoing interaction with senior officials with the governments of China and Mongolia,” Sumner’s April email said.
Aboussie sent her email two months later to remind Clinton’s subordinates of the request.
“Huma, I need your help now to intervene please,” she wrote. “We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months.”
Abedin that same day emailed Valmoro, Clinton’s secretary: “Assume u have this on your plate already? We need to discuss.”
There was no indication in the Judicial Watch release Monday if the meeting took place.
Peabody asked for bankruptcy protection in April. It reported a net loss of $235.5 million in the second quarter of 2016, while overall revenue at the country’s largest coal miner fell 22 percent, to $1.04 billion for the quarter.
This month, Peabody said its lenders had approved a five-year business plan as a first step to emerging from bankruptcy, and it has reached deals with several states that sets aside money for mine cleanup obligations.
President Barack Obama’s administration and big coal have been at odds over the administration’s clean-air policies that coal supporters say unfairly target their industry, threatening the production of electricity in coal-dependent states like Missouri.
And Clinton herself is under frequent attack by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who seized on Clinton comments last spring that her clean-energy policies would put coal workers and coal companies out of business.
Clinton attempted to walk the statement back, expressing concern for coal workers, but many attribute her loss to rival Bernie Sanders in the West Virginia primaries to that comment.
Jacob Barker and Kevin McDermott of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
Election 2016 from St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Chuck Raasch • 202-298-6880
@craasch on Twitter
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