Boeing’s CEO refused a shareholder request Monday to release emails between company officials and the State Department that may have been deleted from Hillary Clinton’s server.
David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research, requested the disclosure at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Monday, but was rebuffed by Boeing’s CEO, according to a press release.
Clinton has been under fire in recent months following revelations that she used a private email address for official correspondence while serving as Secretary of State, and that her staff has since deleted more than half of the messages. (RELATED: Hillary Staffers Did Not Read the Emails They Deleted)
Noting that Boeing had already successfully blocked a resolution calling on it to release correspondence it may have had with the Clinton Foundation, Almasi said, “you still have the opportunity to set the record straight that every communication between Boeing and the State Department was above board. Will you release every email and communication that Boeing officials had relating to donations to the Clinton Foundation, and with the State Department?”
While denying any impropriety, Boeing Chairman and CEO W. James McNerney, Jr. responded that the company would not release the emails unless “there is some regulatory or legal proceeding that we’re asked to become part of.”
McNerney said Boeing is “very mindful of interacting in the proper way with any charitable organizations,” but asserted that, “we feel comfortable with the donations we made” to the Clinton Foundation.
Boeing’s refusal comes less than a week after General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt likewise told shareholders that GE would not release email correspondence it had with either the Clinton Foundation or the State Department during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary. (RELATED: GE CEO: I Will Not Release State Department Emails From Hillary Clinton)
Almasi made a similar request at last year’s meeting, asking McNerney to explain a report by the Washington Post that Boeing had donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2010, just two months after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had successfully lobbied Russia to sign a $3.7 billion deal with Boeing.
Pointing out that lobbyists have gone to jail for less, Almasi asked, “Why would we risk federal charges by making a donation to the Clinton Foundation at a time when our Company had such a clear conflict of interest?” (RELATED: Hacker: Hillary Had MULTIPLE Private Email Accounts)
McNerney denied any conflict of interest then, too, saying he was “highly confident that we followed the letter and the spirit of the law,” and arguing that Clinton “would have advocated for Caterpillar’s tractors or GE’s turbines with equal fervor… with or without these few donations.”
“Boeing officials may have done nothing wrong,” Almasi stated in the press release, “but doubling down on the ambiguity as to why they felt it best to donate to the family-run foundation of a serving public official who had helped them out begs prosecutors to investigate the possibility of honest services fraud.”
“We were asking about the emails yesterday because that would be a way to protect the company in a way that the State Department may not be able to,” Almasi told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
There is a fairly low bar for prosecuting fraud under the Honest Services law, he explained, so the only sure protection for Boeing and its shareholders is to show emails exonerating its practices. But because the government’s copies of those emails may have been deleted from Hillary’s private server, the onus might be on Boeing to produce those records.
“They need to have, in our opinion, an ethical justification,” Almasi told TheDCNF. “It may be above-board, and I hope it is, but they need to justify these things.”
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