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On 12 July 2017, the Miami Herald covered the death of former Haitian official Klaus Eberwein, news that soon developed into an version of the Clinton Body Count political urban legend. In the original article, the Herald reported that Eberwein held the position of director general of Haiti's economic development agency (fonds d’assistance économique et social, or FAES) from May 2012 until his replacement in February 2015. According to the report, Eberwein had subsequently struggled and worked as an Uber driver, presumably to make ends meet: The portion of the article that caught the attention of conspiracy blogs was about allegations of fraud and corruption faced by Eberwein about FAES' management of funds. The paper made no mention of Clinton or the Clinton Foundation: By 14 July 2017, internet sleuths got wind of the news and, perhaps inevitably, built on it: A separate blog post on the same day summarized the Herald's report, then made an uncited and unsourced claim about Eberwein's scheduled appearance at a 18 July 2017 hearing: The outlet originally reported that Eberwein was slated to appear in relation to a probe into the management of PetroCaribe funds, the money Haiti receives from Venezuela’s discounted oil program. We were unable to find a credible link to Eberwein's involvement in the hearing; the same unsourced claim was repeated by a blog called the Haiti Sentinel. However, many readers citing that site failed to recognize that the Haiti Sentinel article came after the other pieces, and that it based its claims upon them: As it turns out, however, the article from YourNewsWire from which the Haiti Sentinel piece was written is suspect, containing a quote from Eberwein — the only part of the article that linked him to the Clintons to begin with — that was actually spoken by someone else: Someone did say that outside Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan in November 2016, but YourNewsWire appears to have, for some reason, confused one person of Haitian descent with another. The actual person who spoke this phrase is a community activist and New York area radio host named Dahdoud André, and this comment originally appeared in a BBC article: André, despite the attempts to stir suspicion, remains very much alive as of July 2017, and pointed out to us that Eberwein had nothing to do with any protests against the Clintons that he had helped organize. (It appears YourNewsWire took some liberties with the false quote as well, weaving Donald Trump's assessment of the Clinton Foundation into André's.) As we have noted before, allegations about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and corruption in Haiti are not new, nor are they fully substantiated: In 2014, Eberwein lamented slow progress in Haiti following a 2010 earthquake, despite an outpouring of aid to the country, and claims about the Clintons' influence in Haiti are not limited to career Clinton critics. In 2015, Politico reported: The Clintons' role in what was frequently framed as a bungled-at-best relief effort was described in a September 2016 Slate piece: The claim about Eberwein's purportedly suspicious suicide bore a strong resemblance to similar rumors involving former U.N. official John Ashe in 2016. Ashe purportedly died before he could testify against Clinton in the summer of that year. Although insiders have repeatedly stated that Ashe was never scheduled to testify against Clinton, his name regularly appears on lists of those allegedly murdered by the Clintons or their associates. Before news of Klaus Eberwein's suicide was reported on 12 July 2017, no reports said or even hinted that any probe in which he was involved targeted Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation. The claim originated on the frequently disreputable YourNewsWire.com, and was uncritically repeated and amplified by readers and blogs. However, we have found no specific information tying Eberwein to Clinton before his July 2017 death. We attempted to contact both the original Herald writer as well as Sen. Evalière Beauplan to verify the link or lack thereof, but have not yet received a response from either.
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