Tag: Clinton Foundation

Maybe Hillary Doesn’t Understand ‘Conflict of Interest’

Buck Banks

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… 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,” AP reports.

Bubba’s Speaking Fees a Possible Conflict for Hillary Clinton

Buck Banks

$8 million

Speaking fees paid by more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government to former President Bill Clinton to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Hillary Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.

Blumenthal Was on Clinton Foundation Payroll While Advising State Department

Buck Banks

$10,000

Monthly salary Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, earned as a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation while he was providing unsolicited intelligence on Libya to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Politico reports. “Blumenthal was added to the payroll of the Clintons’ global philanthropy in 2009 — not long after advising Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — at the behest of former president Bill Clinton, for whom he had worked in the White House, say the sources.”

‘Clinton Cash’: The Same Old GOP Smoke and Mirrors

Jon Ponder

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By now you’ve probably heard that a right-wing partisan hack named Peter Schweizer has written a book about the Clinton Foundation titled “Clinton Cash” in which he suggests that Bill and Hillary have been operating their foundation as a giant slush fund, and that Bill has been whoring himself out to moneyed interests who pay him “speaking fees” in exchange for favors delivered by Hillary when she was secretary of state.

You’ve probably also heard about Schweizer’s deep ties to the extreme right. He is a former Bush speechwriter, foreign-affairs adviser to Sarah Palin and blogger for Breitbart.com, the legacy website of the late serial liar and notorious racist, Andrew Breitbart. His work is riddled with mistakes and falsehoods. Fact-checkers and legit reporters have used words like these to describe his work in the past: “incorrect,” “inaccurate,” “bogus,” “a fatal shortcoming in Journalism 101,” “the facts didn’t stand up,” “unfair and inaccurate,” “specious argument,” “there was nothing there,” “suspicious,” “the facts don’t fit,” facts “do not check out,” sources “do not exist or cannot be tracked down,” “confusion and contradiction,” “discrepancies,” “admitted a mistake,” “neither journalism nor history,” “a polemic so unchecked … that we can’t tell the fact from the fiction,” sources “have clearly used him,” and “tacitly conced[ed] he was wrong.”

Despite Schweizer’s shady background, however, “Clinton Cash” has been taken seriously by “liberal media” outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and others, who have lent it legitimacy by using it as a source for their reporting.

So — where there’s smoke there’s fire. Right?

[…]

Clinton Defends Foundation

Buck Banks

My theory about all of this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments. I believe we have done a lot more good than harm and I believe this is a good thing.

— Bill Clinton, defending his foundation’s acceptance of donations from foreign governments, “pointing to the track record of his global philanthropy as Hillary Clinton nears an announcement on a 2016 presidential campaign,” the AP reports.

Algeria’s Donation to Clinton Foundation Violated Ethics Agreement

Buck Banks

$500,000

Amount of a donation from the Algerian government that was “given to assist with earthquake relief in Haiti, the foundation said. At the time, Algeria, which has sought a closer relationship with Washington, was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues,” the Washington Post reports. “The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.”