Trina Vargo, a veteran U.S. adviser on Ireland, founded the George J. Mitchell Scholarship in 2000 Vargo said that Bill Clinton intervened in the first year of the scholarship, when Kane, whose 3.19 grade-point average was much weaker than those of the top candidates, had failed to make the final selection round. He had submitted a letter of recommendation for Kane, who had already landed an internship in the Clinton White House during his relationship with Chelsea.
Vargo said that the timing of Clinton’s call, which came while the program was choosing its 12 scholarship awardees from a group of 20 finalists, was a blatant attempt to game the selection process. “There’s no way to see that as anything other than an attempt to influence a situation that hadn’t been finalized yet,” she said.
“In light of the college admissions scandal, I don’t think it’s very unusual for people who have money or influence to use what means they have, whether it’s for their children or friends."
MIkela French, 42, who graduated from Boise State University, was also one of the Mitchell Scholars that year. She is now a criminal litigator. She said it was troubling that President Clinton would attempt to intervene in the decision process. "I think that’s cheating," she said. "If that did happen, I definitely think it’s a real shame."
"If the Mitchell hadn’t been a program that was geared towards true equality of opportunity, my application may not have been taken on its own merit," she said. "The things that I learned, the connections that I made, the amount that I grew, I have lifelong friendships and an invaluable education. I do think it was an absolutely wonderful thing to have had in my life."
“It was with some uneasiness that he rang me to say that President Clinton had just been onto him and he was very unhappy that the boyfriend of his daughter Chelsea was not among the 20 finalists for a Mitchell Scholarship,” wrote Vargo. “Mitchell made it clear that he was not asking me to do anything; he just wanted to understand the background and asked what he should say to the president.”
Vargo said: “If he had called George Mitchell after we had selected the twelve finalists just to say that the organization doesn’t know what they’re doing because they didn’t pick him, that would be fine from my perspective. The timing … it was meant to influence decisions.”
A month after Kane failed to make the shortlist, Vargo ran into Hillary Clinton at a reception at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. “It was immediately clear to me that she knew I was the person she viewed as responsible for Chelsea’s boyfriend not getting the scholarship,” Vargo wrote.“For those few seconds, her eyes closed to a slit, the way they do when one is unhappy and sizing up a person.”
Vargo was a 2008 adviser to Obama and debunked Hillary Clinton's claim to have been a central figure in the Irish peace process, a move that cemented the Clintons' disdain for her.
Bill Clinton abruptly pulled out of a speech to Vargo's organization in Belfast in April 2008, blaming a scheduling conflict and leaving her with a nonrefundable deposit for a block of hotel rooms. "I immediately suspected this was payback for the fact that Sen. Clinton's overreach on her role in the peace process had been called out," Vargo wrote.
Under Hillary Clinton, the State Department cut the Mitchell Scholarship’s $500,000 annual budget.
Vargo wrote: “In 2011, Mary Lou Hartman, former director of the Mitchell Scholarship program, bumped into [Clinton adviser Melanne] Verveer, who made clear that I was persona non grata ... Just months later, the State Department informed us they were totally eliminating all funding for the Mitchell Scholarship program in the next State Department budget.”
State Department emails found on Hillary Clinton's private server show her senior staff were attentive to the Mitchell Scholarship’s finances, which represented 0.1% of the State Department’s foreign exchange education program budget.
After Vargo tried to renew the group's funding by meeting with members of Congress, State Department aide Kris Balderson wrote to Hillary Clinton: "She will not succeed."