Haiti’s top diplomat in the U.S. is fired after a passport scandal in the Washington embassy

Haiti has fired its ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, following investigations by the U.S. and Haitian governments into a kick-back corruption scheme inside its Washington embassy involving the illegal issuance of passports, a Haitian government official confirmed to the Miami Herald.

The decision to dismiss Edmond, who was abruptly called back to Port-au-Prince this week, was made Wednesday by Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Henry sent an assessment mission to its embassy in Washington last month following allegations that embassy staffers were producing passports for Haitians living outside the United States and charging bribes to expedite them as part of an unsanctioned scheme.

Edmond, who did not respond to Herald request for comment, has denied any wrong-doing. In a one-page statement he released Thursday, he called the allegations against him “far-fetched.”

He pointed fingers, instead, at his former boss, Claude Joseph, who served as both interim prime minister and foreign minister of Haiti under the late President Jovenel Moïse. Joseph told the Herald that when he learned about the corruption allegations, he did what he had to and ordered an inquiry by the ministry of foreign affairs.

The corruption first came to light when Joseph was in charge of the foreign ministry. In June of 2021, U.S. Customs officials seized several packages with a total of 400 passport applications from Haitian nationals living in Chile and cash totaling $50,000. The FedEx packageswere addressed to the personal residence of Gélorme Juste, who was Joseph’s cousin and who was serving at the time as head of the consular section of the Haitian embassy in Washington.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection document shared with the Herald showed, for example, that after agents seized one of the packages, they sent Juste a letter dated Aug. 18, 2021 informing him that they had intercepted the documents and a cashier’s check for $10,200 addressed to his home in Maryland.

The package was seized, CBP said “because an attempt was made to smuggle or clandestinely import the monetary instruments into the commerce of the United States, by falsely declaring the description and/or value on the shipper’s manifest.”

During this time, the Haitian government, informed by U.S. officials, had already launched its own investigation into the issuance of passports. The allegations that a parallel office in the Washington embassy was issuing official passports outside of the control of the Haitian government was later confirmed in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs 40-page report that evolved out of the August 2021 inquiry.

The report, obtained by the Herald, laid out the scheme, and said Juste, the head of the consular section, did not act alone. Investigators said several people interviewed implicated Edmond and other individuals including a sister of the ambassador, Betyna Edmond.

She had “unlimited access,” the report said, to the passport manufacturing unit and was present at the embassy “every week, from Thursday to Sunday” even though she was no longer a government employee.

Betyna Edmond did so, the report said, “under the lax or complicit gaze of Ambassador Edmond, her brother.”

The August report concluded that the Passport Production Unit of the Embassy of Haiti in the United States resembled “an individual business whose functioning is largely linked to the influence of position, cronyism and more than anything, the power of money, thus opening the way to influence peddling, blackmail and essentially to corruption schemes, probably well exploited” at different levels of the Embassy of Haiti in the U.S.

A U.S. government official told the Herald on Thursday said the Biden administration is aware of the corruption allegations involving the Haitian embassy and Edmond, the country’s Oxford-educated ambassador who was appointed to the prestigious job by Moïse seven months before he was assassinated in July 2021.

“A Haitian government investigation report determined Haitian ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond; the ambassador’s sister, Betyna Edmond, an accredited consular officer at the Haitian Consulate General in New York, as well as other Haitian diplomatic mission members issued passports without lawful authority from the Haitian government,” the spokesperson said.

Follow-up questions about the corruption were referred to the Justice Department. Both Justice and the FBI field office in Washington declined to comment.

Why the U.S. would be concerned about what Haiti did in its own embassy remains unclear. But several Haiti-based sources interviewed by the Herald, said U.S. officials informed Haiti that his behavior “constitutes a threat to the internal security of the United States.” In an April 11 note to Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. gave the government of Haiti three weeks to deal with the problem, and even provided a deadline for Bocchit’s departure from the United States.

While the discovery of the passport applications and undeclared cash payments being sent through the mail and not a diplomatic pouch, set off the events that led Henry to firing Edmond, it is not the last of such firings.

The Haitian government source who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely about the matter said more dismissals and transfers are coming due to the corruption. Also, dozens of U.S.-based Haitian diplomats will be recalled following a request from the State Department.

The State Department recently provided Haiti and other foreign missions with a list of diplomats whose accreditation is approaching its time limit, following the implementation of a five-year accreditation policy for bilateral foreign mission members and a two-year grace period. Haiti has 41 mission members, including consul generals, who will have to leave the United States by late summer.

On Thursday, both Bocchit and Joseph accused the other of being responsible for the scheme. Bocchit, in his statement, said he was being made into the fall guy for the corruption, which involved Juste and other employees collecting kickbacks to process hundreds of applications from Haitian nationals living abroad. The corruption also involved employees setting up “agencies” outside of the embassy.

“It is common knowledge that I had no control over Gélorme Juste, who dealt directly with his cousin, the minister,” said Bocchit, referring to Joseph, the ex-prime minister.

Joseph said he fired Juste “without any hesitation for his implication in this scandal.” He also accused Henry of protecting Edmond, whom he said often “bragged” about his relationship with the the prime minister.

Joseph also said he gave the document from the August 2021 inquiry to Henry.

Henry spokesman Jean-Junior Joseph, who is not related to the former prime minister, said Claude Joseph forwarded the report directly to the U.S. State Department, explaining why it took so long for the government to act.

“We completely deny whatever Claude Joseph is saying,” the prime minister’s spokesman told the Herald.

Wherever the fault lies, one thing is clear: The corruption scandal is not the first, nor will it likely be the last, involving a Haiti embassy or consulate. The country’s diplomatic missions have become notorious for corruption and political patronage with little oversight as diplomats face accusations of rape, embezzlement and other wrongdoing while posted abroad, and overstay their welcome in foreign nations.

In 2019, allegations of corruption by Haitian diplomats in Nassau led to an investigation by Bahamian authorities. Haiti’s Canadian mission also has had several scandals including diplomats fired without explanation and the purchase of a million-dollar waterfront. One high-profile scandal involved Marie Louisa Célestin, an employee in the Haitian consulate in Montreal and the wife of then-Haitian senator Rony Célestin. It was reported in 2021 that the couple purchased a waterfront villa for $3.4 million cash. The politician and businessman, who was sanctioned last year by both the U.S. and Canada, denied any wrong-doing.

On Thursday, Haitian media reported that former Haiti ambassador to Japan Helph Monod Honorat is being accused of sexual assault by a Japanese woman. In an interview with Radio Tele Metronome, he denied attacking the woman and said he was awaiting for the conclusion of a Japanese police investigation. Honorat confirmed reports that he had left Japan, but claimed that he was due back on May 8.

In the case of the Washington embassy, the August 2021 investigation concluded that “the irregular receipt of passport documents at the Haitian Embassy in the United States is not an isolated occurrence. This is a practice that is both common and trivialized, well exploited at different levels at the Embassy of Haiti in the United States,” the report said.

Also, this is not the first time that the Haitian embassy in Washington, known for diverting passport fees to pay for government activities abroad, has been at the center of a scandal. The most recent involved payments to U.S. lobbyists with passport funds.

McClatchy Senior National Security and White House Correspondent Michael Wilner contributed to this report.