Tag Archives: The Clinton Foundation

This Is Not Suprising

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On Saturday, The American Thinker posted an article about the dwindling revenue going toward the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

According to Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton:

When one of the most recognizable nonprofits in the world loses 75% of its contributions over a four-year period, there are typically investigatory reports written into what has gone wrong. That isn’t the case with the Clinton Foundation. The Foundation received $62.9 million in 2016 but only $16.3 million in 2020, and very few people seem to have notice[d].

That is because most Beltway insiders know the Clinton Foundation’s primary purpose: to serve as a platform for Hillary Clinton’s political operation while lining the Clintons’ pockets by trading influence for money. That is why donations spiked when Hillary was secretary of state and most of the world thought she was destined to become president — and why they cratered after she lost.

The article continues:

It’s always been a political influence-peddling operation.  As Fitton notes, donations spiked when Hillary Clinton was riding high on the hog as President Obama’s secretary of state.  After she left office and lost the 2016 presidency to Donald J. Trump, she got “defunded,” big.  Trump cost the harridan a lot of baksheesh she had been counting on.  Issues & Insights has an excellent chart here demonstrating the trajectory along with a good editorial to go with it.

The Foundation, laughably enough, attributed the drop-off in donations to the pandemic.  Fitton shot that down with this:

This argument doesn’t explain the tens of millions the Foundation lost between 2016 and 2019 and ignores that charitable giving was up by 5.1% in America last year.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It includes a list of large honorariums paid to Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton for their speeches. Although the donations have dwindled, they are still coming in. The list of where the donations are coming from is very interesting. There evidently are some people who are betting that the Clintons still wield significant influence in American politics.

Some Of The Reasons The Presidential Election Is So Important

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On November 29th (updated November 30th) The Epoch Times posted an article titled, “Crime Hiding Crime: A Motive for Stealing the Election.” The article notes a few of the consequences of four more years of President Trump versus the election of Vice-President Joe Biden.

The article reports:

A lot of ink, mournful or triumphalist depending on its source, has been spilled making predictions about what will happen in the United States should Joe Biden become president.

Another theme, running softly like an obbligato through that mighty narrative, also deserves our attention.

We know about the Dems in charge. They’ve promised higher taxes, nonstop wokeness and virtue signaling, more climate hysteria (here’s looking at you John “reporting-for-duty” Kerry), more Mullah-coddling and China-appeasing, and hordes of new Democratic voters hustled over our Southern border.

They have also promised to regulate coal and fracking and fossil fuels out of economic contention, which is another salient in their attack on prosperity itself. (Remember John Holdren, Obama’s prophet of “a massive campaign to de-develop” the United States? He would be back in a Biden administration.)

All of that—and I leave out of account what would happen should the Democrats also flip the Senate—all of that, I say, might be aggregated under the plus column of the Hobbesian typology of human motivation: the desire for, and exercise of, power.

The article notes some other consequences if Joe Biden were to become President:

The 2020 presidential election, however it is finally decided, will be important for what does not happen as well as what does.

I have no doubt that Democrats were highly motivated in the election in order to pursue their socialist, anti-American agenda.

But they were also powerfully motivated by fear.

Consider some of the things that will not happen should Joe Biden assume the presidency.

John Durham. Remember John Durham? He’s the fellow who has spent months and months and months investigating the investigators, looking into the cesspool of corruption and partisan malfeasance that underwrote what I have called the greatest political scandal in American history.

I mean the whole Russia Collusion Delusion, featuring Robert Mueller G-man extraordinaire, and a host of supporting actors from James Comey, Christopher Steele, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, John Brennan, and James Clapper on down.

Poof. Gone. The Durham investigation would be gone. Thanks for your service, John, but it’s time to think about spending more time with your family now and, besides, we need that office space for some Title IX inquiries. Just leave your files next to the shredder on your way out.

The Clinton Foundation. You remember the Clinton Foundation. That was the siphon through which hundreds of millions of dollars passed from influence seekers into the pockets of the Clinton family coffers. There were people in the DOJ looking into that operation, too, but you can be sure they would be furloughed before being exiled entirely should the Biden-Harris circus come to town.

Hunter Biden and his laptop from hell. Depending on where you get your news, you may or may not have heard much about Hunter’s laptop on the run-up to the election. It was one of the stories of the season, but since it was election season, the Media Industrial Complex closed ranks and put the story in a hermetically sealed container.

America needs to get this right. Our future depends on it.

The Saga Continues

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Andrew McCarthy has an article up at The National Review today about the roots of the Russian collusion investigation. The title of the article is, “The FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses.”

Meanwhile, CNN is reporting today:

If Democrats are not careful, they will end up in the worst of all political worlds.

Since the release of the Mueller report, the party’s leadership in Congress has been extraordinarily hesitant about taking the logical next steps. Faced with a 400-plus page report documenting extensive efforts by the President of the United States to obstruct justice, House Democrats have punted — making it pretty clear that impeachment proceedings will not be happening any time soon.

Even as the attorney general takes extraordinary steps to obstruct the subsequent hearings into obstruction, Democratic leaders remain tepid about any conversation that involves impeachment.

Okay. Let’s go back to some basic tenants of American law. First of all, you are innocent until proven guilty. The Mueller Report specifically stated that they could not find the evidence to prove President Trump guilty of anything. That means according to our laws, he is presumed innocent. Second of all, how can you have obstruction when there was no crime involved?

The CNN report is totally misleading and divisive. It states that the President obstructed justice when the Mueller Report concluded that there was no evidence to support that claim.

So let’s look at what Andrew McCarthy has to say about the root of this witch hunt:

Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

Andrew McCarthy points out in his article that in order to begin surveillance on the Trump campaign, the State Department and the FBI had to find something other than the Steele Dossier to base their claims on. They set up George Papadopoulos.

The National Review article lists some of the connects of the people involved in setting up the scam:

The State Department (very much including the American embassy in London) was deeply in the tank for Clinton. Downer has a history with the Clintons that includes arranging a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation in 2006, when he was Australia’s foreign minister and then-senator Hillary Clinton was the favorite to become U.S. president in 2008. For years, furthermore, Downer has been closely tied to British intelligence, which, like the British government broadly, was anti-Trump. (More on that in the future.)

The State Department’s Dibble immediately sent Downer’s information though government channels to the FBI.

About three weeks earlier, Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s top State Department official for European and Eurasian affairs, had supported the FBI’s request to meet former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele in London. Steele was the principal author of the Clinton-campaign-sponsored faux intelligence reports (the unverified “Steele dossier”), which claimed — based on anonymous sources and multiple layers of hearsay — that Russia was plotting to help Trump win the election, and that it had been holding compromising information about Hillary Clinton.

On July 5, Agent Michael Gaeta, the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome (who had worked with Steele on the FIFA soccer investigation when Steele was still with British intelligence), met with Steele at the latter’s London office. Steele permitted him to read the first of the reports that, over time, would be compiled into the so-called dossier. An alarmed Gaeta is said to have told Steele, “I have to report this to headquarters.”

It is inconceivable that Gaeta would have gone to the trouble of clearing his visit to London with the State Department and getting FBI headquarters to approve his trip, but then neglected to report to his headquarters what the source had told him — to wit, that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to undermine the 2016 election.

As I have previously detailed, after the hacked DNC emails were published, Steele (whose sources had not foretold the hacking by Russia or publication by WikiLeaks) simply folded this event into his preexisting narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

Prior to early July, when the FBI began receiving Steele-dossier reports (which the State Department would also soon receive), the intelligence community — particularly the CIA, under the direction of its hyper-political director, John Brennan — had been theorizing that the Trump campaign was in a corrupt relationship with Russia. Thanks to the Steele dossier, even before Downer reported his conversation with Papadopoulos to the State Department, the Obama administration had already been operating on the theory that Russia was planning to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Clinton. They had already conveniently fit the hacked DNC emails into this theory.

Downer’s report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it was already pursuing with a report from a friendly foreign government, as if that report had triggered the Trump-Russia investigation. In order to pull that off, however, it was necessary to distort what Papadopoulos had told Downer.

To repeat, Papadopoulos never told Downer anything about emails. Moreover, the Mueller report provides no basis for Papadopoulos to have known that Russia was planning the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton in order to help Trump; nor does the Mueller report allege that Papadopoulos actually told Downer such a thing.

The State Department’s report to the FBI claiming that Papadopoulos had “suggested” these things to Downer was manufactured to portray a false connection between (a) what Papadopoulos told Downer and (b) the hacking and publication of the DNC emails. That false connection then became the rationale for formally opening the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation — paper cover for an investigation of the Trump campaign that was already under way.

CNN either doesn’t know the truth or chooses not to report it accurately. Either way, they are doing a disservice to Americans by misleading them on the facts of the case.

The Fix Was In At The Beginning

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Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported that Congressman Collins from Georgia had released the transcript of Peter Strzok’s testimony before Congress.

The article reports:

Peter Strzok told then-Majority General Counsel Zachary Somers that the Department of Justice made a deal with the FBI not to search for, or investigate Clinton Foundation emails.

Mr. Somers asked Peter Strzok if the Clinton Foundation was on Hillary’s private server to which Strzok replied, ” I believe on one of the servers, if not others.”

When asked if the FBI was given access to Clinton Foundation emails as part of the investigation into Hillary’s private server, Strzok said, “We [FBI] were not. We did not have access.”

The article concludes:

This is a clear example of the two-tiered justice system that is infecting this country — Hillary Clinton’s attorneys were allowed to “negotiate” with the feds to make sure they didn’t find her Clinton Foundation emails which would show she was peddling influence and power in a pay-to-play scheme while she was the head of the Department of State.

In contrast, the FBI, guns drawn, breaks down the doors of Trump associates in pre-dawn raids and violates attorney client privilege without fear of reprisal.

According to reports, the FBI is currently investigating the Clinton Foundation.

The Clintons aren’t the only ones who are guilty of corruption — everyone who worked to protect Hillary Clinton and the criminal Clinton Foundation should be investigated and prosecuted.

The article includes a screenshot of the exact testimony. I wonder if this information had been available to the public before the November 2018 election if it would have changed anything.

 

Unfortunately No One Wins In This Scenario

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Lisa Page’s testimony stated that the Department of Justice prevented the FBI from charging Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. That may or may not have something to do with a meeting on an airport tarmac, but that is the situation.  Let’s take a trip back in time to reexamine the entire picture.

If the FBI had indicted Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information during the political campaign, Bernie Sanders would have been the candidate and Donald Trump would probably have won. The Democrats would have been up in arms that Donald Trump won unfairly. They are claiming that anyway, but not too many people believe them! Since the Democrats expected Hillary Clinton would win, they assumed the story of the private server would disappear as soon as she took office. Well she lost, and the story is back. But let’s take a look at the consequences of the server.

On October 27, 2016, Real Clear Politics posted the following quote by Charles Krauthammer:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This brings us back full circle to the beginning. The question was originally: Why did she have the private server? She said convenience, obviously that was ridiculous…

It was obvious she was hiding something.

And think about it, she set it up in 2009, before becoming Secretary of State. So, she anticipated having exchanges that she would not want anyone to see. So, we’ve been asking ourselves on this set for a year almost, what exactly didn’t she want people to see?

Well, now we know.

And as we speculated, the most plausible explanation was the rank corruption of the Clinton Foundation, and its corrupt — I don’t know if it’s illegal, but corrupt relationship with the State Department.

And her only defense as we saw earlier– the Democrats are saying, well, there was nothing she did… that was corrupted by donations. You can believe that if you want, but there’s a reason that people give donations in large amounts, and that’s to influence the outcome of decisions. So, this — we are getting unfolding to us, exactly what she anticipated having to hide, and it is really dirty business.

I miss Charles Krauthammer.

But there is another aspect to this. On August 29, 2018, The Federalist Papers reported:

A new report shows that the Chinese hacked Hillary’s homebrew communication server and reports indicate the Chinese killed 12 CIA sources while the server was at her residence.

The article included quotes from the Daily Caller News Foundation:

…“The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant ‘courtesy copy’ for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.”

In other words, an American secretary of state who felt entitled to work on her own amateurish computer system had exposed all of her correspondence to one of the country’s most powerful and dangerous rivals in world affairs.

And it’s very possible that at least 12 operatives serving United States intelligence agencies paid for Clinton’s security breach with their lives.

According to a New York Times report from May 2017, a successful Chinese counterintelligence operation that started in 2010 “systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.”

“From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources,” The Times reported. “According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.”

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but 2010 was Clinton’s first full year as secretary of state.

So what do we do with Hillary Clinton? If she were anyone but Hillary Clinton, she would be sitting in jail somewhere. However, if she is charged under a Republican administration, the Democrats will cry that the charges are political. But if she is not charged with the mishandling of classified information, it will be political. How in the world do you solve the accountability problem and the political problem?

Collusion

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On Sunday The Hill posted an article about Russian collusion. Just for the record, a number of legal experts have stated that collusion is not a crime, so I am not sure what all the fuss is about, but there has been quite a fuss.

The article states:

With Republicans on both House and Senate investigative committees having found no evidence of Donald Trump being guilty of Democrat-inspired allegations of Russian collusion, it is worth revisiting one anecdote that escaped significant attention during the hysteria but continues to have U.S. security implications.

As secretary of State, Hillary Clinton worked with Russian leaders, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-President Dmitri Medvedev, to create U.S. technology partnerships with Moscow’s version of Silicon Valley, a sprawling high-tech campus known as Skolkovo.

Clinton’s handprint was everywhere on the 2009-2010 project, the tip of a diplomatic spear to reboot U.S.-Russian relations after years of hostility prompted by Vladimir Putin’s military action against the former Soviet republic and now U.S. ally Georgia.

A donor to the Clinton Foundation, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, led the Russian side of the effort, and several American donors to the Clinton charity got involved. Clinton’s State Department facilitated U.S. companies working with the Russian project, and she personally invited Medvedev to visit Silicon Valley.

The collaboration occurred at the exact same time Bill Clinton made his now infamous trip to Russia to pick up a jaw-dropping $500,000 check for a single speech.

The former president’s trip secretly raised eyebrows inside his wife’s State Department, internal emails show.

That’s because he asked permission to meet Vekselberg, the head of Skolkovo, and Arkady Dvorkovich, a senior official of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear giant seeking State’s permission to buy Uranium One, a Canadian company with massive U.S. uranium reserves.

Years later, intelligence documents show, both the Skolkovo and Uranium One projects raised serious security concerns.

It may have raised concerns, but it is sad that the Department of Justice was so compromised at that point that they chose to do nothing about it. Does anyone really believe that Russia would have paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech without getting something in return?

The article also notes the involvement of Russia in the dirty dossier scandal:

The intersections between the Clintons, the Democrats and Russia carried into 2016, when a major political opposition research project designed to portray GOP rival Donald Trump as compromised by Moscow was launched by Clinton’s presidential campaign and brought to the FBI.

Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS research firm was secretly hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party through their law firm, Perkins Coie.

Simpson then hired retired British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — whom the FBI learned was “desperate” to defeat Trump — to write an unverified dossier suggesting that Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the election.

Simpson, Steele and Perkins Coie all walked Trump-Russia related allegations into the FBI the summer before the election, prompting agents who openly disliked Trump to launch a counterintelligence probe of the GOP nominee shortly before Election Day.

Simpson and Steele also went to the news media to air the allegations in what senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr would later write was a “Hail Mary” effort to influence the election.

The article concludes:

Collusion can be criminal if it involves conspiracy to break federal laws, or it can involve perfectly legal, unwitting actions that still jeopardize America’s security against a “frenemy” like Russia.

There is clear evidence now that shows Hillary Clinton’s family and charity profited from Moscow and simultaneously facilitated official government actions benefiting Russia that have raised security concerns.

And there’s irrefutable evidence that her opposition research effort on Trump — one that inspired an FBI probe — was carried out by people who got information from Russia and were consorting with Russians.

It would seem those questions deserve at least some of the scrutiny afforded the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry that is now two-plus years old.

Someone needs to take the blinders off of Robert Mueller and turn him in the right direction. His investigation is the equivalent of the man looking for his keys under the street light because the light is better (despite the fact that he dropped his keys across the street).

One Can Only Hope The Truth Will Come Out

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Yesterday Sara Carter reported on a public hearing that is going to take place today.

The article reports:

A trove of documents on the Clinton Foundation alleging possible pay for play and tax evasion have been turned over to the FBI and IRS by several investigative whistleblowers, who will be testifying in an open hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Thursday, according to the committee and lawmakers.

Roughly 6,000 documents that are expected to reveal the nearly two-year investigation by the whistleblowers with a private firm called MDA Analytics LLC, which allegedly turned over the documents more than a year and a half ago to the IRS, according to John Solomon, who first published the report last week in The Hill. 

There is a connection between the whistleblowers and Robert Mueller:

However, a former whistleblower, who has spoken with agents from the Little Rock FBI field office last year and worked for years as an undercover informant collecting information on Russia’s nuclear energy industry for the bureau, noted his enormous frustration with the DOJ and FBI. He describes as a two-tiered justice system that failed to actively investigate the information he provided years ago on the Clinton Foundation and Russia’s dangerous meddling with the U.S. nuclear industry and energy industry during the Obama administration.

William D. Campbell’s story was first published by this reporter in 2017. He turned over more than 5,000 documents and detailed daily briefs to the bureau when he served as a confidential informant reporting on Russia’s nuclear giant Rosatom. Campbell worked as an energy consultant, gaining the trust of Russians and providing significant insight into Russia’s strategic plans to gain global dominance in the uranium industry. He reported on Russian’s intentions to build a closer relationship with Obama administration officials, to include then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as reported. The documents he turned over to the DOJ, which were reviewed by this news site, showed Campbell had also provided highly sensitive information both related to the uranium case, as well as other intelligence matters, since 2006.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller was the director of the FBI at the time Campbell was a confidential informant and according to Campbell, the information was briefed to Mueller by his FBI handlers.

It seems as if the corruption and blindness in the FBI is not a new thing.

When The Deep State Overrides The Constitution

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about a recent FBI raid. The raid was conducted on the home of a legally protected whistleblower who had blown the whistle on some of the illegalities in the Uranium One deal and some of the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a government watchdog, according to the whistleblower’s attorney.

The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.

The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

“The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One,” the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF, noting that he considered the FBI’s raid to be an “outrageous disregard” of whistleblower protections.

The article continues:

A special agent from the FBI’s Baltimore division, who led the raid, charged that Cain possessed stolen federal property and demanded entry to his private residence, Socarras told TheDCNF.

“On Nov. 19, the FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity in the Union Bridge, Maryland area,” bureau spokesman Dave Fitz told TheDCNF. “At this time, we have no further comment.”

Cain informed the agent while he was still at the door that he was a recognized protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz recognized his whistleblower status, according to Socarras.

The article explains the whistleblower act:

The whistleblower act is intended to protect whistleblowers within the intelligence community, which includes the FBI.

“The [intelligence community] is committed to providing its personnel the means to report violations of law,” according to a 2016 intelligence community directive.

“The [whistleblower act] authorizes employees of contractors to take government property and give it to the two intelligence committees confidentially,” Socarras told TheDCNF.

The FBI has yet to talk to Cain’s attorney despite the raid, according to Socarras.

“After the raid, and having received my name and phone number from Mr. Cain as his lawyer, an FBI agent actually called my client directly to discuss his seized electronics,” Socarras told TheDCNF. “Knowingly bypassing the lawyer of a represented client is serious misconduct.”

The Justice Department and the IG both declined to comment.

Whoever authorized this raid and whoever was involved in it need to be fired from the FBI so that they can be replaced by people who respect the law and the U.S. Constitution.

This Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

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On Friday, Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial about the Clinton Foundation. The editorial deals with the drop in donations to the Foundation after Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the Presidency.

The editorial reports:

Controversy over the foundation erupted after Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book — “Clinton Cash” — suggested that the foundation served as a way for donors to curry favor with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And, indeed, the multitude of connections that slowly turned out became hard to dismiss as coincidental. There was the fact that 85 of the 154 private interests who’d met with Clinton during her tenure at state were Clinton Foundation donors.

Emails turned up showing how the foundation intervened to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country that had been a major foundation donor. A Chicago commodities trader who donated $100,000 to the foundation got a top job on a State Department arms control panel, despite having no experience in the area. On and on it went.

The editorial concludes:

But the most glaring indictment of the Clinton Foundation came from what happened last year, after Hillary Clinton lost the election — and effectively ended her political career.

First, the Clinton’s almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.

Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See chart below for a timeline.)

If the Clinton Foundation was as good as defenders claimed, why did all its big-time donors suddenly lose interest? The only reasonable explanation is that donors weren’t interested in what the foundation supposedly did for humanity. They were interested in the political favors they knew their money would buy.

In April 2015, The New York Post reported:

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on “conferences, conventions and meetings”; $8 million on fundraising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel. None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation.

In all, the group reported $84.6 million in “functional expenses” on its 2013 tax return and had more than $64 million left over — money the organization has said represents pledges rather than actual cash on hand.

Some of the tens of millions in administrative costs finance more than 2,000 employees, including aid workers and health professionals around the world.

But that’s still far below the 75 percent rate of spending that nonprofit experts say a good charity should spend on its mission.

At one time there was an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. I have no idea whether or not it is ongoing. However, just looking at the amount of money spent on overhead and the rapid drop in donations when Hillary was not elected President, I think there are some obvious conclusions that anyone paying attention can draw about the Foundation.

I Don’t Like Federal Regulations, But…

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America ideally is a land of equal opportunity. To some extent that is true, but there are some people who abuse their position and take advantage of the generosity of the American people. A story posted in The Boston Herald yesterday illustrates how a charity can be used for personal gain–I am not talking about the Clinton Foundation, but the Clinton Foundation might have gotten a few ideas from what I am about to share.

The article reports:

Do you know how much money Joe Kennedy, the former congressman, is now making at his “nonprofit”?

According to the most recent documents, his “public charity” has filed with the state attorney general, in 2016 Kennedy pocketed a total of $824,929 — $109,336 from Citizens Energy and $715,703 from “related organizations.”

His second wife, Beth, grabbed another $316,573 — $55,222 from Citizens Energy and $261,351 from those “related organizations.”

…Kerry Kennedy, got back into the news recently.

… like her older brother, Kerry, too, is fabulously well-to-do thanks to a family “nonprofit.”

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation pays her $352,298 a year, including a $70,000 “bonus.”

…Reading the stories about Kerry’s big payday reminded me of Joe K. And it’s not only him and the second missus who are getting rich off the Citizens Energy gig —  I mean, nonprofit.

According to the public filing, CE’s CEO, one Peter Smith, made $627,983 in 2016. The chief financial officer, Ernest Panos, pocketed $447,260. Joe’s flack in his congressional office —  Brian O’Connor —  now makes $240,962 a year at Citizens Energy.

Charity Navigator, a somewhat reliable source for rating charities, does not rate Citizens Energy Corp because Charity Navigator only rates organizations that are classified as 501(c)(3) and able to accept tax-deductible donations. Citizens Energy Corp is classified as a 501(c)(4). However, just as a point of reference, Charity Navigator does rate the Clinton Foundation as 92.40 out of 100. I find that somewhat questionable.

It seems to me that there are people making large amounts of money due to the generosity of the American people. The government should not be in the business of determining the wages of anyone, but it seems to me that those running non-profit organizations should be paid salaries more in line with the average American. Helping people in need should not be a million-dollar-a-year job. I suspect the only way to deal with this problem is for the American people to pay more attention to the charities they support. More transparency from charities would also be helpful. Americans are a very generous people. It is unfortunate that there are those among us who are taking advantage of that generosity.

Things Americans Were Not Supposed To Find Out

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Have you ever considered how much information Americans would not have access to if Hillary Clinton had been elected President? At best we would have saved the cost of the Mueller investigation–if she won, why would anyone investigate Russian interference? We would never know about the FISA applications to spy on a political opponent (it would be nice to know exactly who came up with that idea). We probably wouldn’t know about Uranium One. The Clinton Foundation would probably still be raking in billions (political access is expensive).

Townhall posted an article today detailing some of the things we would never have found out if Hillary had been elected.

The article reminds us:

As various commentators predicted would be proven, the bulk of the information that formed the basis for the FISA warrant applications was the “dossier” of allegations about Donald Trump’s activities in Russia. This dossier was provided to the FBI by British spy Christopher Steele. Steele was hired during the 2016 presidential campaign by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, who was paid by Hillary Clinton’s law firm Perkins Coie, who was paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The allegations in the dossier were scandalous and completely unverified, in violation of federal statutes and FISA court rules.

In other words, the FBI used oppo research paid for by the Democrats as justification for government spying on a political opponent and other Americans.

But there’s more. In another incredible coincidence, Fusion GPS had hired scholar and professor Nellie Ohr as a “paid Russian expert.” Nellie Ohr just happens to be married to Bruce Ohr, deputy attorney general in the Justice Department. Bruce Ohr is alleged to have passed along his wife’s anti-Trump research to the FBI. He was demoted for failing to disclose not only his wife’s employment with Fusion GPS, but also his own meetings with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.

Evidently the people who filled out the FISA application neglected to mention any of the history of the dossier that formed the basis for the application.

The article lists something else we were not supposed to know:

When thousands of DNC emails were leaked to the public through Julian Assange’s organization WikiLeaks, we learned that Hillary Clinton had abused the primary process, nearly bankrupted the DNC and effectively stole the nomination from upstart candidate Bernie Sanders. We also learned that the press played favorites with Clinton, getting her approval before running stories and even forwarding debate questions to Clinton in advance. (The official line is that Russians hacked the DNC computers and gave the emails to WikiLeaks. Assange and former U.S. and U.K. intelligence officials vehemently deny this, and maintain that it was an inside “leak,” not a hack. The DNC refused to turn over their servers to the FBI for inspection.)

One of the biggest scandals out there has still been underreported by the mainstream media:

Nor is this the Democrats’ only problem with compromised computer servers. Imran Awan, IT aide to Florida representative (and former DNC chair) Debbie Wasserman Schultz was investigated after it was discovered that he and family members had improperly accessed the House Democratic Caucus’ computer server over 7000 times. Awan was arrested trying to leave the country to return to his native Pakistan, where he and his wife had wire-transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars. Earlier this month, Awan pleaded guilty to bank fraud on a home loan application; all other matters were dropped.

Consider the fact that if Democrats gain control of Congress, none of the investigations into these scandals will continue–those in power who used the power of the government for political purposes will not face repercussions for what they did. At that point we can expect to see the government being used to silence opposition as the norm. Our representative republic will have been replaced by a banana republic.

Swamps And Alligators

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As the saying goes–“When you are up to your neck in alligators, it is hard to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp.” As we watch the deep state react to being backed into a corner, it is good to remember that expression.

Let’s try to put the ‘hair-on-fire’ reporting of the President’s statements at his press conference with Putin in perspective. First of all, we have seen in the short time that Donald Trump has been President that he tends to be polite in press conferences. We also have learned that he tends to be tough in private talks.

One of the hair-on-fire media statements is that Putin must have something on President Trump. He may, but I can guarantee he has a whole lot more on Hillary Clinton.

Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial today that reminds us:

Last week we learned that a “foreign entity” may have been secretly receiving Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State, including many that contained classified information. And that the FBI apparently ignored this information during its “investigation.” The reaction by the press to this bombshell? Crickets.

At one point during Peter Strzok’s congressional testimony last week, Rep. Louie Gohmert made a stunning claim: FBI investigators were told that Clinton’s emails had been surreptitiously forwarded to a “foreign entity.” And the FBI investigators who were allegedly conducting a thorough, unbiased, professional probe into Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials ignored it.

Trump did business with Russia for years. It is quite possible some corners were cut. How does that stack up to information that could have been obtained from Hillary Clinton’s server–Clinton Foundation activities illegally related to State Department access, misuse of funds going into the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play schemes, Uranium One information, etc. It seems to me that anything Putin may or may not have on President Trump pales in comparison to what Putin has on Hillary Clinton.

The following was posted at rightwinggranny on March 7, 2018:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This brings us back full circle to the beginning. The question was originally: Why did she have the private server? She said convenience, obviously that was ridiculous…

It was obvious she was hiding something.

And think about it, she set it up in 2009, before becoming Secretary of State. So, she anticipated having exchanges that she would not want anyone to see. So, we’ve been asking ourselves on this set for a year almost, what exactly didn’t she want people to see?

Well, now we know.

And as we speculated, the most plausible explanation was the rank corruption of the Clinton Foundation, and its corrupt — I don’t know if it’s illegal, but corrupt relationship with the State Department.

And her only defense as we saw earlier– the Democrats are saying, well, there was nothing she did… that was corrupted by donations. You can believe that if you want, but there’s a reason that people give donations in large amounts, and that’s to influence the outcome of decisions. So, this — we are getting unfolding to us, exactly what she anticipated having to hide, and it is really dirty business.

The above quote is from October 2016. As usual, the late Charles Krauthammer was right on target.

ZeroHedge quotes a claim Vladimir Putin made in the press conference in Helsinki:

Vladimir Putin made a bombshell claim during Monday’s joint press conference with President Trump in Helsinki, Finland, when the Russian President said some $400 million in illegally earned profits was funneled to the Clinton campaign by associates of American-born British financier Bill Browder – at one time the largest foreign portfolio investors in Russia. The scheme involved members of the U.S. intelligence community, said Putin, who he said “accompanied and guided these transactions.”

Browder made billions in Russia during the 90’s. In December, a Moscow court sentenced Browder in absentia to nine years in prison for tax fraud, while he was also found guilty of tax evasion in a separate 2013 case. Putin accused Browder’s associates of illegally earning over than $1.5 billion without paying Russian taxes, before sending $400 million to Clinton.

Is it possible that the hair-on-fire reporting on President Trump’s statement is simply to distract us from the questions about the $400 million donation to the Clinton campaign?

 

 

 

The Look Of Desperation

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Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported that Robert Mueller is investigating ‘billionaires with ties to Russia’ who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities. Good grief. We have large donations from Russia to the Clinton Foundation followed by a transfer of a large portion of America’s uranium resources, and Robert Mueller is investigating businessmen who attended the inauguration parties? This totally smacks of desperation!

The article quotes ABC News:

The presence of people with Kremlin ties in Washington for Trump’s inaugural celebration was first reported by The Washington Post. But the guest lists obtained by ABC News offer a new glimpse at the level of access granted to several well-connected oligarchs.

Several donated enough to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to qualify for tickets to a “Candlelight Dinner” in Washington’s Union Station on the eve of the inauguration, a perk for $1 million contributors, the list of attendees show. Guests were treated to a preview performance by singer Jackie Evancho, a one-time runner-up on “America’s Got Talent,” who would go on to sing at the inauguration the following day.

…The Trump inauguration brought in more than $107 million, double the amount of President Obama, to finance a week of festivities that was filled with far fewer events than past inaugurations – only three Presidential balls. In May, ABC News reported that the Special Counsel had questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations from donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Donating to the inauguration is not unusual. Has anyone looked at donations to the Clinton Foundation during the time that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State? This investigation is clutching at straws hoping that the American people are unaware of what is normal practice in Washington. It would make more sense to evaluate the funding of inaugurations than to try to accuse President Trump of something based on donations from Americans (which are perfectly legal, regardless of who those Americans do business with).

The Quiet Scandal

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The most underreported scandal in Washington today is the information technology scandal involving the Democrat Party. The American Thinker posted an article today about the continuing investigation and legal action regarding that scandal.

The scandal involves the strange circumstances involved in the hiring of Imran Awan to handle information technology for 44 House Democrats. Awan was originally hired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. During his hiring process, background checks were waived for Awan and the family members he later brought on as his staff. There is also evidence that he accessed and transferred data that he was not supposed to have access to.

The American Thinker reminds us:

Schultz was forced to step down after hacked emails revealed that she and the DNC had their finger on the scales and actively worked to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton.

…Like Al Capone and tax evasion, Imran Awan was charged with bank fraud regarding the millions he was paid and handled with his family. But the court case against him has mysteriously been delayed a seventh time. Is a plea deal in the works against Wasserman Schultz or is this just another case of the criminality can being kicked down the road? At issue may be that laptop with initials “REPDWS” on it:

…Many of the delays appear to be related to a laptop that Awan left in a decommissioned phone booth in a House building in April last year. The laptop, which had the username “RepDWS,” was accompanied by several copies of ID cards belonging to Awan and a letter he wrote to prosecutors.

Awan had been employed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — whose initials (RepDWS) were on the laptop — since 2005…

After the laptop was found by Capitol Police, Wasserman Schultz attempted for months to have the laptop returned to her, including hiring an outside lawyer to prevent prosecutors from looking at it.

During a May 18 hearing, Wasserman Schultz told the Capitol Police chief there would be “consequences” if the laptop was not returned to her.

According to a recent article in The Daily Caller, Mr. Awan’s lawyer, Chris Gowen, is associated with the Clinton family and has done work for the Clinton Foundation. Mr. Gowen has accused the investigators in the case of being anti-Muslim. He really has no other defense.

The article at The American Thinker concludes:

This is just one of many shoes waiting to drop from the Democrat’s centipede of corruption. Crimes were committed here, possibly including Wasserman Schultz and leading Democrats. Yet a cover-up could be in the works. Let’s not take our eves off this corner of the swamp.

 

 

 

What Changed?

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I guess I am just cynical, but The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article that I thought stated something very logical and obvious. Hillary Clinton spoke to a crowd at Rutgers University this week. She was paid $25,000–not her usual $200,000. Just as a comparison, Snooki (from the Jersey Shore television series) got $32,000 when she spoke.

The article reports:

The payment came from an endowment fund and not tuition or public funds, a Rutgers spokeperson told NJ.com.

 In the past, Clinton has secured lucrative speaking fees that are often around her standard $200,000 fee.

Clinton appeared at at least eight universities in 2014 for paid speeches and took home a combined $1.8 million.  

When Rutgers brought in reality TV star Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi to speak on campus in 2011, she was given $32,000. More than 1,000 people came to the university to hear Snooki speak after several students questioned if it was a wise use of money.

A spokesperson for Clinton told NBC last week that she planned to donate her Rutgers speaking payment to charity. 

…The event was hosted by the Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics and its director Ruth Mandel.

I wonder if the charity she will donate to is the Clinton Foundation.

If you are still naive enough to believe that the $200,000 per speech that Hillary Clinton was receiving in the run-up to the election had nothing to do with the fact that she was expected to be the next American President, I have some oceanfront land I would like to sell you in Arizona.

Sometimes Our Tax System Is A Joke

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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.

 

It Just Gets Messier

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The Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday that The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). which was spun off from the Clinton Foundation in 2010, is not going to refile its tax returns. The CHAI failed to comply with a conflict-of-interest pledge after promising to do so.

The article reports:

The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which was spun off from the foundation in 2010, did not solicit a State Department ethics review of multiple contributions from foreign governments as mandated by a conflict-of-interest pledge established before Hillary Clinton assumed the role of secretary of state in 2009. A CHAI representative told Reuters in April that the organization was planning to refile its 2012 and 2013 tax returns.

However, Politico reported Monday that the same representative insists that the organization never promised to refile the forms and will not do so.

“Contrary to what was reported, CHAI has consistently stated that they would conduct a review process to determine whether the transposition errors required a refiling,”  CHAI spokeswoman Maura Daley stated. “After conducting the review, the transpositional errors made had no material impact and we do not believe a refiling is required.”

The Clinton Foundation itself has had some problems with accountability. In April of this year, The New York Post reported the following:

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

Democratic voters really need to reconsider whether or not they want to put these people back in the White House. They are obviously ethically challenged.