Clinton campaign boss John Podesta paid by Adani-fight foundation

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman was being paid by a foundation funding efforts to stop the Adani coal project.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta in Washington.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman was being paid $US7000 a month by the US foundation funding efforts to stop the $16 billion Adani coal project in Queensland at the same time as he was being briefed on the anti-coal campaign in Australia.

The San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation started paying John Podesta after he switched from being Barack Obama’s counsellor to Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman in February last year, and has been seeking his assistance for anti-coal actions in India and Australia.

Mr Podesta’s payments have been revealed in the latest batch of his emails released by WikiLeaks. He has refused to confirm the payments, but the Sandler Foundation, which also funds the Sunrise Project, the Australian-based leader of the campaign against the Adani coal project, has verified the emails and said it would “pay much more” for Mr Podesta’s advice. Earlier email dumps by WikiLeaks confirmed that Sunrise was leading a foreign-funded, highly orchestrated group of Australian activists working to stop the Adani coalmine, which it is claimed will create 10,000 jobs, by influencing indigenous land owners and environmental legal challenges.

In a celebratory email to the Sandler Foundation in August last year after a decision against the Adani mine, Sunrise director John Hepburn, a former Greenpeace activist and one of the authors of a strategy to block coalmining in Australia, thanks the foundation. “Without your support, none of this would have happened,” he said.

Those emails also revealed that in May last year Mr Podesta was being briefed on attempts by Sandler Foundation-funded groups to protect their tax-exempt charity status and hide the identity of their foreign donors from the Australian parliament.

Mr Podesta also offered to help Greenpeace in India, which was also involved in a fight for charity status as it campaigned against the Indian Adani corporation.

Herb Sandler founded the Sandler Foundation after selling a family owned bank, World Savings, just before the global financial crisis. Mr Sandler, and his late wife Marion, sold the bank for $US25 billion, making a personal profit of almost $US3bn.

Mr Sandler and Mr Podesta are close friends. The Sandler family has given $4.4 million to the Clinton campaign because they “care about people and not billionaires”.

The Turnbull government has accused a “cabal of individuals and overseas activists” of trying to prevent jobs being created in Queensland. Federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan has said that the foreign-funded groups “don’t live here, they don’t understand the region, and they’re trying to ­corrupt our judicial system and our political system for their own ends”.

Senator Canavan has called for foreign-funded groups to be forced to disclose their income.

The Adani mine development, which it is claimed will help provide cheap electric power to tens of millions of poor Indians, has been delayed for at least seven years by various legal challenges, including against a rail line to the coast and the development of a port at Abbot Point.

Yesterday, GetUp!, one of the groups named in the Podesta emails fighting the Adani mine, said Senator Canavan attacked its “one million members rather than engage positively with the push to get the influence of ‘Big Money’ out of politics”. Paul Oosting, ­national director of GetUp!, said Senator Canavan was “too busy defending the interests of major Liberal National Party donors, like Adani, to try and reform the current broken situation”.