When A Simple Investigation Turns Into A Witch Hunt

I have previously posted articles about the bias that seems to be part of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. (You can locate these articles using the search engine at the top of the blog to locate articles about Robert Mueller.)  The list of people he hired and the strong-arm tactics used against Paul Manafort are an indication that he had decided on the verdict before he conducted the investigation–much like his friend James Comey and the investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s emails. Well, this endless and wandering investigation may be called on to provide some accountability.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported that nineteen Republican Congressmen have called for hearings on Robert Mueller’s investigation. It is definitely about time.

Following is the letter they sent:

Special Prosecutors need a deadline, a specific investigation subject, and a budget. The abuses connected with special prosecutors are numerous. If Congress is unwilling to terminate the position, they should at least limit it.

The Coincidences Just Keep On Coming

The following video was posted on YouTube on July 18th. It was posted in an article on the One America News website.

There is a history of people closely associated with the Clinton family dying under mysterious circumstances. The expression “Arkancide” was coined to describe the mysterious deaths in Arkansas of many people who opposed the Clintons. The death of this man and the other deaths need to be looked at as part of a pattern.

Another Incredible Coincidence

On Wednesday, the Miami Herald reported that Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official had committed suicide in a motel room in Florida.

The article reports:

A supporter of former Haitian President Michel Martelly, Eberwein served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, better known as FAES. He held the position from May 2012 until February 2015 when he was replaced. He was also a partner in a popular pizza restaurant in Haiti, Muncheez, and has a pizza — the Klaus Special — named after him.

…During and after his government tenure, Eberwein faced allegations of fraud and corruption on how the agency he headed administered funds. Among the issues was FAES’ oversight of shoddy construction of several schools built after Haiti’s devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

Eberwein was scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Haitian Senate’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the head of the commission, Sen. Evalière Beauplan confirmed. The commission is investigating the management of PetroCaribe funds, the money Haiti receives from Venezuela’s discounted oil program.

A website called Yournewswire gives a slightly different description:

Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official who was expected to expose the extent of Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice next week, has been found dead in Miami. He was 50.

Eberwein was due to appear next Tuesday before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake donations from international donors.

According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head“. Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide.”

Eberwein, who had acknowledged his life was in danger, was a fierce critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in the Caribbean island, where he served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years.

The article at Yournewswire also reports:

According to the Haiti Libre newspaper, Eberwein was said to be in “good spirits“, with plans for the future. His close friends and business partners are shocked by the idea he may have committed suicide.

It’s really shocking,” said Muncheez’s owner Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”

Bailly said he last spoke to Eberwein two weeks ago and he was in good spirits. They were excited about future business plans and were working on opening a Muncheez restaurant in Sunrise, he said.

Wow. Just wow.

Unfortunately The Odds Are Against An Honest Investigation

Someone once said, “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” The same thing applies to investigations. If you look back on the history of Watergate, which I believe is the Democratic template guiding their current activities, you find out that Archibald Cox was a close friend of the Kennedy family and that the majority of the investigators he was working with came from the Bobby Kennedy team that investigated organized crime. There was no way that this was going to be a non-partisan group. This was a group of people who wanted to see Ted Kennedy elected President. They managed to turn a fourth rate burglary into a Presidential resignation. I believe that is the primary goal of those who supported Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor to find Russian involvement in the 2016 election. The secondary goal is to tie up the Trump Administration with lawsuits so that the Trump Agenda cannot move forward. There is no desire here to do what is right for the American people. This is simply the deep state gaining a legal foothold.

Yesterday Lifezette posted an article about the team Robert Mueller is assembling.

The article lists some members of the team:

One of the hires, Jeannie Rhee, also worked as a lawyer for the Clinton Foundation and helped persuade a federal judge to block a conservative activist’s attempts to force Bill and Hillary Clinton to answer questions under oath about operations of the family-run charity.

Campaign-finance reports show that Rhee gave Clinton the maximum contributions of $2,700 in 2015 and again last year to support her presidential campaign. She also donated $2,300 to Obama in 2008 and $2,500 in 2011. While still at the Justice Department, she gave $250 to the Democratic National Committee Services Corp.

The Clinton Foundation took large amounts of money from Russia. Do you think Ms. Rhee is going to want to investigate how much of that money was used in the campaign or exactly where it came from?

The list continues:

James Quarles, who worked on the Watergate investigation as a young prosecutor, has an even longer history of supporting Democratic politicians. He gave $1,300 to Obama in 2007 and $2,300 in 2008. He also gave $2,700 to Clinton last year.

Not exactly politically neutral.

And there’s more:

Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who now is at Jenner & Block, contributed $2,300 to Obama in 2008 and $2,000 to the DNC Services Corp. in 2006. Weissmann served as chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section and worked on the Enron fraud case.

A fourth lawyer on Mueller’s staff, Michael Dreeben, donated $1,000 to Clinton 2006 and $250 to Obama in both 2007 and 2008. He was deputy solicitor general and has appeared many times before the Supreme Court.

I know it would be politically unwise to fire the special prosecutor, but now that it has been stated numerous times that there was no connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, why are we still paying for this investigation? Is the special prosecutor going to investigate the unmasking of American citizens after taping their phone calls? Is the special prosecutor going to find out why the DNC would not let the FBI look at their computers after claiming that Russia had hacked them? Is the special prosecutor going to finally investigate Hillary’s private server and its security risks? I seriously doubt it.

Unfortunately we are in for an extended period of political theater. The political left is not interested in seeing America succeed–they are only interested in regaining the control they lost in the last election. If you doubt this, I would like to remind you of some recent history of special prosecutors. Patrick Fitzgerald charged Scooter Libby with revealing the identity of Valerie Plame. It was known when the investigation started that Richard Armitage was the leaker, but Scooter Libby was charged on a ‘process crime.’ He said something under oath that turned out to be not true (evidently his memory was not perfect–it was a minor point). Meanwhile, Valerie Plame, undercover agent, drove to CIA Headquarters every day to go to work. This is how twisted an investigation by a special prosecutor with an agenda can get.

The Connections Are Mind-Boggling

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article with some of former FBI Director James Comey‘s employment history.

The article reports:

Comey served as general counsel at Lockheed Martin until 2010 when he departed with over $6 million to show for it. That same year Lockheed Martin became a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and “won 17 contracts from the U.S. State Department, which was led by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” Big League Politics reports.

Comey just so happened to have joined the board of the British bank HSBC Holdings in 2013, which just so happens to be a Clinton Foundation partner.

Former Director Comey’s brother works for the Washington law firm DLA Piper, where he serves as “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas”.

The article further reports:

DLA Piper is one of the top ten all-time career campaign donors for Hillary Clinton. On top of this, DLA Piper also happens to do the Clinton Foundation’s taxes. DLA Piper performed the 2015 audit of the Foundation when the scandal first broke.

The article also notes that former Director Comey owns his brother’s mortgage–meaning that former Director Comey had a direct financial relationship with a DLA Piper executive during his investigation of Hillary Clinton.

This is crony capitalism at its worst. President Trump needs to drain the swamp as quickly as possible.

Stay Tuned–This May Get Interesting

The Daily Caller reported yesterday the the FBI has instructed its New York office to continue its investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

“There were no instructions to shut it down, to discontinue or to stand down on the investigation, but to continue its work,” the former official told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

He said he received this information about a week ago and that the order originated from the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. well after the November 8 election.  He did not know who at FBI Headquarters issued the order.

…Senior Justice Department officials reportedly were openly skeptical of the Clinton Foundation case and repeatedly tried to shut down the bureau’s probe.  But the department was not able to shut down the FBI activities.

There is probably a serious case here. Looking at the finances of the Clinton Foundation, it becomes obvious that a very small percentage of the money donated iwent toward charitable causes. The administrative expenses of the Foundation account for a large percentage of the money donated. I suspect that there are many legal issues with the foreign money the Foundation has accepted and the decisions made by the State Department involving the donors. However, I don’t want to see Bill or Hillary Clinton go to prison. I suspect that they deserve to be there, but I think sending them there would only serve to divide the country further. Also, neither one of them has aged well, and it would be a nightmare to have an ex-President or ex-First Lady die in prison. At any rate, Americans have a right to know what was compromised because of donations to the Clinton Foundation, and I would be glad to see the investigation into the Foundation continue under a less politicized Justice Department.

Money For Access

The Daily Caller posted a story today that included more revelations from the Wikileaks memos. It seems that the Clinton Foundations was a clearing house for buying access to Bill Clinton as well as the State Department.

The article reports:

The Dec. 7, 2012 memo is included in a batch of documents prepared in advance for a Clinton Foundation board meeting held several days later in New York City.

It shows that Joe Kiani, the founder of medical device maker Masimo, and Alex Karp, the CEO of software company Palantir Technologies, paid $140,000 and $100,000, respectively, for a “Meeting with WJC.”

WJC is William Jefferson Clinton. Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state when the memo was written.

…”The Foundation’s long-term sustainability cannot be possible without a significant and well-managed endowment,” the memo reads. “Earlier this year, we began the critical first steps towards crafting a detailed and well-informed endowment campaign plan.”

The document lists dozens of donors. The individuals and organizations shaded in blue were new contributors, the memo states. It also lists “reason for gift” for each donor.

Please follow the link to the story to see the detailed list of donors.

Ignoring The News While Claiming To Report It

Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about the recent New York Times reporting on allegations by the Clinton campaign that Donald Trump has a connection to Russia. This connection is being used to bolster the claim that Russia hacking is behind the Wikileaks emails.

The article reminds us that The New York Times has recently chosen to ignore some of the Clinton’s connections to Russia. That has not always been the case.

The article cites some older reporting on that connection:

If we go back to April 24, 2015, a New York Times investigative report illustrates why the Clinton campaign should think twice about accusing the Trump campaign of cozying up to Russia. The Times’ “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal”  reveals in depth the ethically-challenged relationship among the Clintons, the Foundation’s top donor, Canadian mining magnate, Frank Guistra ( $31.3 million in donations), and Russia’s state-owned Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom).

…The Times concludes: “The episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president ….even as his wife … presided over decisions (such as approval of the Russian purchase of Uranium One) with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.”

The article concludes:

The Clinton team should remember that people who live in glass houses should not throw the first stone. If the American public knew the unsavory clients of K-Street law and PR firms, they might pull out their pitchforks. If so, our political class would lose their plush lifestyle of life after politics. Be careful. A cooperative media cannot protect you forever.

It is time for term limits and rules that make lobbying less profitable. It is really time to drain the swamp.

 

Sometimes You Have To Go Across The Pond To Find Out What Is Going On Here

On Sunday, The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about the re-opening of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The article reports the following:

James Comey‘s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director.

‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week.

…According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 

He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.

There is also another theory as to why the investigation was re-opened–we are still awaiting more emails from Wikileaks. It would be embarrassing (to say the least) if the Wikileaks emails made the case for charging Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. It seems to me that based on Director Comey’s original statement, we already have that case, but having Wikileaks confirm it would further create the appearance of a compromised FBI.

The thing to remember here is that the person ultimately responsible for this mess is Hillary Clinton. The personal server was set up to avoid scrutiny of the symbiotic relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It has become obvious that President Obama and other officials sent emails to addresses on that server and were aware of it. The fact that the issue of the personal server was never confronted during Mrs. Clinton’s term as Secretary of State raises the question of complicity. That might explain why the Executive Branch of our government is having so much trouble getting to the truth of this matter.

A Very Complex Smoking Gun

The smoking gun has appeared in the Clinton email scandal. Unfortunately some aspects of it are so technical that those of us who think a megabyte is something you do at McDonald’s may struggle with it (Just for the record, I put myself in that category).

The Washington Post is reporting the story today. The headline of the story is, “Hillary Clinton‘s IT guy asked Reddit for help altering emails, a Twitter sleuth claims.”

These are the important parts of the story:

In the posts, stonetear asks for technical advice on retaining and deleting email messages that are more than 60 days old, as well as on removing the email address of an unnamed “VERY VIP” client from email archives.

“Hello all,” one of the posts begins. “I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone. … Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

The screen shot of one of the requests for help altering the emails:

emailsredditThe timeline:

The timing of two of Stonetear’s Reddit posts coincides with events in the Clinton email saga. One post, dated July 24, 2014, came one day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the State Department reached an agreement on producing records. The second, which is dated Dec, 10, 2014, and describes a 60-day email retention policy, came the same month that a longtime Clinton aide requested that their email retention policy be shortened to 60 days.

What cover up?

If you are going to do something illegal (like destroy subpoenaed evidence), you really should make sure that everyone involved has the knowledge required to do their part. This is really sloppy criminality. No self-respecting criminal would expect an IT guy to do this unless they were sure they would never be prosecuted (even if they were caught). That alone should provide food for thought.

 

 

 

Compromised Justice

Last Wednesday The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton and her emails. There are some genuine concerns about some aspects of the email investigation that the FBI chose to ignore.

The article reports:

The calculated release before the long Labor Day weekend suggests political favoritism, and the report shows the FBI didn’t pursue evidence of potential false statements, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.

Mr. Comey’s concessions start with his decision not to interview Mrs. Clinton until the end of his investigation, a mere three days before he announced his conclusions. Regular FBI practice is to get a subject on the record early then see if his story meshes with what agents find. In this case they accepted Mrs. Clinton’s I-don’t-recall defenses after the fact.

The notes also show the G-men never did grill Mrs. Clinton on her “intent” in setting up her server. Instead they bought her explanation that it was for personal convenience. This helped Mr. Comey avoid concluding that her purpose was to evade statutes like the Federal Records Act. Mr. Comey also told Congress that indicting her without criminal intent would pose a constitutional problem. But Congress has written many laws that don’t require criminal intent, and negligent homicide (for example) has never been unconstitutional.

The article also notes that Clinton advisors may have participated in a cover-up to stonewall any investigation.

There is contradictory testimony by Mrs. Clinton’s aides:

Consider page 10 of the FBI report: “Clinton’s immediate aides, to include [Huma] Abedin, [Cheryl] Mills, Jacob Sullivan, and [redacted] told the FBI they were unaware of the existence of the private server until after Clinton’s tenure at State or when it became public knowledge.”

That’s amazing given that Ms. Abedin had her own email account on the private server. It is also contradicted by page 3: “At the recommendation of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s long-time aide and later Deputy Chief of Staff at State, in or around fall 2008, [ Bill Clinton aide Justin] Cooper contacted Bryan Pagliano . . . to build the new server system and to assist Cooper with the administration of the new server system.”

The FBI must also have ignored two emails referred to by the State Inspector General showing Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin discussing the server while they worked at State: “hrc email coming back—is server okay?” Ms. Mills asked Ms. Abedin and Mr. Cooper in a Feb. 27, 2010 email.

The article concludes:

The FBI’s kid-glove treatment of Mrs. Clinton raises serious doubts about the seriousness of Mr. Comey’s probe. His July 5 public rebuke of her “extremely careless” handling of secrets has masked that Mrs. Clinton and her aides were given a pass on much of their behavior and dubious answers. The entire episode is another Jim Comey scar on the FBI’s reputation.

So why the kid-glove treatment? Breitbart posted an article on Saturday that might provide a few clues.

A few nuggets from the Breitbart article:

When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.

But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year.

…In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings.

“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records.

HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.”

“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “$1 billion in financing” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.

The article at Breitbart then goes on to list some of the connections with Peter Comey, the brother of James Comey, and the Clintons.

The obvious conclusion is that the number of honest people in Washington who actually care about the interests of the American people rather than their own wealth could probably be counted on one hand with fingers left over. The only way to clean up this mess is to bring in an outsider who will thoroughly shake up this mess. Hillary Clinton is obviously not that person as she seems to be at the heart of at least half of the scandals and undercover deals going on.

Does This Bother Anyone?

Fox News is reporting today that emails obtained by Citizens United as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department show collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Democrats of the Senate Committee that was investigating Benghazi.

This is a screen shot of the emails (taken from the Fox News article):

emailsBenghaziHearingSo Senator Menendez was not interested in finding out what actually happened at Behghazi–he was interested in advancing Hillary’s political ambitions. I know there were people on that committee that cared about the truth, but they were blocked by committee members that were playing politics.

The article reports:

The emails were obtained by the group Citizens United as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department for emails from Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.  

“This email chain provides a rare behind the scenes look at which Benghazi-related issues the Clinton camp had concerns about going into Secretary Clinton’s January 2013 testimony on Capitol Hill, and what they had apparently plotted out beforehand with a Democrat committee member to deal with those concerns,” Citizens United said in a statement. “Citizens United will continue to release all new Benghazi emails we receive through our FOIA lawsuits as they come in — the American people have a right to know the full picture.”

Fox News asked the Clinton campaign as well as Menendez’s office if they coordinated before the 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing; what was meant by the term “wired;” and how the email exchange was consistent with the principle of independent congressional oversight. There was no immediate response from either.

In 2013, the New Jersey senator — who is now facing federal public corruption charges — at the time of the hearing was about to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, replacing John Kerry who was in line to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Menendez has denied any wrongdoing.

Washington no longer represents the interests of Americans. It is time to clean house.

Pay For Play

The Associated Press posted a story today about the link between donations to the Clinton Foundation and State Department appointments given to people outside of the U.S. Government.

The article reports:

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

When you go to the Charity Navigator that rates charities according to how much money they spend on administrative costs and how much money goes to their various causes and you look up the Clinton Foundation, this is what you find:

Why isn’t this organization rated?

We had previously evaluated this organization, but have since determined that this charity’s atypical business model can not be accurately captured in our current rating methodology. Our removal of The Clinton Foundation from our site is neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of this charity. We reserve the right to reinstate a rating for The Clinton Foundation as soon as we identify a rating methodology that appropriately captures its business model.

What does it mean that this organization isn’t rated?

It simply means that the organization doesn’t meet our criteria. A lack of a rating does not indicate a positive or negative assessment by Charity Navigator.

Loosely translated that means, “We are not willing to take a stand.” I suspect they have seen what happens to people who take a stand to oppose or reveal anything the Clintons are doing.

The Associated Press article continues:

Some of Clinton’s most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband’s political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton’s calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.

S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton’s planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.

Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP’s review showed.

Some of the people who have been screaming for years that they wanted to ‘take the money out of politics’ should take a really good look at this. The Clinton family has become one of the most advanced crime syndicates since the Mafia. They need to be investigated.

 

If This Is Not Illegal, It Should Be

Anyone who follows the news closely (assuming they don’t depend on the mainstream media as their news source) is aware that the Clinton Foundation is a personal cash cow for the Clinton family. A number of sources that have investigated the Foundation have observed that between 8 and 10 cents of every dollar goes to help whatever cause is being helped. The other 90 to 92 cents goes to ‘overhead.’ It would be very interesting to see a dollar by dollar breakdown of that ‘overhead.’ Meanwhile, the concept of ‘pay for play’ keeps rearing its ugly head.

The Washington Examiner posted a story today about communication between the Clinton Foundation and the U.S. State Department during the time that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

The article reports:

Call logs from the office of Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, show Mills had frequent contact with top executives at the Clinton Foundation.

The logs, which were obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act, indicate the foundation’s chief operating officer, Laura Graham, called Mills often to discuss State Department business.

For example, Graham called Mills in February of 2012 to deliver a message relevant to the chief of staff’s upcoming meeting with an unidentified prime minister. The previous month, she had contacted Mills regarding “sensitive” issues that included Haiti relief.

Mills was also in contact with Stephanie Streett, executive director of the Clinton Foundation, the records show.

That’s just a little too cozy for me. It makes me wonder exactly who was influencing American foreign policy.

 

 

 

It’s Good To Have A Friend

The Washington Free Beacon reported today that giving money to the Clinton Foundation has many benefits.

The article reports:

Drug companies that have donated to Hillary Clinton’s foundation received most of the contract money from an international tuberculosis initiative after the foundation was brought on to manage the initiative’s procurement operation, public records show.

Two of every three dollars spent acquiring anti-tuberculosis drugs through the program, which is administered by the World Bank, have gone to two companies—Swiss health care giant Novartis and Indian drug company Lupin Ltd.—that together have donated up to $130,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton and her allies have pointed to the foundation’s international charitable work to deflect allegations of cronyism. However, the millions of dollars in contracts awarded to the two drug companies illustrate how foundation donors profited from laudable causes.

The article also points out:

Clinton has pointed to her foundation’s work in promoting access to pharmaceuticals in the developing world as an example of its laudatory humanitarian mission.

However, critics have noted how beneficiaries of other foundation-backed pharmaceutical access programs have made large financial contributions to the group. Companies that received funds from the foundation to provide low-cost HIV drugs, for instance, were donors to the foundation.

In many cases, the same companies were also lobbying the State Department for lucrative international health contracts while Clinton was secretary of state.

Despite years of collaboration with the industry, Clinton has described pharmaceutical companies as her “enemies,” even as lobbyists for the industry bankroll her presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, this kind of corruption has been going on with the Clintons for a very long time. It needs to end. If she is elected, the Clinton Administration will be a money-making scheme to enrich the Clintons while ignoring the problems and needs of America.

Sometimes Our Tax System Is A Joke

Hillary Clinton has released her tax forms. The Daily Caller has the story.

This screen shot from The Daily Caller tells most of the story:

ClintonDonationsThere’s even more. The article reports:

Desert Classic Charities effectively returned that donation back into the Clinton orbit. Its 2015 tax filing shows that it contributed $700,000 to the Clinton Foundation for work on obesity programs. The group handed out $1.6 million in grants that whole year.

The Clintons’ effective federal tax rate was 34.2 percent, the Clinton campaign said in a press release. With state and local taxes amounting to nine percent of their income, they paid just over 43 percent of their income in taxes.

It remains to be seen if Clinton will face the same scrutiny for her in-house contributions as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did when he ran on the GOP ticket in 2012.

What the Clintons did is a glaring example of why the tax code needs to be changed drastically. Otherwise, in the interest of fairness, all of us should be able to declare ourselves a charity, give about 8 percent of our income to actually help people, and declare the rest as tax deductible. This is obscene.

 

The Company You Keep

One of the names that has surfaced in the leak of Hillary Clinton’s emails (many of which were deleted from her computer because she said they were not work related, but have come to light through Judicial Watch) is Gilbert Chagoury. Breitbart posted a story about this man today. The mainstream media has been somewhat quiet about him. Yesterday, Fox News posted a story about some of the links between emails regarding the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State.

Fox News reports:

In one email exchange released by Judicial Watch, Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, tried to put billionaire donor Gilbert Chagoury — a convicted money launderer — in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.

…Chagoury is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and has appeared on the Clinton Foundation donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor. He’s also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for money laundering. He cut a deal and agreed to repay $66 million to the Nigerian government.

Breitbart has a list of some of the questionable activities of Mr. Chagoury. The list includes:

In 1996, Gilbert Chagoury donated $460,000 to a controversial Miami-based Democratic voter-registration group called Vote Now 96. As a foreign citizen, Chagoury is barred from donating directly to elected officials or political parties. But his three contributions of $200,000, $10,000, and $250,000, made in September and October 1996, were completely legal because Vote Now 96 was a nonprofit organization.

Just two months after making his six-figure donations, Chagoury was among the 250 guests who attended the Clintons’ White House Christmas party.

…In 2000, Switzerland convicted Chagoury of money-laundering and “aiding a criminal organization in connection with the billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria during the [Sani] Abacha years” of military dictatorship, according to a PBS Frontline report.

And finally, the icing on the cake. Breitbart reports:

It is also worth noting that Chagoury’s company, the Chagoury Group, pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009, the same year the Clinton Global Initiative awarded the Chagoury Group its annual prize for “sustainable development.” The money pledged was at the heart of Sen. David Vitter’s (R) probe into whether Chagoury’s cozy relationship with the Clintons played a roll in Clinton’s State Department’s delay of a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation on Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram; an FTO classification would have severely hampered Chagoury’s business endeavors in Nigeria.

We really do not need Hillary Clinton to bring this sort of corruption into the White House.

Anatomy Of A Scandal

Bloomberg.com posted a story yesterday about more private Clinton emails that we won’t get to see until after the election. However, some of the emails of Mrs. Clinton’s staff have made their way into the public eye, and they are very revealing.

Bloomberg reports:

Newly released e-mails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton show evidence of contacts between Clinton’s State Department and donors to her family foundation and political campaigns.

The e-mails released Tuesday by the conservative group Judicial Watch included a 2009 exchange in which Doug Band, a senior staff member at the Clinton Foundation, told a top Clinton aide at the State Department that it was “important to take care of” an individual, whose name was redacted.

Huma Abedin, the State Department aide, replied that “personnel has been sending him options.”

…In another 2009 exchange released Tuesday, Band asked Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in touch with a State Department “substance person” on Lebanon. The Chagoury Group co-founder has given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to a list of donors posted online.

…Judicial Watch said it has now found 171 messages that weren’t included in the 30,000 e-mails Clinton turned over to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey has said that his agency found “several thousand” work-related e-mails that weren’t turned over by Clinton’s lawyers. Clinton has told the State Department she believes she submitted all work-related e-mails she had in her possession, the department’s Trudeau said in a statement.

Under President Obama (and under President Clinton, if she is elected) there is one set of rules for the politically connected and another set of rules for the rest of us. This story should disturb all of us, regardless of our political inclinations. It is no wonder that the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s emails will not be released until after the election. At that point, “What difference does it make?”

 

Follow The Money

This article is based on an article posted in the Malaysia Chronicle on Tuesday. The article deals with the 1MDB Scandal.

The article reports:

Donation is the buzzword for this year, both in the United States as well as Malaysia, but serving different purpose. In US, as temperature rises in the wake of Clinton-vs-Trump for the presidential general election this coming November, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into campaigns to influence American voters.

In the case of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia’s claim that it had donated US$681 million to Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, is now busted. The press conference held by the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and US Department of Justice last week has not only exposed that money was stolen from 1MDB, but also proved that the Saudi had lied about its donation.

The article speculates that the money will be given to the Clinton Foundation or the Clinton Campaign so that when the Department of Justice investigates, Razak will get a favorable result. Whether or not that happens, the chart below tells us a lot about the money flowing into the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation.

ClintonFoundationDonationsThese numbers are somewhat alarming when you consider that only 9 or 10 percent of the money donated to the Clinton Foundation actually goes to help those the foundation is claiming to help. Charity Navigator placed the Clinton Foundation on a watch list.

Breitbart reported in April of last year:

Charity Navigator, who we have on the show all the time, placed the Clinton Foundation on a watch list,” she ( Fox Business Network’s “The Willis Report,” host Gerri Willis) continued. “They think there are problems with this non-profit.” She added, “Any Democrat—they say what a wonderful charitable organization it is doing to help people in need, people who are hungry, people who have AIDS. Listen, 6 percent of the money it collected in 2013, 6 percent — $9 million, of the $140 million in total it collected, went to help people.”

There are a whole lot of things going on with the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton campaign that are downright scary.

 

The Money In Politics

It’s time for a reality check on who is buying our elections. According to opensecrets.org, some of Hillary Clinton’s top contributors to her campaign include Emily’s List (a pro-abortion group), a few major Wall Street investment firms, the US Government and US State Department (how is that legal?), and Time Warner, a major player in cable television and media. Donation amounts from major donors ranged from over $600,000 to about $250,000. The Donald Trump campaign donations paint a very different picture. According to opensecrets.org, Donald Trump’s top donations came from a couple of financial institutions and various companies I have never heard of. The top donation given was $150,000 and the smallest donation listed in the major donation list was about $10,000. Big money and big investments are supporting Hillary. Why? She will continue the status quo where big money people continue to make big money and non-elites continue to make less. And of course, these numbers do not include any money taken from the Clinton Foundation used for travel expenses and other things. The money that does not have to be spent on travel expenses (because the Clinton Foundation can legally fund travel expenses of the Clintons) can be used for attack ads targeting Donald Trump. The 2016 election will determine whether or not elections can be bought in America.

Sometimes The Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

After the airport meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a lot of Americans have concluded that Hillary Clinton now has a ‘get out of jail free card.’ That may or may not have been the intention of the meeting, but at any rate, a wrench has been thrown into the works.

The Hill is reporting today that WikiLeaks has published more than 1,000 emails from Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State. These emails relate to the war in Iraq.

The Hill reports:

The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sent and received. They stem from a trove of emails released by State Department in February.

WikiLeaks combed through the emails to find all the messages that reference the Iraq War.

The development comes after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said last month the website had gathered “enough evidence” for the FBI to indict Clinton.

“We could proceed to an indictment, but if Loretta Lynch is the head of the [Department of Justice] in the United States, she’s not going to indict Hillary Clinton,” Assange told London-based ITV. “That’s not possible that could happen.”

First of all, the article does not make this clear, but according to another source, these emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request–the server was not hacked to obtain them. The server may have been hacked, but we don’t know that for sure. Second of all, the emails I would be looking at if I were going to build a criminal case would be the emails regarding the Clinton Foundation. There were many foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. These are the emails the government says they will not release until two and a half years. Much of the money was funneled through a charity in Canada so that the money would not be directly traceable. Recently, Charles Krauthammer explained this on Bill O’Reilly’s show:

1. You create a separate foreign “charity.” In this case, the Clintons set it up in Canada.

2. Foreign oligarchs and governments, then donate to this Canadian charity. In this case, over 1,000 did – contributing mega millions. I’m sure they did this out of the goodness of their hearts, and expected nothing in return. (Imagine Putin’s buddies waking up one morning and just deciding to send untold millions to a Canadian charity)

3. The Canadian charity then bundles these separate donations and makes a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

4. The Clinton Foundation and the cooperating Canadian charity claim Canadian law prohibits the identification of individual donors.

5. The Clinton Foundation then “spends” some of this money for legitimate good works programs. Unfortunately, experts believe this is on the order of 10%. Much of the balance goes to enrich the Clintons , pay salaries to untold numbers of hangers on, and fund lavish travel, etc. Again, virtually tax free, which means you and I are subsidizing it.

6. The Clinton Foundation, with access to the world’s best accountants, somehow fails to report much of this on their tax filings. They discover these “clerical errors” and begin the process of re-filing 5 years of tax returns.

7. Net result – foreign money goes into the Clinton’s pockets tax free and untraceable back to the original donor. This is the textbook definition of money laundering. Oh, by the way, the Canadian “charity” includes as a principal one Frank Giustra. Google him. He is the guy who was central to the formation of Uranium One, the Canadian company that somehow acquired massive U.S. Uranium interests and then sold them to an organization controlled by Russia . This transaction required U.S. State Department approval, and guess who was Secretary of State when the
approval was granted.

Get out the popcorn, the show has begun.

Move Along, Nothing To See Here

Hot Air posted an article today about the airplane meeting of former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The article reports:

Reporter Christopher Sign of ABC 15 in Phoenix, AZ appeared on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night to talk about his scoop involving that secret meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Watch the entire interview below. Sign lays out how the story developed and then he leaves this little nugget:

“The former president steps into her plane. They then speak for 30 minutes privately. The FBI there on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.’”

Seems as if they might have been trying to keep this meeting under the radar.

The article further reports:

Finally, let’s stop focusing on the fact that this meeting was inappropriate because Clinton’s wife is under investigation by Lynch’s Justice Department. I mean, that’s bad, but it’s actually letting Lynch and Clinton off the hook a bit. By focusing on the appearance of conflict because Hillary Clinton is being investigated, we are willfully overlooking the very real conflict in the fact that Clinton himself is under investigation, as the Grand Poo-bah at the Clinton Foundation. (Fox News)

The day after the meeting the Justice Department announced that it was going to delay the release of correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a closely allied public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch. The delay is 27 months–well into a Hillary Clinton presidency if she is elected.

Nothing to see here, move along.

It Just Keeps Dripping

Paul Mirengoff posted an article at Power Line today reporting major gaps in Hillary Clinton’s appointment calendar during her tenure as Secretary of State.

The article reports:

AP has identified at least 75 meetings that Hillary Clinton had with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors, and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded (or not properly recorded) on her State Department calendar. AP identified the meetings by comparing her calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day’s events.

In many cases, Clinton’s State Department calendar simply excluded the meeting altogether. On other occasions, the names of those with whom she met were omitted.

It seems clear that the omissions were made to obscure Clinton’s ties to tycoons and big donors. For example, in one omission, Clinton’s State Department calendar dropped the identities of a dozen major Wall Street and business leaders who met with her during a private breakfast discussion at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2009.

The first thing to notice here is that the search for this information was initiated by the Associated Press. Usually the press is supporting Hillary Clinton. Since the press tends to be aligned with the Democratic Party, this is an interesting development.

The article further reports:

AP had to go to court to pry from the State Department the records it needed to expose this latest example of Clinton’s lack of transparency and her ties to the wealthy.

The AP first sought Clinton’s calendar and schedules from the State Department in August 2013, but the agency would not acknowledge even that it had the material. After nearly two years of delay, the AP sued the State Department in March 2015.

The department agreed in a court filing last August to turn over Clinton’s calendar, and provided the documents in November. After noticing discrepancies between Clinton’s calendar and some schedules, the AP pressed in court for all of Clinton’s planning material.

The U.S. has released about one-third of those planners to the AP so far.

Is this a person we want in the White House?

 

Keeping The Voters Uninformed

Hillary Clinton will probably be the Democratic nominee for President. If she is indicted, the ticket will probably be Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. However, I doubt very seriously that Mrs. Clinton will face any serious charges for the corruption and mishandling of classified information that she is guilty of. A recent story at Breitbart illustrates how the news media will minimize the seriousness of some of Mrs. Clinton’s actions.

The story reports:

CNN Money’s “fact-checkers” Cristina Alesci and Laurie Frankel ended up with egg on their faces on Wednesday after they rated as “false” a well-established and proven Clinton Cash fact involving Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. approving the transfer of 20 percent of U.S. uranium to the Russian government, as nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Under the guise of “fact-checking” Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech, Alesci and Frankel purported to verify whether “Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

Well, I guess all fact-checkers are not created equal.

The article further reports:

Why Alesci and Frankel couldn’t confirm the $145 million in Clinton Foundation donations for themselves is curious. Indeed, in a 4,000-word front page story written over a year ago, the New York TimesPulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jo Becker and Mike McIntire verified the Clinton Cash uranium revelation in stunning detail, including charts and graphs laying out the flow of millions of dollars from the nine investors in the uranium deal who flowed $145 million to Hillary’s family foundation.

The article goes on to list a number of large donations to the Clinton Foundation from people who increased their wealth dramatically during Mrs. Clinton’s time as Secretary of State. Much of that increased wealth came from international business transactions that the State Department needed to sign off on. Unfortunately, a lot of the information contained in emails related to these transactions was on Mrs. Clinton’s private server and is missing. What an incredible coincidence.

The American voters are either unaware of this or our moral compass has become so enured to political corruption that no one cares. Either way, it is not good for our country.

Where Are We Going As A Country?

On Sunday, Glenn Reynolds posted an article in USA Today entitled, “When leaders cheat, followers…follow.” That is not good news considering the current state of affairs in America.

The article reminds us:

I wonder more when I read things like this report from the Washington Examiner: “The CIA’s inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’”

Here’s a hint: It very likely wasn’t.

…Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

So this leads to the question:

So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.

The article describes America as currently a high-trust society. Glenn Reynolds defines that as a place where people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. He defines a low-trust society as a place where trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.

The article concludes:

High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten. As Lira (Gonzalo Lira, an American novelist and filmmaker) says, “I’m like Wayne Gretsky: I don’t concern myself with where the puck has been — I look for where the puck is going to be.” Where will our society be in a decade if these trends continue? And what can we do to ensure that they don’t?

If the coming Presidential election is won by a Republican, will the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious, the email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, etc. be investigated? I don’t know, but an honest investigation might restore some of the trust in our government.