Clinton Fdn

4/16 see clinton main

12/19 feels oddly proto-corruption trump era? who decided /when/why this would sink hillary? how did NYT wapa? get suckered by peter s?

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judd pop info 12 24 ymail

On Monday, Popular Information reported that Justin Sun, a Chinese national currently being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, sent President-elect Donald Trump $18 million in cash. Sun did so by purchasing $30 million in tokens from World Liberty Financial, a crypto company backed by Trump.

World Liberty Financial planned to sell $300 million of its crypto tokens, known as WLF, which valued the company at $1.5 billion. Before Sun's purchase, the offering looked like a bust. Only $22 million in tokens had been sold. Per the terms of his deal with World Liberty Financial, Trump is entitled to 75% of proceeds from the token sale, but only after the first $30 million in tokens are sold.

So before Sun's purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing. Sun conveniently purchased enough tokens to meet the entire reserve, allowing Trump to collect 75% of the revenue of all other tokens sold. As a direct result of Sun's purchase, Trump netted over $18 million.

Trump's relationship with World Liberty Financial is a vehicle for any person or entity seeking to curry favor with Trump — foreign or domestic — to send him millions of dollars. This can be done in secret. Justin Sun decided to make his purchase public, but he was not required to do so. The next foreign national seeking to send Trump cash through World Liberty Financial could do so anonymously.

And yet, Sun's purchase of $30 million in WLF tokens has been ignored by several major media outlets. The New York Times has not mentioned Sun's purchase of the tokens, even in passing. Other major outlets, like the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal, have briefly mentioned Sun's purchase in the context of other coverage.

For some reason, the direct transfer of $18 million by a foreign national being prosecuted by the SEC to the president-elect has not been deemed worthy of meaningful coverage. This is a dramatic change from how the same outlets handled the potential influence of foreign money on other politicians.

In the leadup to the 2016 election, there was extensive coverage from every major media outlet concerning how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation created conflicts of interest for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. This was a legitimate subject of journalistic inquiry but differed in several respects from Sun's enrichment of Trump:

Nearly all of the payments to the Clinton Foundation at issue occurred when Clinton was not in public office. Most of the coverage centered around donations made after Clinton left the State Department and before she launched her presidential campaign.

The foreign money was donated to benefit the Clinton Foundation, a charity, and not Clinton personally. The money did not go into Clinton's bank account, but to the foundation's charitable activities.

The Clinton Foundation disclosed its donors, even though it was not required.

Clinton had not been elected president.

An analysis by Popular Information reveals that between January 1, 2015, and November 8, 2016 (Election Day), the New York Times published 79 pieces that were about or referenced foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. That is nearly one story a week for 22 months.

In a February 20, 2015, column by the New York Times Editorial Board — before Clinton had formally announced her candidacy — the paper emphasized why even an indirect connection between a presidential candidate and foreign dollars was deeply problematic:

Foreign nationals are banned by law from contributing to American politicians’ campaign coffers. This ban does not apply to private foundations, but the idea behind it — that influence should not be bought — is relevant to a political campaign, where appearances can count for much.

…Substantial overlap was found between foundation contributors and familiar Clinton campaign donors and money bundlers. Considering the Clintons’ popularity and influence in their party, this is no surprise. But it does make it important that Mrs. Clinton, in defending the family’s efforts on behalf of the world’s needy, reassure the public that the foundation will not become a vehicle for insiders’ favoritism, should she run for and win the White House.

After Clinton declared her candidacy in April 2015, the Clinton Foundation reimposed restrictions on foreign donations, increased the frequency of its voluntary disclosures, and announced it would stop holding events overseas. The New York Times noted that "questions about the donations have created weeks of negative headlines for Mrs. Clinton leading up to her campaign rollout."

At the same time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Fox News struck a deal with Peter Schweizer, a right-wing operative and frequent collaborator with Steve Bannon. Schweizer had rebranded himself as a journalist and was publishing a book called "Clinton Cash." The book alleged "that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return." Schweizer later admitted that he had no actual evidence to back up the central premise of his book. Nevertheless, the extensive coverage continued in the New York Times based on Schweizer's work.

Upgrade to paid

On April 23, 2015, the New York Times Editorial Board dedicated another column devoted to foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation:

The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.

The coverage, while not revealing any evidence of impropriety, continued month after month. The Republican Party even created an attack ad based on the flood of media attention:

On August 18, 2016, Clinton announced that, if she won the presidency, the Clinton Foundation would stop taking money from corporations or foreign sources. But even that was not enough to put the issue to bed.

"The foundation’s ties to foreign governments and financiers have long been fodder for Mrs. Clinton’s critics — chief among them Donald J. Trump — who contend that foreigners used donations to the foundation to curry favor with the Clintons while Mrs. Clinton was the country’s top diplomat," the New York Times reported on October 15, 2016. That story was about a hacked email revealing that the Qatari government, who donated to the Clinton Foundation, requested to meet with Clinton. The email was treated as a potential scandal even though there was no evidence such a meeting ever occurred.

The New York Times' approach to foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation was not unique. A review of Washington Post coverage over the same time period reveals dozens of similar articles. The Washington Post, for example, highlighted the pledge to stop accepting foreign donations if Clinton won the election meant "donors could race to give money before the deadline — but in time to curry favor with a Democratic nominee who is leading in the polls."

The Washington Post finally filed a story on Sun's purchase of tokens on Tuesday afternoon. The New York Times and other outlets, however, still appear uninterested in a foreign donor personally enriching Trump after he won the presidency.

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an 5 23

rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton.

During a Sunday interview on Fox News, hostMaria Bartiromo asked an animated Jordan if he would consider opening an investigation into the Clintons.

"Do you want to see another investigation of Hillary and Bill Clinton?" Bartiromo wondered. "Because in the Durham report, John Durham wrote that while they were pursuing Trump, they made no effort to investigate the claim that Hillary Clinton was taking money from foreigners for her Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation."

"They not only didn't investigate her like they did President Trump, they gave her campaign a defensive briefing!" Jordan exclaimed. "They should have done the same for President Trump because they literally had no evidence."

Jordan said he would talk with his attorneys and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) before proceeding.

"We're going to give that a good hard look," he insisted. "But nothing is off the table because it is critical the American people understand how their government, their agencies have been turned on, them the taxpayer,and we get all the facts out there."

Watch the video below from Fox News or at this link

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/11/clinton-foundation-cash-flow-drop/

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https://www.npr.org/**2019/10**/09/768556474/how-a-political-hit-job-backfired-and-led-to-trumps-impeachment-peril

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The nation's attention is riveted on the drama unfolding in Washington, where House investigators are assembling evidence for their impeachment inquiry, and President Trump is refusing to cooperate. Our guest, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, says that, ironically, Trump's impeachment peril is the unintended result of an effort to help him.

Last spring, a book came out called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." Its author was Peter Schweizer, the head of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon. The book includes information about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden and his activities in Ukraine when his father was the vice president.

The book raises questions about possible ethical violations and corruption related to Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine. The book received a lot of attention on Fox News, where it came to the attention of President Trump and led Trump to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to pressure the new government there to investigate the claims in Schweizer's book.

Joshua Green notes in a new article how this echoes the playbook that Schweizer and Bannon successfully used with their 2015 book "Clinton Cash," which raised questions about the propriety of Hillary Clinton's financial dealings and those of the Clinton Foundation. It led to investigations by the mainstream media. Joshua Green writes about politics for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Joshua Green, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You write that the allegations of corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine were first aired in a book published last year by something called the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, the Government Accountability Institute is registered as a nonpartisan research organization. It was founded in 2012 by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, and Peter Schweizer, who, I believe, is now the president and still works there. And it bills itself as an investigatory outfit that investigates money and politics, corruption and that sort of thing.

DAVIES: Right. Who funds it?

GREEN: Well, we don't know all the funders, but one of its chief funders is Rebekah Mercer, who is part of the Mercer family, headed by Robert Mercer, the former co-chair of Renaissance Technologies, the big hedge fund. The Mercer family was and still is a major right-wing donor to various different causes, big Trump supporters, and a family that has come into the spotlight since Trump's election - also involved in Cambridge Analytica and some of the outfits that became famous and even notorious after the 2016 election.

DAVIES: The funding certainly comes from partisan sources. You know, the co-founder was Steve Bannon. What's interesting, as you write, is that the work - the research that it produced and the books that it produced weren't intended particularly to reach the conservative media or core Republican voters. What was the purpose?

GREEN: Well, the purpose of GAI originally was to, you know, investigate politicians. But given the conservative band of people like Bannon and Schweizer and their funders, the focus often tended to be Democrats. And in my book, I write about howSchweizer and Bannon resolved to go after Hillary Clinton a couple of years before the 2016 election, knowing that she was likely to emerge as the Democratic nominee.

So through GAI and its investigators, its forensic data scientists, you know, they pored over public records, corporate filings, dark Web scrapings to compile, you know, a damning book about Bill and Hillary Clinton in their work through their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, that was published about a month before Hillary launched her presidential campaign. And that book, "Clinton Cash," became an instant New York Times [PARTNERSHIP?!] bestseller and really tarnished Hillary Clinton's image just as she was entering the presidential fray.

DAVIES: And the interesting thing is that, you know, Bannon was not interested in just generating material for the conservative media. It was important that mainstream media draw on this research and, you know, give it their imprimatur tour too.

GREEN: That's exactly right. You know, Bannon's critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton's impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber and they chased wild rumors and conspiracy theories and really put off ordinary voters. The media didn't listen to them. Voters didn't listen to them. OPPO RESEARCH

So with "Clinton Cash," he resolved to compile factual information that he wanted the mainstream media to pick up and amplify. And so he explicitly was not looking to reach a conservative audience, which is already going to be predisposed to dislike the Clintons, and was aiming to affect the votes in the views of independents and Democrats and the type of people that Hillary Clinton was counting on.It was important to Bannon that GAI's work be picked up and taken seriously by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News.

DAVIES: And did those mainstream media organizations publish stories based on the research?

GREEN: Yeah, they did. I mean, famously, there was a New York Times story based on Schweizer's reporting. And it revealed this in the story, looking at a Clinton Foundation deal in a Russian-backed company called Uranium One that really took off and, I think, poisoned the public views of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton. Of course, that expanded as the media focused on her missing emails and Republicans pushed these ideas. But the book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

DAVIES: Right. And we should just note that there is nothing at all unusual about credible reporters getting tips and leads and information from partisan sources. They have to, of course, independently verify the information and assess its credibility. Were the books that the Government Accountability Institute writes generally accurate?

GREEN: Well, they were based on facts. And what these investigators did was go out and turn out examples of foreign donors that hadn't been disclosed and examples of behavior by former President Bill Clinton that seemed to be conducted on behalf of donors to the Clinton Foundation.You know, Schweizer's style is not to fabricate or allege illegality. Instead, he uses his reporting to lay out a suggestive timeline that leads readers to a conclusion that, hey, something is dirty here. This reeks of influence peddling. Something is not right. And it raises doubts about the subjects.

DAVIES: So the new book from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute is called "Secret Empires: How The American Political Class Hides Corruption And Enriches Family And Friends." And it identified Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as a target for some of the material. What did it find about Joe and Hunter Biden?

GREEN: Well, what it found was that Hunter Biden, the vice president's son, had become a highly paid director at a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma, a position that he didn't have any obvious qualifications for. But he did have a very famous last name, and the owner of the company was interested, I think, in building credibility. Schweizer also took a look at a private equity fund that Hunter Biden became involved in that drew a lot of money from Chinese investors at the same time that Hunter was flying to China on Air Force Two with his father, the vice president.

So in Schweizer's reporting, you know, this is made to look very fishy and possibly illegal and raise doubts about the ethics of Joe Biden and whether or not, you know, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination really belongs in that position or, you know, is in some way corrupt because of his son's business dealings.

DAVIES: No direct evidence that Joe Biden did anything to assist his son in either of those ventures, right? But there's an association.

GREEN: No. No, there isn't. And Bloomberg News, my employer, has done a lot of reporting and has turned up no wrongdoing.Other outlets have taken a look. I mean, what is going on and what Schweizer is good at finding are situations like this where, you know, I think any objective reader would come to the conclusion that, you know, but for Hunter's last name, he would not be in this position. You and I would not be offered a $50,000 a month board seat at a Ukrainian gas company because our father isn't vice president.

So it's the sort of - it's what, you know, Schweizer calls corruption by proxy. There's nothing explicitly illegal, but it's sort of morally corrupt and an indictment of our system in a way that populist Republicans and Democrats like to criticize.

DAVIES: The Clinton book got a ton of mainstream media attention and had an impact on the Clintons themselves. This book, did it get a lot of mainstream attention? Did it hurt harm the Bidens?

GREEN: You know, it really didn't. It came out in 2018, and it kind of came and went. It - you know, it didn't attach itself to Biden. It didn't become - it didn't drive the political news cycle in the way that "Clinton Cash" drove the 2015-2016 presidential news cycle. It got a decent amount of attention in conservative media, but it never really broke out into the mainstream.

You know, and I speculated in my Businessweek piece, a couple of reasons for this - one, Joe Biden wasn't yet a candidate, and so there wasn't that kind of urgency to look into his past. There might have been had the book come out later on. It also didn't focus only on the Biden's; it focused on John Kerry, Barack Obama, the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.So I think that influenced how it was received. And of course, unlike "Clinton Cash," it wasn't focused on an actual Democratic presidential candidate; it was mainly focused on his son. And so there - it was sort of one degree removed from the primary actors.

I think all these things together help explain why the book didn't really break out until, that is, Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became infatuated with it, started trying to investigate these things themselves and now has kicked off what has become an entire impeachment proceeding and put the book and the Bidens and Schweizer himself very much in the center of the 2020 presidential news cycle.

DAVIES: So when this book was launched with these stories, what were the ambitions of Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute?

GREEN: Well, I think the ambition was a reprise of what they'd seen with "Clinton Cash," that the mainstream media would look into this stuff and amplify it in the way that they had with the Clinton charges. You know, Steve Bannon, who kind of pioneered this model, has a phrase he likes to use - anchor left, pivot right. And what that means is you want to anchor this reporting on the left and the mainstream media - what Bannon considers the left - get them writing about it and then use the right-wing media to amplify what it is the mainstream media is saying and to kind of dominate the entire mediasphere.

So I think Schweizer and GAI were hoping that "Secret Empires," the Biden reporting, would be anchored in the mainstream media, and the whole process would repeat itself, but that never really happened with the second book.

DAVIES: So what did happen? Why do we know about it now?

GREEN: Well, we know about it now - it got a decent amount of attention in the right-wing media, onFox News, in the New York Post.And of course, some of - you know, one of the most loyal consumers of right-wing media is the president, Donald Trump, who according to reporting watches hours and hours of Fox News every day. So he was exposed to this reporting, exposed to the charges and the insinuations that Schweizer made. He's tweeted about the book. He's tweeted about Schweizer.

And, you know, based on everything we've heard from the whistleblower report, from the White House call transcript that was released at the end of September, Trump and Giuliani took it upon themselves to pick up the phone and try and advance Schweizer's reporting into the Bidens. I mean, essentially, calling the president of Ukraine and saying, hey,I know about this Biden stuff. I want you to look into this. I want you to investigate my political opponent. And, you know, if you don't, we're going to withhold this military aid - setting off all the alarm bells that have now led to the impeachment inquiry.

DAVIES: So it really was the president and Giuliani that took this and ran with it.

GREEN: It really was. I mean, the remarkable thing - a lot of people watch Fox News, watch right-wing media, get upset about the Clintons and the Bidens, but only one of them had the power to pick up the telephone, call the president of the Ukraine and put pressure on him to investigate the Bidens in hopes that they could turn up more damning information about Joe and Hunter Biden, knowing that Joe Biden was very likely to be his Democratic opponent in 2020.

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green about the origins of the story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, which drew interest from President Trump and has now led to an impeachment inquiry. Green is the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

So President Trump has said that Joe Biden, when he was vice president - I guess in 2016 - sought to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired, who was, at that time, investigating the company associated with Hunter Biden, his son - in effect, kind of scotching an investigation into his son by getting the prosecutor fired. What's the truth of this?

GREEN: Well, it is true what Trump says, but it is wildly misleading. Vice President Biden played a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in the Ukraine. But Biden, the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union were all putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to root out corruption and, particularly, to fire the chief prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, who was not - who was essentially beholden to the oligarchs, was not doing the kind of corruption investigations they wanted.

So Biden threatened to withhold up to a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if Shokin wasn't fired because he was so deeply corrupt. So Biden and the Obama administration were putting pressure on the Ukraine government to do more investigating of corruption not less, as Trump and his allies are insinuating.

And it's also - I mean, just to be clear, they weren't in - Ukrainian prosecutors were never investigating Hunter Biden. They were investigating an oligarch who owned - who is the co-founder of Burisma, the gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served.

DAVIES: Right. And is it clear whether, at the time that he was fired,this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was actually investigating the company?

GREEN: You know, it isn't clear.There have been conflicting reports on this. There does seem to have been an investigation into Burisma. But, you know, they paid a fine. That went away. At no point was Hunter Biden ever implicated in any kind of corruption. And part of what, I think, Trump and Giuliani were trying to do was to reopen this investigation and steer it toward Hunter Biden in hopes that they could find or maybe create damaging material around the Bidens.

DAVIES: There is a new chief prosecutor in Ukraine and was quoted as saying that he had opened an audit of a bunch of old investigations, including one into Burisma Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden was associated with. What does this portend?

GREEN: Well, it's not clear. I mean, one of the things, I think, a lot of people don't understand about the whole Ukraine situation is that Hunter Biden was never investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors. What happened was that they were investigating an oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who co-founded Burisma.And so reopening investigations would be investigations into Burisma Holdings. But they - from what we know, that wouldn't affect or have anything specifically to do with Hunter Biden or his situation there.

One of the things that Trump and Giuliani are pushing for in these text messages and these - in these meetings and phone calls is for Ukrainian prosecutors to go further and specifically investigate the Bidens in hope that they can turn up dirt that can be used in the 2020 presidential campaign.

And as far as we know, there's no basis for investigating anything. There is no evidence that I'm aware of or that anybody has reported that would suggest that there was wrongdoing there.And Schweizer himself, in fact, in the New York Times today, has an op-ed saying that, you know, what transpired actually wasn't illegal under U.S. law. It was unseemly. It might have been unethical - the idea of putting a politician's son on a board as a way of maybe trying to influence the political process - but there was nothing illegal here. And that's very much Schweizer's style is not to allege illegality but to insinuate that there is something corrupt going on there.

And, I think, part of the way that this entire story went sideways and went crashing into this impeachment inquiry is that Trump is very much susceptible to the insinuation that there is something, you know, perfidious going on here and took it upon himself to, you know, push and amplify and even threaten people in hopes of advancing the story.

DAVIES: You mentioned that Peter Schweizer, the author of this book that was funded by the Government Accountability Institute, has an op-ed in The Times. He's arguing that there's a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for an American company operating in a foreign country to engage in, you know, bribery or nepotism to secure favor from governments in which they operate but that there's a big hole in the law in that there's nothing to prevent a foreign government from hiring the family of U.S. officials or creating relationships in order to, you know, create an appearance which helps their business. Does he have a point?

GREEN: I think he's got a perfectly good point. And that's exactly what seems to be going on with Hunter Biden. He had no traditional, professional qualification for the job that he held with Burisma, you know, and that in itself doesn't seem right. I think that is what Schweizer is pointing to.

Now, Trump and Republicans have taken it a lot further, twisting a lot of the facts about what was investigated, what the Obama administration and Biden were pressuring the Ukrainian government to do in 2016. But the basic fact that Hunter Biden was on this board and was probably there for political reasons, because there weren't really any other good reasons for him to be on the board - what Scheizer has pointed out here and what he says in his New York Times op-ed is that what Hunter Biden did was perfectly legal, but that, in itself, is a problem.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek. After a break, he'll talk with Dave Davies about how the controversy is affecting the Biden campaign and how Trump and his allies are fighting back with counter narratives that paint the president as the victim of Democratic attacks.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green. In a recent column, Green argues that President Trump's impeachment worries are actually the unintended result of an effort to help him. He says Trump picked up on research about Joe Biden developed by a conservative think tank and included in a book last year.

The material was intended to harm Biden's presidential campaign. But when Trump saw the story on conservative media and began urging Ukraine to investigate Biden, he created far bigger problems for himself. Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry into whether he abused the authority of his office. When we left off, Green was talking about an op-ed published in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, the author of the book with the allegations against Biden.

DAVIES: Are you surprised that The New York Times would publish an op-ed by Peter Schweizer, you know, who got funding from, you know, the Mercers and have a very strong political point of view?

GREEN: Yeah. You know, a little bit, given the controversy it kicked up in 2016 when Schweizer's reporting appeared on the front page - in other words, in the news pages. This piece today is in the opinion section, which I think is a little bit more appropriate for the author and the subject and the claims that he's making.

DAVIES: Right. And just going back to 2016, my understanding is that, you know, the author of the Times' reporting on the Clinton Foundations and the Uranium One story is reporting that they stand by, that they independently investigated all of this and found it credible and newsworthy. Do you disagree?

GREEN: No. I don't disagree with that at all. I mean, part of what made the GAI project so effective is that they didn't do what some conservative authors do, which is to, you know, fabricate or publish rumors. I mean, they're - all of this is based in fact. They certainly put their own spin on those facts. They insinuated that there was maybe more going on than was actually going on. But they really did turn up evidence of unreported donations, of relationships that just didn't seem right that, you know, any legitimate investigative reporter, were he or she to come across this information, would want to look into further. And that's exactly what happened.

So the fact that there is a grain of truth in a lot of what is written is one of the things that makes it so effective and that Bannon and Schweizer understood from the outset would get the mainstream media to pay attention and amplify these charges. I think what happened in 2016 that upsets liberals so much is that, you know, as this stuff was being published in the mainstream media, it was also being amplified and distorted in the right-wing media. And that was having a real effect on Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

Her reputation was unquestionably tarnished. She was dogged by these charges and allegations. You add in the amplifying voice of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate calling her crooked Hillary and corrupt and I don't think there's any question - but that - it affected voters' views of her in a way that ultimately proved disastrous for Clinton's own candidacy and for Democrats.

DAVIES: One of the things that I think adds to the political potency is that the facts of a lot of these stories are so complicated, that it's really hard for an average reader to sort out what it all means. Was there subsequent reporting on the Uranium One story which cast the Clintons' actions in a different light?

GREEN: Nothing knocked it down. You know, the subsequent reporting - I mean, I think what a lot of Democrats objected to was the fact that this, frankly, partisan outfit and author and right-wing money had produced this information that had made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. And I spoke to the liberal activist David Brock at the time about Schweizer and Bannon. And he shook his head. And he Said, you know, looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus - meaning, you know, the intention all along from these guys was to poison the public image of Hillary Clinton. And by getting these charges onto the front pages of The New York Times, they essentially accomplished that mission. I think everything that happened subsequently with Trump's attacks and Clinton's loss in the 2016 election back that up. And this time around, with Joe and Hunter Biden, they were looking to do the same thing.

DAVIES: In the op-ed, the Times doesn't mention Peter Schweizer's association with the Government Accountability Institute or its funders, you know, the Mercers.What do you think of that?

GREEN: You know, if I were running the op-ed page, I think that's something I would've disclosed based on, you know, his background, the political lineage and what we saw in the 2016 presidential cycle.

DAVIES: So is all of this affecting the Biden campaign?

GREEN: You know, it's not clear that it is. I mean, Biden had been on a bit of a downward trajectory before Trump and the Ukraine charges really came into the news cycle. But, you know, he is - he's starting to slip now. I mean, in the latest averages of polls, Elizabeth Warren has nudged ahead of him. So, you know, it's not clear that this is a deadly development for Joe Biden's candidacy, but it certainly isn't helping.

DAVIES: Since the whistleblower complaint emerged, there's been a lot of information and text and the summary of the phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which has led to this impeachment inquiry, which is clearly picking up steam. I mean, we're going to see, you know, testimony from other players in this including the former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration says it is not going to cooperate with this because, you know, it's a witch hunt. Where do you see this going?

GREEN: Well, you know, the irony here is that Trump, by involving himself, you know, essentially made this entire project blow up in his face and committed actions that, at the very least, have launched an impeachment inquiry and I think are very likely to lead to his impeachment in the House whether or not the Senate ultimately chooses to remove him.

But what the whistleblower report showed, what the subsequent text messages that have now been revealed between the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and Bill Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that show that the U.S. apparently was withholding military aid to help a political campaign, as Taylor put it in his text. That is the quid pro quo that Democrats are alleging. And I think if there is a trial in the House, that's what it's likely to show. And the evidence we've seen so far certainly supports that.

So I think, from an impeachment standpoint, Trump is in real trouble. Whether or not he's ultimately removed from office, we'll see. I'm skeptical. But certainly this isn't the outcome that Schweizer and GAI and I think Trump and Giuliani expected to happen when they started making noise about this over the summer.

DAVIES: Right. Well, the president's defenders are aggressively promoting other narratives. I mean, Giuliani, a couple of weeks ago, was on the ABC weekend show waiving an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, you know, the prosecutor that was fired in 2016, in which alleges that, in fact, he was investigating the company Hunter Biden's - was associated with. There are certainly reasons to doubt his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people. And then, you know, last week, Senator Ron Johnson had a heated exchange with Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press" in which he was arguing that there's all this credible evidence that people in the Ukraine were trying to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton in 2016. [RUSSIAN DISINFO] It's a very aggressive strategy to - you know, bringing up other stuff. What do you think the effect will be?

GREEN: Well, I think the intention on the part of Republicans is to muddy the waters and to turn the charges of corruption against Trump that we've seen laid out in the whistleblower report and the text messages - turn them back against the Democrats.

What is troubling to a lot of people is that a lot of these charges are based on discredited conspiracy theories. What Ron Johnson was talking about was a conspiracy theory that Trump and Giuliani have propagated that it wasn't Russia that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in the 2016 election but Ukraine.That's something that's been knocked down by every intelligence official, U.S. and otherwise, who's looked into this. And yet, this is what's being propagated by Trump.

And I think a lot of Republican politicians, fearful of Trump's wrath and eager to toe the partisan line, have found themselves forced or obligated to repeat these wild charges in a way that bears no relationship to reality but is nonetheless, I think, muddying the waters and shaping public opinion in a way that is intended to mitigate the damage of the charges against Trump.

DAVIES: Is Steve Bannon playing a role in stoking any of these allegations?

GREEN: You know, he really isn't anymore. I mean, Bannon had a very public falling-out with Donald Trump in 2017, where Trump sort of publicly humiliated him and excommunicated him from the Republican Party. He lost his position as the head of Breitbart News, was essentially sent out into the wilderness.

I mean, Bannon is still around on the scene. He is focused more on China these days and trying to, I think, strengthen Trump's resolve to conduct the trade war. Trump did tweet favorably about him a couple of months ago. But there isn't a close relationship there in the way that there was during the presidential campaign.

DAVIES: Yeah. I asked because you wrote a book about Steve Bannon and talked to him a lot. He was also going around Europe trying to kind of build a, you know, nationalist, populist movement. How did that go?

GREEN: Well, it basically failed. I mean, the nationalist movements in Europe weren't really interested in an American political strategist coming in and telling them what to do. They didn't perform nearly as well in the May European parliamentary elections as Bannon and some of the nationalist contingent were hoping for.

And so he's focused mainly these days on kind of beating the war drums against China, going out and publicly defending Trump's aggression against China when it comes to tariffs and the trade war and that sort of thing, and seeking to remain relevant in that way. But so far, there has been no reproach with Trump and the White House, or the Mercer family, for that matter. And so he's off on his own.

DAVIES: You know, looking at the strategy of the Government Accountability Institute with this book, you know, the idea was to kind of repeat the playbook that worked with the Clinton candidacy in 2016, where you develop information, it becomes adopted by the mainstream media and becomes a scandal. And in this case, it seems like another - kind of a different weird thing happened, which is that it turned into a scandal for the president himself when he pursued a theory and then engaged in conduct which has resulted in this impeachment inquiry.

At the same time, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book funded by the Government Accountability Institute, is being quoted. I mean, the story is out there. I wonder how they view this - how it's all worked out.

GREEN:Well, the irony here is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president. And by the president becoming involved, you know, the original plan has kind of blown up. What may wind up happening - as you say, you know, Biden and these charges are very much in the news. That was part of the intention, even if the negative attention toward Trump wasn't part of the plan. What we could see end up happening is a kind of a murder-suicide where Trump really does take out his strongest Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, only, he winds up, in the process, getting himself impeached.

DAVIES: Well, Joshua Green, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

GREEN: Thank you. It's always a pleasure.

GROSS: Joshua Green is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of a book about Steve Bannon called "Devil's Bargain."

===

expertise

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/this-researcher-wrote-the-book-on-presidential-failure-shes-never-see-anything-like-trumps

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-right-wing-coronavirus-deniers-want-to-kill-expertise-and-they-could-entice-trump-to-court-disaster/

no lnx

The right-wing coronavirus deniers want to kill expertise — and they could entice Trump to court disaster

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly March 31, 2020

Back in 2012, Donald Trump tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

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Paul Krugman is right to suggest that we might experience a bit of déjà vu when we watch how the president and his enablers are responding to the coronavirus.

Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”

Just as there are climate science deniers, there are a whole range of coronavirus deniers out there as well. They come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most common are those who simply deny the scope of the problem. While they accept that the virus exists, they tend to believe that Democrats, the media, or the “deep state” (pick your villain) are simply exaggerating the problem in order to make Trump look bad.

The more perverse of these folks started the Twitter hashtag, #FilmYourHospital. They take videos of the outside of hospitals and claim that the lack of activity indicates that the hype is all a hoax.

DeAnna Lorraine????

@DeAnna4Congress

Just went to 2 hospitals in LA to check out these “War Zones” the MSM keeps telling us about.??

They are very quiet & EMPTY.

We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here!

Embedded video

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One of the most prominent coronavirus deniers is radio talk show host Bill Mitchell. His most recent schtick has been to rail against the “stay at home” orders being issued by governors.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

I promise you, when we granted Governors these emergency powers, no one envisioned them shutting down their state for months at a time and imposing martial law.

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But it was Mitchell who initiated the right wing attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci. It all started back on March 3rd.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

So this Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing the panic button today. Always helpful. Talking about closing schools and businesses?

Hell, why don't we just shut down the whole country over 104 sick, 6 dead?

Sorry President Trump, but replace this crackpot.

Almost immediately Fauci was accused of being a Democratic plant. The idea that he was a member of the so-called “deep state” took hold and eventually an email from Fauci surfaced among those that had been released by WikiLeaks. In it, the doctor had praised Hillary Clinton for her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee. Now the deniers were off to the races. They were soon doing the same thing to Dr. Deborah Birx.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate Conflicted Loyaltieshttps://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/exclusive-dr-birxs-connections-with-the-clinton-foundation-and-obama-unfortunately-indicate-conflicted-loyalties/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons …

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate...

Is Dr. Deborah Birx, the doctor with the scarf, a voice of reason or another Deep State doctor pushing economic disaster and suffering? Her past unfortunately provides the answer. Dr. Deborah Birx...

thegatewaypundit.com

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Isaac Stanley-Becker makes the important point about all of this (emphasis mine).

[T]he disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.

This is something we’ve seen over and over again from right-wingers. Whenever someone says something they don’t like—especially if it challenges “dear leader”—all they have to do is find a remote connection to a Democrat (preferably Hillary Clinton), and the opposing opinion can be discarded as nothing more than partisanship. That is how the right is attempting to kill the whole notion of expertise—be it on anything from climate change to coronavirus. The mainstream media provides an assist to those efforts when they assume a “both sides” approach to every issue instead of prioritizing the truth.

Over the course of the last three months, Donald Trump has dallied in many of the opinions espoused by these coronavirus deniers. His decision to extend the guidelines calling for social distancing and other measures to mitigate the virus indicate that at this point, he’s still listening to the experts—even if it is merely for his own self-interest. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The deniers are waiting in the wings with their conspiracy theory guns loaded for the moment he grows impatient with the experts.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-the-hills-john-solomon-undermined-journalism

no lnx

How The Hill’s John Solomon undermined journalism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington MonthlyDecember 6, 2019

With the release of the report from the House Intelligence Committee on their impeachment hearings, Trump’s enablers are outraged that Representative Adam Schiff got access to the phone records of key players in Giuliani’s extortion scheme. According to Byron York, of particular concern is the fact that those records include telephone calls by John Solomon.

Finally, the publication of John Solomon’s records raised still other issues, this time about freedom of the press. In the excitement over the Democratic report, there was little or no discussion about the problems that might arise from the House Intelligence Committee publishing a journalist’s phone records. But in the past, at least when President Trump was not involved, similar issues have been a concern of press advocates…

Searching media coverage Tuesday and Wednesday, there was little or no discussion on whether Schiff’s disclosure touched on Solomon’s First Amendment rights. Solomon is the target of much criticism in mainstream reporting, but he is a journalist who should enjoy the same protections as others in his profession.

York isn’t the only one complaining. The guy who smeared a U.S. ambassador with a mountain of lies in order to get her fired actually had the nerve to talk about a lack of decency.

The problem with claiming that someone like Solomon deserves the protections of the first amendment is that he wasn’t acting as a journalist. While he calls himself an “investigative journalist,” he’s not simply a conservative reporter as some would suggest. He’s been a political operative for years now.

I first noticed stories by Solomon when I began tracking down the origin of the smears about the Clinton Foundation. He wrote volumes spreading those lies. As it turns out, one of his sources was Victoria Toensing, a pattern that has persisted to the current impeachment hearings about Ukraine. At the time, Toensing was representing an undercover FBI informant who claimed he could blow the whistle on Clinton corruption.

What we eventually learned is that the Justice Department determined that they had “serious credibility concerns” with Toensing’s client and that there were inconsistencies between his testimony and the documents they had obtained as part of their investigation.

You might, however, notice a pattern here when I point out that, while Solomon was collaborating with Toensing, the same lies about the informant were being repeated by Trump on Twitter and by Representative Devin Nunes on Fox News. The cast of characters looks very familiar, doesn’t it?

Solomon went on to write about the Trump-Russia investigation. He specifically focused in on the Steele dossier and often quoted anonymous sources that sounded an awful lot like members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Since March, Solomon has been writing articles related to Giuliani’s Ukrainian racket – including smears against Ambassador Marie Yavanovitch, claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and attacks on the Bidens. He admitted that Lev Parnas is the one who connected him to the source of much of his material—former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko.

Documents shared with congress by the State Department inspector general give us an inside look at how these kinds of stories were coordinated.

Included in the roughly 50-page packet was an email from Solomon to Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas previewing an article he’d written that was not yet published…

After that email became public, Solomon claimed he was simply fact-checking the piece before it was published. But Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas are not mentioned in the article, raising the possibility that the trio, who had been working to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens in Ukraine, had been working directly with Solomon on the story.

In other words, Solomon was running the article by his handlers to get their input and/or approval prior to publication.

Just as we saw with the efforts to smear the Clinton Foundation, the team of Toensing and diGenova would sign on as lawyers to represent people who had dirt on Trump’s opponents to sell, usually in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump’s Justice Department. Parnas or Toensing connected those people with Solomon, who wrote the stories that were spread by Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and a whole host of right wing news outlets. In the midst of all of that, Solomon was also a client of Toensing and diGenova.

It is in that sense that I would challenge Solomon’s claims to be a journalist. Just like Giuliani, Toensing, diGenova, Parnas, and Nunes, he was working as a political operative on Trump’s behalf. Beyond the fact that he spread lies that benefited the most corrupt individual to ever serve as a U.S. president, he contributed to the undermining of journalism, which is equally disturbing. Any time a political operative disguises themselves as a journalist, it infects the entire culture with suspicions about who we can trust.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

===

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/06/the-clinton-global-initiative-isnt-really-dead/

ARGUMENT

The Clinton Global Initiative Isn’t Really Dead

The obituaries missed how Bill Clinton’s most important post-presidential legacy lives on in spirit – and in practice.

BY JOE CONASON | FEBRUARY 6, 2017, 8:00 AM

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 22: Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and husband, Former U.S. President Bill Clinton embrace during the Opening Plenary Session: Reimagining Impact for the Clinton Global Initiative on September 22, 2014 at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

The news looked grim: On Jan. 12, the New York State Labor Department issued a statutory warning that the Clinton Global Initiative would be laying off 22 employees within the next three months. Media coverage, especially inright-wing outlets, greeted this routine bureaucratic announcement as proof that Bill Clinton had been forced to shut down his signature philanthropic project in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat because — as one website put it — “nobody pays bribes to people unable to deliver favors.”

Like so much publicity about CGI and the Clinton Foundation during the months leading up to the presidential election, however, those stories were heavy on hostile innuendo and light on basic facts. The obituaries obscured the bigger picture, showing how the ambitious enterprise had permanently changed the direction of philanthropy, both in the United States and abroad. They also missed the fact that CGI hadn’t really died.

Established by the former president in September 2005, to coincide with the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly, CGI drew heads of state, corporate leaders, nonprofit executives, and assorted celebrities who wanted to act as well as talk about major world problems, including poverty, disease, conflict, and climate change. What distinguished CGI from the beginning was Bill Clinton’s insistence that every participant make a “commitment to action.” Over 12 years, CGI commitments grew into “action networks” that brought together companies, nonprofits, and governments in thousands of projects.

Contrary to the negative commentary, the January announcement about CGI wasn’t the product of a post-election capitulation.Contrary to the negative commentary, the January announcement about CGI wasn’t the product of a post-election capitulation. Last September, almost two months before Election Day, Bill Clinton publicly announced the end of CGI at the organization’s 12th annual conference in New York City. He had informed the CGI staff in August, as part of a broader reorganization of the Clinton Foundation that anticipated Hillary Clinton’s expected victory in November.

So the state layoff notice in January reflected nothing beyond the Clinton Foundation’s decision to keep many CGI employees on payroll for up to six months while they sought other jobs. To describe that bureaucratic event as a mark of disgrace or defeat was a misunderstanding — or an intentional misinterpretation — which served as a coda to the torrent of angry, exaggerated, and often inaccurate attacks on CGI during Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated presidential candidacy.

In his farewell speech to CGI members at Manhattan’s Sheraton hotel on Sept. 21, Bill Clinton told them that the initiative — inaugurated there almost exactly 11 years earlier — “worked out better than I ever dreamed.” After more than a decade of developing CGI from a casual notion into a formidable entity,credited with delivering quality health care, clean water, improved education, disaster relief, and other essential benefits to millions of people around the world, he might have thought that those achievements would speak for themselves. But CGI’s work had been tarnished by repeated accusations of “corruption” and “favoritism” toward donors.

CGI and the Clinton Foundation rarely came under such criticism during the years before Hillary Clinton became the favored candidate to succeed Barack Obama as president. From the beginning, CGI’s membership, operations, and tone were strictly nonpartisan, welcoming participation by Republicans (and independents) who shared its objectives. Republican business leaders like John Chambers of Cisco Systems provided financial support and undertook the “commitments to action” that were central to its mission; Republican politicians like John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Carly Fiorina delivered speeches at its annual meeting, laced with extravagant praise for its work.

For the most partisan Republicans, even some like Fiorina who had participated in CGI, the election-year opportunity to smear the Clintons was irresistible. One illuminating example was a widely publicized release of emails between Hillary Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin that depicted a $32 million “commitment” by the crown prince of Bahrain as a bribe to win an official meeting with Clinton in 2009. But the commitment — a pledge to provide college scholarships to Bahraini students — had been made in 2005, three years before anyone knew she would become secretary of state. And not a penny of those Bahraini funds went to the Clintons, their foundation, or CGI. Yet many media outlets fell for that kind of fraudulent “revelation,” clouding the reputations of the Clinton initiatives and their sponsors.

Though the smears can be safely ignored, it’s true that CGI’s real impact has never been easy to assess. During its 12 years, CGI members made more than 3,600 commitments in over 180 countries, valued at many billions of dollars, which are said to have “improved the lives of over 435 million people,” in a wide variety of ways, from better education for 52 million children to safe drinking water for 33 million people and better maternity and early childhood support for 114 million families. They claim to have invested billions of dollars in small businesses, housing development, health care, and energy efficiency, creating up to 4 million “clean jobs” around the world. All of that data relies on reporting by CGI members, with very limited auditing by CGI staff — and even less independent reporting on the commitments or their results by news outlets. It’s natural and inevitable to feel skepticism toward such claims — and the leaders of CGI were not immune to it.

That was why, in the months before its 10th conference in 2014, the Clinton Foundation’s leadership undertook a formidable effort to collect and analyze all of the information that had flowed into CGI’s offices since its founding conference in September 2005.They outsourced the job to Palantir Technologies, a software giant based in Palo Alto that handles “big data” tasks for banks, major corporations, and hedge funds, as well as the Pentagon and several U.S. intelligence agencies. Although Palantir’s largest shareholder is libertarian investor (and eventual Donald Trump supporter) Peter Thiel, its management had enlisted the company as a CGI member years earlier for philanthropic purposes. (Specifically, to develop computer technology to more effectively harness volunteers who show up to assist disaster victims.)

The Palantir study demanded months of work, at considerable expense, which the company performed on a pro bono basis. Unveiled at the CGI conference in September 2014, the results were revealing and instructive — but were reported almost nowhere beyond the philanthropic trade press. Of all the CGI commitments, nearly 42 percent had been completed; just under 40 percent were still underway; about 12 percent were deemed “inactive,” because their sponsors had not reported in for two years or more; almost 5 percent were marked as unsuccessful; and 1.6 percent were described as “stalled.”

The Palantir analysis went even deeper, seeking clues to what had made some CGI commitments succeed at accomplishing their goals and others fail. What the failed commitments shared in nearly every instance was that they had run out of money.Among the most spectacular failures was Sir Richard Branson’s 2006 commitment to invest $3 billion of Virgin Group profits on clean energy projects. The final numbers showed that he had put up less than 10 percent of that amount, while his airlines’ carbon emissions skyrocketed.

The most productive were partnerships that paired a nonprofit with a corporation, as in Procter & Gamble’s work providing billions of gallons of clean water to communities in the developing world through charities like World Vision and ChildFund. To Clinton, these partnerships and networks, often including national or local government agencies, epitomized his own political philosophy: “Everyone counts, everyone deserves a chance, everyone has a role to play, and we all do better when we work together.” In most of the countries where CGI members operated, governments were unable to solve their own problems, but the problems could not be solved without government participation.

If not every project worked out, as the Clintons and their staff were quick to acknowledge, the influence of CGI reached well beyond the endeavors of its members.If not every project worked out, as the Clintons and their staff were quick to acknowledge, the influence of CGI reached well beyond the endeavors of its members. As much as any specific mission, the aim was to change the way nonprofits operate.

“We started CGI to create a new kind of community built around the new realities of our modern world,” Clinton said in his farewell speech, “where problem-solving requires the active partnership of government, business, and civil society. This partnership model, which may seem self-evident today, was simply not how philanthropy and corporate responsibility worked over a decade ago.”

Indeed, CGI had long since proved itself as an innovative model, moving the nonprofit, philanthropic, and corporate spheres toward entrepreneurial cooperation. Even the World Economic Forum held in Davos,Switzerland, every year — where former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band had first conceived of CGI as a kind of protest against elite inertia — has renovated itself as a more action-oriented event. And CGI has inspired dozens of new events and activist discussions around the annual September meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, which had once merely stimulated a frenzy of cocktail receptions.

As Jane Wales, an Aspen Institute vice president who attended almost every CGI conference for 12 years, put it last fall after the final meeting, “My feeling is the job is done — it is a success. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, well, in philanthropy, it is the quickest way to impact.”

On Feb. 2, President Clinton released his foundation’s 2016 annual report, with a letter from him to its supporters. “The attacks on our efforts have not come from people and organizations who understand or care about the work we do,” he wrote. “By contrast, those who do understand have a very different view of what we do and how we do it. The three main charity review groups, which take a detailed look at governance, financial health, transparency, and accountability, have given us high ratings: Charity Navigator: Four Stars; CharityWatch: A; and GuideStar: Platinum.” He went on to pledge that most of the foundation’s initiatives, aside from CGI, will continue — notably including the Clinton Health Access Initiative, whose programs have saved the lives of millions of HIV/AIDS patients across the world.

And as for CGI, perhaps its critics shouldn’t gloat just yet. In his letter, Clinton noted, “We have kept a small group of people at CGI to help those who have made commitments keep them, and are looking now at how best to offer our members and other concerned citizens the chance to dramatically increase the impact of some of the best ideas CGI has produced — and others that may arise.” More to the point, its student program, Clinton Global Initiative University, which has sponsored annual meetings that have welcomed almost 7,000 young people with their own ideas about how to save the world, will continue next October at Northeastern University in Boston. CGI may be gone, but its spirit lives.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo.

===

bs ibizdaily

EDITORIALS

Scam Exposed: Donations To Clinton Foundation Plummeted After Clinton Lost The Election

Corruption: Throughout the presidential campaign there was plenty of talk about whether the Clinton Foundation was a legitimate charity or a pay-to-play scam. The latest financial data from the charity provides the answer.

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.

Coincidences?

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.

Earlier this year, news broke that the FBI was investigating whether the foundation violated tax laws by converting donations to personal or political uses. In December, Republicans plan to hold a hearing into the probe, before handing control of the House to Democrats.

Throughout all this, the Clinton's and their defenders insisted that foundation was doing great work for mankind. It was helping the poor and sick around the world. It got top ratings from charity rating agencies. They said there wasn't any hard evidence of wrongdoing.

Donations Evaporate

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 the nearby 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.

Clinton Foundation Scandal Explained

The Clinton Foundation Is Dead — But The Case Against Hillary Isn't

EU Army: Just Another Bad Idea From Euro-socialists Macron And Merkel

===

official, much transparency

https://www.clintonfoundation.org/about

board 7/19

---

Donor name
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Elevate Social Businesses [Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada)] *
Fred Eychaner and Alphawood Foundation
Frank Giustra, The Radcliffe Foundation
Nationale Postcode Loterij *
The Children's Investment Fund Foundation
UNITAID Leadership Team as of July 2019 LISENA DESANTIS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE JAMES JENKIN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CLINTON GIUSTRA ENTERPRISE PARTNERSHIP ANDREW KESSEL, CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER D. LANCE KING, CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER BARI LURIE, CHIEF OF STAFF, OFFICE OF CHELSEA CLINTON PATTI MILLER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, TOO SMALL TO FAIL GREGORY MILNE, CHIEF IMPACT AND FOREIGN POLICY OFFICER CRAIG MINASSIAN, CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING OFFICER MAURA PALLY, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT BILL RUSTRICK, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CLINTON DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE AMY SANDGRUND-FISHER, GENERAL COUNSEL AND CHIEF HUMAN RESOURCES OFFICER STEPHANIE S. STREETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR KEVIN THURM, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER BILL WETZEL, DIRECTOR, CGI UNIVERSITY ERIC WHITE, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER Leaders of our Separate, Affiliated Entities KATHY HIGGINS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, ALLIANCE FOR A HEALTHIER GENERATION IRA MAGAZINER, VICE CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CLINTON HEALTH ACCESS INITIATIVE

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation

Clinton Foundation (founded in 1997 as the William J. Clinton Foundation^[2] and from 2013 to 2015 briefly renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation)^[3] is a non-profit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code. It was established by former President of the United States Bill Clinton with the stated mission to "strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence."^[4] Its offices are located in New York City and Little Rock, Arkansas.

Through 2016, the foundation had raised an estimated $2 billion from U.S. corporations, foreign governments and corporations, political donors, and various other groups and individuals.^[5] The acceptance of funds from wealthy donors has been a source of controversy.^[5][6] The foundation "has won accolades from philanthropy experts and has drawn bipartisan support".^[5] Charitable grants are not a major focus of the Clinton Foundation, which instead uses most of its money to carry out its own humanitarian programs.^[7]

This foundation is a public organization to which anyone may donate and is distinct from the Clinton Family Foundation, a private organization for personal Clinton family philanthropy.^[8][9]

According to the Clinton Foundation's website, neither Bill Clinton nor his daughter, Chelsea Clinton (both are members of the governing board), draws any salary or receives any income from the Foundation. When Hillary Clinton was a board member, she reportedly also received no income from the Foundation.^[10]

History

The foundation's success is spurred by Bill Clinton's worldwide fame and his ability to bring together corporate executives, celebrities, and government officials.^[11] Similarly, the foundation areas of involvement have often corresponded to whatever Bill suddenly felt an interest in.^[11]The origins of the foundation go back to 1997, when then-president Bill Clinton was focused mostly on fundraising for the future Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.^[1] He founded the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2001 following the completion of his presidency.^[11] Longtime Clinton advisor Bruce Lindsey became the CEO in 2004.^[12][13] Later, Lindsey moved from being CEO to being chair, largely for health reasons.^[12] Other Clinton hands who played an important early role included Doug Band^[14] and Ira Magaziner. Additional Clinton associates who have had senior positions at the foundation include John Podesta and Laura Graham.^[11]

Preceding Barack Obama's 2009 nomination of Hillary Clinton as United States Secretary of State, Bill Clinton agreed to accept a number of conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the Clinton Presidential Center and the Clinton Global Initiative.^[15] Accordingly, a list of donors was released in December 2008.^[16]

By 2011, Chelsea Clinton was taking a dominant role in the foundation and had a seat on its board.^[11][17] To raise money for the Foundation, she gave paid speeches, such as her $65,000 2014 address at the University of Missouri in Kansas City for the opening of the Starr Women's Hall of Fame.^[18]

In 2013, Hillary Clinton joined the foundation following her tenure as Secretary of State. She planned to focus her work on issues regarding women and children,^[19][20] as well as economic development.^[12] Accordingly, at that point, it was renamed the "Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation".^[11]Extra attention was paid to the foundation due to the 2016 United States presidential election.^[11][12]

In July 2013, Eric Braverman was named CEO of the foundation.^[13] He is a friend and former colleague of Chelsea Clinton from McKinsey & Company.^[11][12] At the same time, Chelsea Clinton was named vice chair of the foundation's board.^[11][13] The foundation was also in the midst of a move to two floors of the Time-Life Building in Midtown Manhattan.^[11]

Chelsea Clinton moved the organization to an outside review, conducted by the firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Its conclusions were made public in mid-2013.^[12] The main focus was to determine how the foundation could achieve firm financial footing that was not dependent upon the former president's fundraising abilities, how it could operate more like a permanent entity rather than a start-up organization, and thus how it could survive and prosper beyond Bill Clinton's lifetime.^[11][12] Dennis Cheng, a former Hillary Clinton campaign official and State Department deputy chief, was named to oversee a $250 million endowment drive.^[11] The review also found the management and structure of the foundation needed improvements, including an increase in the size of its board of directors that would have a more direct involvement in planning and budget activities.^[12] Additionally, the review said that all employees needed to understand the foundation's conflict of interest policies and that expense reports needed a more formal review process.^[12]

In January 2015, Braverman announced his resignation. Politico attributed the move to being "partly from a power struggle inside the foundation between and among the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades and who helped start and run the foundation."^[21] He was succeeded at first in an acting capacity by former deputy assistant secretary, Maura Pally.^[22]

On February 18, 2015, The Washington Post reported that, "the foundation has won accolades from philanthropy experts and has drawn bipartisan support, with members of the George W. Bush administration often participating in its programs."^[5] In March 2015, former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration, Donna Shalala, was selected to run the Clinton Foundation.^[23] She left in April 2017.^[24]

In August 2016 The Boston Globe's editorial board suggested that the Clinton Foundation cease accepting donations. The Globe's editorial board offered praise for the foundation's work but added that "as long as either of the Clintons are in public office, or actively seeking it, they should not operate a charity, too" because it represents a conflict of interest and a political distraction.^[25]

In 2016, Reuters reported that the Clinton Foundation suspected that it had been the target of a cyber security breach. As a consequence of the suspected cyber security breach, Clinton Foundation officials retained a security firm, FireEye, to evaluate its data systems. The cyber security breach has been described as sharing similarities with cyberattacks that targeted other institutions, such as the Democratic National Committee.^[26]

In October 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that four FBI field offices—in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock—had been collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to determine whether "there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling". In a reported separate investigation, the Washington field office was investigating Terry McAuliffe before he became a board member of the Clinton Foundation.^[27]

CNN reported in January 2018 that the FBI is investigating allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation in Arkansas. Sources said that federal prosecutors are checking to see if foundation donors were improperly promised policy favors or special access to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state in return for donations, and whether tax-exempt funds were misused by the foundation's leadership.^[28]

Board of directors:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

As of January 2018, the board members are:^[29]

Programs and initiatives:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

As of January 1, 2010, the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, became a separate nonprofit organization called the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).^[11][30] Organizations such as the Clinton Foundation continue to supply anti-malarial drugs to Africa and other affected areas; according to director Inder Singh, in 2011 more than 12 million individuals will be supplied with subsidized anti-malarial drugs.^[citation ^needed]

In May 2007, CHAI and UNITAID announced agreements that help middle-income and low-income countries save money on second-line drugs. The partnership also reduced the price of a once-daily first-line treatment to less than $1 per day.^[31]

CHAI was spun off into a separate organization in 2010; Ira Magaziner became its CEO (he had been a key figure in the Clinton health care plan of 1993).^[11] Chelsea Clinton joined its board in 2011, as did Tachi Yamada, former President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.^[11]

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and CGI U:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was founded in 2005 by Bill Clinton. Doug Band, counselor to Bill, was heavily involved in the formation.^[14] Clinton has credited Band with being the originator of CGI and has noted that "Doug had the idea to do this."^[32] Band left his paid position at CGI in 2010,^[11] preferring to emphasize his Teneo business and family pursuits, but remains on the CGI advisory board.^[12] The overlap between CGI and Teneo, of which Bill was a paid advisor, drew criticism.^[11] Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is also said, according to his lawyers, to have taken part in the conception of CGI.^[33]

In September 2016, it was announced that the Initiative would be winding down to be discontinued and that 74 employees would be let go at the end of the year.^[39][40] In January 2017, it was announced that another 22 employees would be let go by April 15, 2017, and that CGI University would be continued.^[41][42]In 2007, Bill started CGI U, which expanded the model of CGI to students, universities, and national youth organizations. CGI U has been held at Tulane University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Miami, the University of California, San Diego, The George Washington University, Washington University in St. Louis, Arizona State University, and University of California, Berkeley. Panelists and speakers have included Jon Stewart, Madeleine Albright, Vandana Shiva, Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Stephen Colbert, Jack Dorsey, Greg Stanton, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Shane Battier, Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy), and U.S. Rep. John Lewis.^{[34][35][36][37][38]}

Clinton Global Citizen Awards:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Clinton Global Citizen Awards are a set of awards which have been given by the Clinton Global Initiative every year since 2007.^[43] The awards are given to individuals who, in the opinion of the Clinton Foundation, are "outstanding individuals who exemplify global citizenship through their vision and leadership".^[43] Past recipients of the award include Mexican businessman and philanthropist Carlos Slim,^[43] Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien,^[44] Moroccan entrepreneur Mohammad Abbad Andaloussi,^[45] Rwandan President Paul Kagame,^[46] Afghan women's rights activist Suraya Pakzad,^[47] Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández,^[48] and Pakistani labor rights activist Syeda Ghulam Fatima.^[49]

Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In August 2006, Bill Clinton started a program to fight climate change, the Clinton Foundation's Climate Initiative (CCI) .^[50] The CCI directly runs various programs to prevent deforestation and to rehabilitate forests and other landscapes worldwide, develop clean energy, and help island nations threatened by rising ocean levels.^[51]

On August 1, 2006, the Foundation entered into a partnership with the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, agreeing to provide resources to allow the participating cities to enter into an energy-saving product purchasing consortium and to provide technical and communications support.^[52]

In May 2007, CCI announced its first project which will help some large cities cut greenhouse gas emissions by facilitating retrofitting of existing buildings. Five large banks committed $1 billion each to help cities and building owners make energy-saving improvements aimed at lowering energy use and energy costs.^[53] At the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton announced the 1Sky campaign to accelerate bold federal policy on global warming.^[54] The 1Sky campaign supports at least an 80% reduction in climate pollution levels by 2050.

On May 19, 2009, CCI announced the global Climate Positive Development Program where it will work with the U.S. Green Building Council to promote "climate positive" city growth.^[55]

Norway and Germany are among the countries co-financing projects with the CCI in numerous developing and third-world countries.^[56][57][58]

Clinton Development Initiative (CDI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Clinton Development Initiative, originally the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative, was formed in 2006 as a partnership with Scottish philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter's Hunter Foundation to target the root causes of poverty in Africa and promote sustainable economic growth.^[59]

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association that was working to end the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States by 2010.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which provided an initial $8 million to start the Healthy Schools Program, awarded a $20 million grant to expand the program to over 8,000 schools in states with the highest obesity rates.^[60]

At the industry level, the Alliance struck agreements with major food and beverage manufacturers to provide kids with nutritional options, and established nutrition guidelines for school vending machines, stores and cafeterias to promote healthy eating. Some of the companies involved in these efforts are Coca-Cola, Cadbury plc, Campbell Soup Company, Groupe Danone, Kraft Foods, Mars and PepsiCo.^[61][62]

Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Established in 2007 with Canadian mining executive Frank Giustra — founder of the petroleum company Pacific Rubiales (renamed Pacific Exploration & Production in 2015) — CGSGI describes itself as "pioneering an innovative approach to poverty alleviation."^[63] Giustra's involvement with the Clinton Foundation has been criticized by the International Business Times, The Washington Post, and the American Media Institutebecause it was accompanied by a sudden reversal in Hillary Clinton's position while Secretary of State concerning the United States–Colombia Free Trade Agreement, an agreement which she had previously opposed "as bad for labor rights."^{[64][65][66][67]}

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In November 2012, Bill Clinton announced the launch of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI). CHMI is a national initiative, building on the Clinton Foundation's work on global health and childhood obesity, that works to improve the health and well-being of people across the United States by activating individuals, communities, and organizations to make meaningful contributions to the health of others. CHMI holds an annual Health Matters conference every January in the Coachella Valley.^[68]

Disaster relief:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Foundation has funded extensive disaster relief programs following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, President George W. Bush asked former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to raise funds to help rebuild the Gulf Coast region. The two Presidents, having worked together to assist victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, established the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to identify and meet the unmet needs in the region, foster economic opportunity, and to improve the quality of life of those affected.^[69] In the first month after the hurricane, the Fund collected over 42,000 online donations alone; approximately $128.4 million has been received to date from all 50 states and $30.9 million from foreign countries.

Both the foundation and the Clintons personally have been involved in Haiti before and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.^[11][70] Bill Clinton was named the head of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) in 2010 after serving as UN special envoy to Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The Clinton Foundation itself raised $30m and played an important part in the creation of the Caracol Industrial Park. The IHRC mandate was removed by the Haitian legislature in 2011.^[71]

No Ceilings project:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 2013, Hillary Clinton established a partnership between the foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the United Nations Fourth World Conference On Women in Beijing in 1995.^[72][73] This is called "No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project."^[72][73] The project released a report in March 2015.^[74]

Charity review sources:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In March, 2015, the charity watchdog group Charity Navigator added the Clinton Foundation to a watch list (a designation meant to warn donors that questions have been raised about an entity's practices), after several news organizations raised questions over donations from corporations and foreign governments. It removed the foundation from its watch list in late December of that year.^[75] In September 2016, it gave it its highest possible rating, four out of four stars, after its customary review of the Foundation's financial records and tax statements.^[76] A different charity monitor, CharityWatch, said that 88% of the foundation's money goes toward its charitable mission and gave the foundation an A rating for 2016. In 2015, based on revenue of $223 million and an expense ratio of 12% the foundation spent in excess of $26 million to complete its mission.^[77]

Private philanthropy

The Clinton Foundation is a public organization to which anyone may donate. Due to their similar names, the public foundation has sometimes been confused with the Clinton Family Foundation, which is reserved for the Clintons' private philanthropy. The two foundations have sometimes been conflated by news sources.^[8] The significantly smaller Clinton Family Foundation is a traditional private foundation that serves as the vehicle for their personal charitable giving.^[9] Headquartered in Chappaqua, New York, it received nearly all of the approximately $14 million the Clintons gave to charity from 2007–13.^[8]

Controversies

Transparency

Around 2007, the Clinton Foundation was criticized for a lack of transparency. Although U.S. law did not require charities, including presidential foundations, to disclose the identities of their contributors, critics said that the names of donors should be disclosed because Hillary Clinton was running to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Commentator Matthew Yglesias opined in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the Clintons should make public the names of foundation donors to avoid any appearance of impropriety.^[78]

The foundation has been criticized for receiving donations from Middle-Eastern countries which are seen to oppress women (stoning for adultery, not being able to drive, requiring a male guardian, etc.). These countries include Saudi Arabia ($10–25 million), UAE, and Qatar.^[80] The foundation accepted these donations even though Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential campaign platform guaranteed to break down barriers that held women back.^[81]A lengthy donors list was then released by the Foundation in December 2008,^[16] which included several politically sensitive donors, such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Blackwater Worldwide.^[79] The Foundation stated that the disclosures would ensure that "not even the appearance of a conflict of interest" would exist once Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.^[79]

In November 2016, Reuters reported that "The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new or significantly increased support from foreign governments."^[82] Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin opined that the Qatari gift "raised ethical questions" because of the nation's support for Hamas.^[83]

The ethics agreement between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation that had been put into force at the beginning of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State in 2009 came under scrutiny from the news media during February 2015 as polls showed her the likely 2016 Democratic nominee for president.^[84] The Wall Street Journal reported that the Clinton Foundation had resumed accepting donations from foreign governments once Secretary Clinton's tenure had ended.^[85] Contributions from foreign donors, which are prohibited by law from contributing to political candidates in the U.S., constitute a major portion of the foundation's income. A Washington Post investigation in 2014 showed that there was "substantial overlap between the Clinton political machinery and the foundation". The investigation revealed that almost half of the major donors who had backed Ready for Hillary, a group which supported her 2016 presidency bid, had given at least $10,000 to the foundation, either personally or through foundations or companies they run. The Clinton Foundation's chief communications officer Craig Minassian explained that it is a "false choice to suggest that people who may be interested in supporting political causes wouldn’t also support philanthropic work."^[5]

A subsequent Washington Post inquiry into donations by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation during the Secretary's tenure found, in addition to six cases where such governments continued making donations at the same level they had before Clinton became Secretary as envisioned under the agreement, one instance of a new donation, $500,000 from Algeria for earthquake relief in Haiti, that was outside the bounds of the continuation provision and should have received a special ethics review, but did not.^[86] Foundation officials said that if the former Secretary decided to run for president in 2016, they would again consider what steps to take in reference to foreign donations.^[86] But in general, they stressed that, "As with other global charities, we rely on the support of individuals, organizations, corporations and governments who have the shared goal of addressing critical global challenges in a meaningful way. When anyone contributes to the Clinton Foundation, it goes towards foundation programs that help save lives."^[86] State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki attested that the foundation's commitment to the ethics agreement in question "has been over and above the letter of the law".^[87] In August 2016, after Clinton's securing the Democratic nomination, the Clinton Foundation announced that it will stop accepting foreign donations if she were elected.^[88]

In March 2015, Reuters reported that the Clinton Health Access Initiative had failed to publish all of its donors, and to let the State Department review all of its donations from foreign governments after it was spun off from the Clinton Foundation in 2010.^[89] In April 2015, The New York Times reported that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the State Department had approved transactions that allowed Russian state-owned corporation Rosatom to take a majority stake in Uranium One,^[90] whose chairman had donated to the Clinton Foundation.^[91] The State Department "was one of nine government agencies, not to mention independent federal and state nuclear regulators, that had to sign off on the deal."^[92] FactCheck.org decided there is "no evidence" that the donations influenced Clinton's official actions or that she was involved in the State Department's decision to approve the deal,^[93] and PolitiFact concluded that any "suggestion of a quid pro quo is unsubstantiated".^[92]

2015 State Department subpoena

Main article: Clinton Foundation–State Department controversy

In February 2016, The Washington Post reported that the United States Department of State issued a subpoena to the foundation in the fall of 2015. According to the report, the subpoena focused on "documents about the charity's projects that may have required approval from federal government during Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state" and "also asked for records related to Huma Abedin, longtime Clinton aide who for six months in 2012 was employed simultaneously by the State Department, the foundation, Clinton's personal office, and a private consulting firm with ties to the Clintons."^[94]

References

...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/trumps-ag-nominee-helped-perpetrate-steve-bannons-uranium-one-hoax/

Certain figures in Washington develop a gold-plated image over the years, praised so often in reputable media outlets as men (almost always men) of integrity that their reputations become unassailable. Nobody criticizes them, because they are defined above criticism. Often enough, these figures prove less perfect than advertised — think Clark Clifford or Kenneth Starr.

Such a fellow is William Barr, whose nomination by President Trump for United States attorney general will come before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. His name is almost invariably adorned with adjectives like “prominent” and “respected.” These days, it is also usually noted that he is one of the youngest lawyers who ever served in the office to which he again aspires, named by the late former President George H.W. Bush, of blessed memory, et cetera.

Given this uplifting consensus, it may seem churlish to mention some basic facts about Barr. Contrary to the sugar coating routinely applied by pundits to the Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush era, the Justice Department that Barr once headed was rife with political intrigue. (An attorney general predecessor of his — one Edwin Meese, still at large — barely escaped prison.)

The most blatant episode occurred one month before the 1992 presidential election, when Barr suddenly seized control of a minor matter in Little Rock, Arkansas. He ordered FBI agents in the Little Rock office to open an investigation of tiny Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan — no later than Oct. 16! — a move that was clearly designed to set up Bill and Hillary Clinton for embarrassment. Barr issued this order despite the fact that Charles Banks, the U.S. Attorney in eastern Arkansas, had determined there was no plausible evidence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons.

Barr’s partisan directive plainly violated Justice Department strictures against any legal action that might influence a federal election. His intrusion enraged Banks — a Republican appointee — who dictated a sharply worded letter that left no doubt about his suspicions.

Banks declared that he would not participate in this “intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election” and warned that this “amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Justice Department policy.” He closed by promising to direct “any press inquiry from any source whatsoever” to Barr.

Almost a quarter century later, Barr is the same partisan hack indulging in the same political mischief. And he is still targeting the Clintons.

Before he was nominated by Trump, he auditioned for the job by suggesting publicly that special counsel Robert Mueller has no legal basis to investigate the president for obstruction of justice. This worrisome opinion will no doubt be explored by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who fear that Barr will interfere with the Russia investigation.

They should also ask Barr why he believes that the Uranium One conspiracy theory — which claims that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved a Russian takeover of U.S. uranium reserves in exchange for donations to The Clinton Foundation — merits investigation by the Justice Department. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters,” he said last year, “the department is abdicating its responsibility.”

Uranium One is a political hoax, albeit a hoax that Steve Bannon once contrived to place on the front page of The New York Times. It is false in every aspect, from the motives of the Clintons, to the process for approving the uranium asset sale by federal officials — which Hillary Clinton could not have controlled as secretary of state, and which continued after she left office. So for Barr to promote this fraud means either that he is very stupid or that he is willing to misuse the Justice Department’s investigative authority. And nobody thinks Barr is stupid.

So senators on the judiciary committee should ask why he uttered that remark. What evidence does he possess about Uranium One? What sources have informed his strange opinion? And will he pursue investigations to vindicate a political agenda?

It wouldn’t be the first time.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Nobody ought to be surprised to hear of the belated demise of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a racketeering enterprise under investigation by the state authorities in New York for the past two years. Barbara Underwood, the state attorney general, announced that the foundation will dissolve and its assets distributed to bona fide charitable groups. She seeks to prohibit its overseers, President Trump and his adult children, from serving on the board of any nonprofit in New York for the foreseeable future.

Raking through the foundation's records since 2016, Underwood found what she described as "a shocking pattern of illegality," which included not only various self-serving schemes to bolster Trump businesses and stroke Trump's ego but also multiple (and unlawful) expenditures to advance his presidential campaign. The largest donation went to restore a fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York when Trump owned it. The smallest went to the Boy Scouts and appeared to be Donald Trump Jr.'s enrollment fee.

Trump misused the assets of one scam, the Trump Foundation, to protect another, Trump University. He sent a $25,000 foundation check to Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi -- an illegal donation-- around the time she was considering whether to open a fraud probe into his fake educational institution. He raised millions for a veterans charity and then let Corey Lewandowksi direct the distribution of those funds in Iowa on the eve of the 2016 Republican caucuses. That violated the law, too.

Meanwhile, a different foundation continues to operate in New York City, with the highest possible ratings from nonprofit watchdog agencies like Guidestar, Charity Navigator and Charity Watch. Over the past decade or so, that foundation is estimated by public health authorities to have saved the lives of millions of people around the world threatened by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. And it has estimable programs that help farmers, workers, women and schoolchildren around the world, including the United States. That foundation bears the names of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton -- none of whom have ever been sanctioned for a misuse of foundation funds.

Yet the sorry fact is that despite The Clinton Foundation's extensive good works, many, perhaps most, Americans probably believe that it is no better than Trump's fountain of sleaze. That negative image is owed to a carefully crafted and heavily funded plan to defame the Clinton Foundation, run by none other than Steve Bannon. Using funds supplied by the right-wing billionaire Mercer family, Bannon oversaw the production of a highly inaccurate book, "Clinton Cash," which he then used to manipulate mainstream news outlets. The book author even made a deal with The New York Times to feature the book's "research" in a front-page story that suggested Hillary Clinton had engineered approval of a uranium sale to Russia for the benefit of foundation donors.

That false and cynical story ran in 2015, around the time that Clinton declared her presidential candidacy -- and it molded a damaging narrative that influenced all ensuing coverage, just as Bannon and Mercer had plotted. From that moment until November 2016, news coverage of The Clinton Foundation mainly consisted of snuffling around for gossip, stolen emails and any other stray nonsense that advanced the negative story. Coverage of the Clinton Foundation's actual achievements was pushed aside.

The Trump Foundation escaped any such harsh scrutiny until just six weeks before Election Day 2016, when the Washington Post published the most devastating articles in a series by David Fahrenthold. His outstanding investigations eventually set the stage for the Trump Foundation's exposure and dissolution by New York authorities. But most of Fahrenthold's toughest stories came far too late for any political impact -- and received far too little coverage in mainstream outlets

By then, Brad Parscale,the Trump aide who is already managing Trump's reelection campaign, had bamboozled voters with a wildly bogus comparison, as summarized in this June 2016 tweet: "Data doesn't lie: Clinton Foundation was 'slush fund' while Hillary was a Senator/Secretary/Pres candidate. Trump Foundation helped people in need with 100 percent to charities, but @realDonaldTrump voluntarily shut his down. Yet who is the sleazy NY AG suing?!"

Parscale earned four Pinocchios from the Post fact-checker for this crude deception. But he got the last laugh.

Voters can depend on Parscale and Trump to slander their opponent in 2020, just as they lied viciously and incessantly about the Clintons. The question is whether mainstream news outlets will again amplify such lies in the name of "balance" or defend truth against its enemies.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

===

zombie:

House hearing to shine spotlight on Clinton Foundation

Posted By -NO AUTHOR- On 11/22/2018 @ 3:45 pm In APP Frontpage,Politics,U.S. | No Comments

Hillary Clinton at the American Federation of Teachers Union on July 13, 2018 (Video screenshot)

As they prepare to hand over the leadership of committees to the Democrats, House Republicans will hold a hearing into the Justice Department’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told Hill.TV on Wednesday that U.S. Attorney John Huber, who has been working with the DOJ and the FBI on the the probe, will testify before the House Oversight Committee Dec. 5,the Daily Caller reported.

Meadows said Huber was tasked in part with investigating possible “improper activity” by the Clinton Foundation.

The allegations center on “pay for play” donations to the charity while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

Critics, including investigative journalistPeter Schweizer, have presented evidence Clintons exchanged political favors for donations and pushed favorable policies to receive donations.

The New York Times reported Trump told his White House counsel earlier this year he wanted the DOJ to prosecute Clinton.

In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided a special prosecutor was not needed to investigate Hillary Clinton regarding allegations the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state-owned company while she was secretary of state was related to donations made to the Clinton Foundation.

Sessions said Huber also was reviewing the allegations of Republican lawmakers that the FBI used the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Meadows said in a Twitter message at the time that Sessions’ decision not to appoint a special counsel was “disappointing.”

“So the Obama DOJ can open a legally questionable investigation into the Trump campaign — allegedly based on a campaign volunteer mouthing off at a London bar — but this DOJ can’t appoint a second special counsel after all the troubling documents we’ve seen? Disappointing,” he wrote.

Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” was the first to report nine foreign investors in the Uranium One deal gave $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times confirmed in an April 2015 story Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. The Times found that the Clintons, however, did not publicly disclose the contributions, despite an agreement Hillary Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.

In addition, Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian bank tied to the Kremlin in 2010, when Hillary Clinton opposed sanctions on Moscow. She reversed her position the following year.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2018/11/house-hearing-to-shine-spotlight-on-clinton-foundation/

===

target by cu bossie ny post tabloid multiple, ed slime

major donor to the Clinton Foundation was tapped by Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff to an intelligence advisory board – despite his inexperience in the field, according to ABC News.

Rajiv Fernando’s only apparent qualification as a member of the International Security Advisory Board was his technological acumen, the network reported.

Fernando, a stock trader who also was a prolific fundraiser for Democratic candidates, joined the panel that comprised mostly nuclear scientists and security experts.

Newly released State Department emails – which shed light on the controversial appointment – revealed how Clinton staffers sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” ABC News and finally accept the donor’s resignation four days later when the network asked about his qualifications.

The emails showed that a press aide for Clinton expressed concern about Fernando’s appointment in an email to two other State Department officials.

“I have spoken to [State Department official and ISAB Executive Director Richard Hartman] privately, and it appears there is much more to this story that we’re unaware of,” Jamie Mannina, the aide, wrote in one of the newly released emails.

“We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name, as well as the integrity of the Board. I think it’s important to get down to the bottom of this before there’s any response.

“As you can see from the attached, it’s natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members,” Mannina continued.

Wade Boese, the chief of staff for the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, responded: “The true answer is simply that S staff (Cheryl Mills) added him. Raj was not on the list sent to (Clinton); he was added at their insistence.”

S refers to the secretary of state, meaning Clinton.

When confronted by ABC News at the 2012 Democratic convention, an upset Fernando said he was “not at liberty” to speak about it.

At the time of his appointment, Fernando – whose expertise appeared to be high-frequency, computer-generated stock trading – headed Chopper Trading, a leading firm in that field.

Fernando bundled more than $100,000 for Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign, before raising money for President Obama in the general election.

He also donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation.

The trove of revealing new emails were provided to ABC by the conservative group Citizens United, which obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Clinton campaign through a spokesman told ABC News that the ISAB’s charter calls for the panel to be made up of “a balance of backgrounds and points of view. Furthermore, it is not unusual for the State Department Chief of Staff to be involved in personnel matters.”

Fernando attended a White House state dinner honoring the British prime minister six months after he left the security board.

He is now a super-delegate to the Democratic presidential convention in Philadelphia.

His contributions to the Clinton Foundation have increased since 2008 to between $1 million and $5 million, the network said.

===

ref

...emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act after more the two years of litigation with the government.

A prolific fundraiser for Democratic candidates and contributor to the Clinton Foundation, who later traveled with Bill Clinton on a trip to Africa, Rajiv K. Fernando’s only known qualification for a seat on the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) was his technological know-how. The Chicago securities trader, who specialized in electronic investing, sat alongside an august collection of nuclear scientists, former cabinet secretaries and members of Congress to advise Hillary Clinton on the use of tactical nuclear weapons and on other crucial arms control issues.

...

ref ny post

note no actual ref to clinton fdn (only an unrelated case which is presumably weiner texting? how cd tabloid not go for that?]

... last month, the FBI director rebuffed requests from Republicans to reopen the investigation, saying he hadn’t seen new evidence that “would come near” taking such an extraordinary step.

Donald Trump’s campaign cheered the FBI’s decision.

“A great day in our campaign just got even better. FBI reviewing new emails in Clinton probe,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said in a tweet.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame.”

“She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information. This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators.”

Another top Republican said it was becoming clearer that Clinton “jeopardized national security.”

“The more we learn about Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the clearer it becomes that she and her associates committed wrongdoing and jeopardized national security,” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness. The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.”...

ref (all by diff authors)

CLINTON FOUNDATION

Bill Clinton's upcoming windfall

DOJ reportedly launches new probe into Clinton Foundation

Donations to Clinton Foundation plunged along with Hillary's election defeat

Jeff Sessions denies Trump is pressuring him into probing Clinton

Chelsea Clinton used her family foundation’s cash to pay for her wedding, living expenses and taxes on gifts of cash from her parents, according to a bombshell email made public Sunday.

Doug Band, formerly a top aide to President Bill Clinton, griped about the former first daughter’s spending in a Jan. 4, 2012, email released by WikiLeaks.

[note elliptical]

“The investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents…,” Band wrote to John Podesta, now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

“I hope that you will speak to her and end this. Once we go down this road…”

Band’s message is contained in a chain of emails that were hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account. WikiLeaks has released more than 50,000 of the stolen emails over the past 32 days.

Earlier in his correspondence with Podesta, Band said he had “just received a call from a close friend” of Bill Clinton’s.

Modal Trigger

Bill Clinton walks Chelsea down the aisle on her wedding day.AP

Band said the pal revealed that Chelsea had told one of George W. Bush’s daughters that she was looking into transfers of money from the Clinton Global Initiative to the Clinton Foundation.

“The bush kid then told someone else who told an operative within the republican party,” Band wrote, eschewing capitalizations.

Band — who was revealed in previous leaked emails to have called Chelsea a “spoiled brat kid” — also said he had “heard more and more chatter” about the former first daughter “and bari talking about lots of what is going on internally to people.”

The mention of “bari” is an apparent reference to Bari Lurie, Chelsea’s chief of staff at the Clinton Foundation.

“Not smart,” Band added.

Podesta responded: “You are perfecting your skills for understatement.”

Other hacked emails revealed Sunday that Podesta thought Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills, “didn’t want her to run” for president due to the private server/email scandal and had likely told Clinton that using a private computer server was OK.

The new emails extended a chain of messages, released last month, in which Neera Tanden, a Clinton ally and president of the Center for American Progress think tank, fumed about who “told Hillary she could use a private email” and asked “has that person been drawn and quartered?”

“Don’t you think Cheryl?” Podesta asked Tanden on July 25, 2015.

“I repeat, why hasn’t this person been drawn and quartered? I’m reading wolf hall. There is something to be said for the power of torture,” Tanden answered.

“At least we now know why Cheryl didn’t want her to run,” Podesta wrote

...

===

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-foundation-paid-for-chelseas-wedding/

no pix, tweet

Did the Clinton Foundation Pay for Chelsea’s Wedding?

The rumor that the charitable foundation paid for Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding at Haiti's expense appears to be without merit.

CLAIM

Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding was paid for by the Clinton Foundation.

RATING

:{UNPROVEN:(style="box-sizing:inherit;position:relative;z-index:1;width:100%;text-transform:uppercase;vertical-align:top;height:90px"):}:

ORIGIN

In mid-January 2018, a more-than-a-year-old rumor that the Clinton Foundation illegally paid for Chelsea Clinton’s 2010 wedding began recirculating on social media, after the only daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to criticize United Sates President Donald Trump for disparaging African countries, El Salvador, and Haiti in an ongoing debate about immigration.

The rumor first appeared two days before the 8 November 2016 presidential election, when the document-dumping site WikiLeaks posted a hacked email between Democratic operatives seemingly discussing it. The rumor was kicked up again by supporters of President Trump after two damaging breaking news stories hit: one by the *Washington Post* reporting that Trump had asked during a discussion about immigration why people from “shithole countries” were coming to the U.S., and another by the *Wall Street Journal* reporting that one of Trump’s attorneys had paid a six-figure sum to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to remain silent about a 2006 sexual encounter.;

The unfounded Chelsea Clinton wedding rumor was pushed by the usual suspects:

cc:

Mr. President, immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and the 54 countries in Africa likely helped build your buildings. They’ve certainly helped build our country. cc @POTUS :{https://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:twitter.com/business/statu:{s/951598283218186242 }:…

[:{:{Paul Joseph Watson}::{ > :{✔}:

}:}:@PrisonPlanet](https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet)

Chelsea loves the Haitian people. They paid for her wedding, after all. :{http://www.:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:independent.co.uk/news/world/ame:{ricas/chelsea-clinton-emails-wedding-wikileaks-foundation-money-funds-a7402011.html }:…

8:35 AM - Jan 12, 2018

Chelsea Clinton allegedly used Clinton Foundation funds to help pay for wedding

Chelsea Clinton used the Clinton Foundation's resources "for her wedding", an aide to former US President Bill Clinton wrote in 2012, according to emails released by WikiLeaks. They appear to show...

independent.co.uk

:{4,132:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

:{2,008 people are talking about this:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

:{Twitter Ads info and privacy:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:

The story got a major boost by Fox News guest Tom Fitton, the head of right-wing activist organization Judicial Watch, who claimed in an interview on the conservative cable channel that Haiti got “shafted” by the Clinton Foundation because Chelsea’s wedding and a major earthquake in Haiti took place in the same year, insinuating that funds intended for earthquake relief in Haiti were diverted to the Clintons’ daughter’s wedding instead:

.@TomFitton: "@ChelseaClinton's wedding was back in 2010, which was the year of the [Haiti] earthquake, and the allegation was that Foundation resources were used for Clinton's wedding."

9:12 AM - Jan 13, 2018

:{1,542:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

:{1,203 people are talking about this:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

The claim that the Clinton Foundation diverted funds from the Haiti quake to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding is a reach at best, especially considering the discussion in the e-mail exchange between former Bill Clinton aides Doug Band and John Podesta on 4 January 2012 was itself nothing more than the relaying of a rumor. In it, Band told Podesta that he had caught wind of scuttlebutt regarding Chelsea Clinton’s activities and the Clinton Foundation finances from a friend of a friend, as it were:

I just received a call from a close friend of [Bill Clinton] who said that [Chelsea Clinton] told one of the bush 43 kids that she is conducting an internal investigation of money within the foundation from [Clinton Global Initiative] to the foundation. The bush kid then told someone else who then told an operative within the republican party

I have heard more and more chatter of [Chelsea Clinton] and [Bari Lurie] talking about lots of what is going on internally to people

Not smart

…

The investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents….

I hope that you will speak to her and end this

Once we go down this road….

The e-mail was made public as part of a trove of leaked messages which U.S. intelligence agencies reported werestolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic operatives in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and were then handed over to WikiLeaks as part of an effort not only to not only help then-candidate Donald Trump, but also to sow social division and doubt in the American democratic process. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is currently investigating allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia.

No tangible evidence has yet turned up documenting that the cost of Chelsea Clinton’s 2010 wedding to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky was paid out of Clinton Foundation coffers, and it’s unclear exactly what Band meant by Chelsea Clinton’s using foundation “resources” for her wedding, or why she might have been investigating who paid for her own wedding. What is clear is that Band was talking about hearsay, and the e-mail offered only nebulous information about what was being investigated (and by whom). Adding more uncertainty to the motivations and context for the exchange was the fact that Band apparently had a sour relationship with Chelsea over his role at the Clinton Foundation.

According to Bill Clinton’s spokesperson, Angel Ureña, Chelsea’s wedding in Rhinebeck, New York was paid for by her parents, which Clinton himself reiterated on Twitter:

No Clinton Foundation funds—dedicated to Haiti or otherwise—were used to pay for Chelsea’s wedding. It’s not only untrue, it’s a personal insult to me, to Hillary, and to Chelsea and Marc.:{https://www.:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important"):}:washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec:{ker/wp/2017/01/04/did-the-clinton-foundation-pay-for-chelseas-wedding/ }:…

1:11 PM - Jan 13, 2018

Did the Clinton Foundation pay for Chelsea’s wedding?

Some voters were swayed at the last minute to vote for Trump because of this allegation. But there is no evidence to support it.

washingtonpost.com

:{79.3K:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

:{36K people are talking about this:(style="display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;margin-left:3px;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;min-width:0px"):}:

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are independently audited annually, and reports are posted to the charity’s web site for public examination. Certified public accounting firm BKD audited the Clinton Foundation’s finances for the year 2010 and found no evidence of any misleading or inaccurate financial statements made on Internal Revenue Service disclosure forms.

The charities of both 2016 major party presidential candidates were the sources of much scrutiny and partisan flame-throwing in the months before the election, but the Clinton Foundation has been the target of an unending parade of debunked-yet-resilient conspiracy theories.Here are just a few of the many examples:

o The suicide death of former Haitian official Klaus Eberwein was linked to the foundation.

o A former foundation executive, Eric Braverman, had suspiciously gone “missing.”

o After giving a speech supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Gold Star father Khizr Kahn was accused of accepting a six-figure wire transfer from the Clinton Foundation.

Perhaps the most persistent conspiracy theory about the Clinton Foundation is the one with the longest legs to date: a debunked but jarring claim that Hillary Clinton made a deal to transfer 20 percent of U.S. uranium deposits to a Russian company in exchange for donations to the foundation has made it to the highest levels of government. In November 2017, the Justice Department announced it would review the Uranium One allegations.

In July 2016, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) filed fraud complaints with several federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, against the Clinton Foundation. The IRS followed up by notifying Blackburn that her complaint was being referred to the Exempt Organizations Examinations office in Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Washington Post investigative reporter David Fahrenthold documented in detail several instances in which the Donald J. Trump Foundation violated federal rules against “self-dealing,” which forbid non-profit heads from using charity money for personal benefit.

In 2016, Donald Trump paid a fine to the IRS for making a political donation using Trump Foundation money. The Trump Foundation filed paperwork for dissolution in November 2017.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-legal-team-shared-office-space-with-top-conservative-legal-group

Trump’s Lawyers Sharing Space With Anti-‘Deep-State’ Group

The powerful conservative non-profit happens to be suing the administration over, among other matters, Uranium One.

BETSY WOODRUFF

LACHLAN MARKAY

03.22.18 2:44 PM ET

President Donald Trump’s legal team has done work out of the Capitol Hill offices of a conservative nonprofit group run by one of the president’s lawyers.

Two sources familiar with the situation say attorneys representing the president in the probe into Russian election meddling have met at and worked out of the headquarters of theAmerican Center for Law and Justice, a 501(c)(3) legal advocacy nonprofit run by Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s legal team.

A spokesperson for the ACLJ did not dispute this report.

"The American Center for Law and Justice has maintained a Washington D.C. office for many years,” said Gene Kapp, a spokesperson for the organization. “The work done by the ACLJ is separate and distinct from the work performed by those who serve as Counsel to the President. Any non-ACLJ related work that occurs at the ACLJ offices is reimbursed in compliance with all applicable tax laws.”

From a strictly legal perspective, the arrangement appears above board, so long as ACLJ is charging market rates to rent the space, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform programs at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog.

“The only way this would be an issue is if ACLJ was offering its services at less than fair market value, or using ACLJ resources without being compensated” by the president, the White House, or the Trump campaign, Fischer said in an email.

As Sekulow represents the president in matters related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, ACLJ has also pursued litigation that, while not directly related to that investigation, aligns with efforts by the president and his allies to deflect from allegations that the Russian government worked to elect Trump in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/clinton-money/

===

TOP POLITICAL PATRONS OF BOTH BILL AND HILLARY

Haim and Cheryl Saban

Haim and Cheryl Saban, media executive; women's advocate/author. $2.42 million.

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, public employees union. $1.684 million.

Communications Workers of America, labor union. $1.682 million.

Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw

Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, film director; actor. $1.5 million.

Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg

Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation chief executive; philanthropist. $1.35 million.

National Education Association, teachers' union. $1.31 million.

George Soros

George Soros, hedge fund executive. $1.26 million.

Barbara F. Lee

Barbara F. Lee, women's advocate/philanthropist. $1.24 million.

S. Donald Sussman

S. Donald Sussman, hedge fund executive. $1.18 million.

Plumbers & Pipefitters Union, labor union. $1.16 million.

Note: Totals do not include donations to the Clinton Foundation.

===

hhmn, AN

Clinton Foundation Receiving Millions of Dollars from Corporations That Want to Build Keystone XL

According to a voluntary disclosure from the Foundation, in 2014 the not-for-profit received between $250,000 and $500,000 from Canada’s Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development department, which has pressed for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The agency’s own website states that one of its priorities is to “Deepen commercial relations with the United States through support for innovation and foreign investment and promote Canada as a stable and secure source of energy and energy technology, such as the Keystone XL initiative.”

This Canadian agency is not the only donor aligned with big oil.

Numerous fossil fuel giants sent direct payments to the foundation in 2014, including Exxon MobilCorp., which donated up to $5 million, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., BP,ConocoPhillips Co., Chesapeake Energy Corp., Citgo Petroleum Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp, the Hill reported.

Big Oil has played a key role in lobbying in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline, including in a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama signed by the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Anadarko.

:{linton Founda:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:tion Receiving Millions of Dollars from Corporations That Want to Build Keystone XL

http://www.alternet.org/environment/clinton-foundation-urged-return-exxon-money-growing-coalition-activists-and-celebrities

===

see cannes

OMG

Clinton Cash at Cannes

Exclusive LifeZette interview with author of explosive new documentary

by Ashley Pratte | Updated 16 May 2016 at 11:49 AM

Peter Schweizer, the author of The New York Times bestseller “Clinton Cash,” is set to debut an hour-long documentary based on his explosive book at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday. The film will hit the big screen in the United States on July 24, just days before the Democratic National Convention — inconvenient timing for Hillary Clinton.

“We’ve been told FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton are required to read ‘Clinton Cash’ as a backgrounder.” — Peter Schweizer

What’s more, just before the “Clinton Cash” documentary hit the screens, more news broke of the Clinton Foundation’s shady dealings. The Clinton Global Initiative, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, was found to have given $2 million to Energy Pioneer Solutions, a for-profit company headed up by friends and political allies of the Clintons. This transaction may have the Clintons in hot water with the feds, since tax-exempt charitable organizations aren’t supposed to act in private interest.

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/11/devastating_documentary_probing_clintons_cash_to_premiere_at_cannes_next_week/

freelancer

“Devastating” documentary probing Clinton’s cash to premiere at Cannes next week

The film was written and produced by Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bann VIDEO

BRENDAN GAUTHIER Follow SKIP TO COMMENTS

TOPICS: BILL CLINTON, CLINTON CASH, CLINTON FOUNDATION, ELECTIONS 2016, HILLARY CLINTON, MSNBC, PETER SCHWEIZER, STEPHEN K. BANNON, ELECTIONS NEWS, MEDIA NEWS, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

"Devastating" documentary probing Clinton's cash to premiere at Cannes next week

“Clinton Clash,” premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, is a “devastating” documentary, according to MSNBC, alleging Bill and Hillary Clinton used the Clinton Foundation to “help billionaires make shady deals around the world with corrupt dictators, all while enriching themselves to the tune of millions.”

The film, written and produced by Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon and directed by M.A. Taylor, is based on theNew York Times bestselling book of the same name (subtitled “The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich”) by Peter Schweizer.

MSNBC got an “exclusive first look” at the documentary, which is strategically set to hit U.S. theaters on July 24, one day before the start of the Democratic National Convention:

“The movie alleges that Bill Clinton cut a wide swathe through some of the most impoverished and corrupt areas of the world — the South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, India and Haiti among others — riding in on private jets with billionaires who called themselves philanthropists but were actually bent on plundering the countries and lining their own pockets.

“In return, billionaire pals like Frank Giustra and Gilbert Chagoury, or high-tech companies like Swedish telecom giant Ericsson or Indian nuclear energy officials — to name just a few mentioned in the film — hired Clinton to speak at often $750,000 a pop …”

full:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/clinton-cash-doc-set-stir-controversy-it-debuts-cannes

‘Clinton Cash’ doc set to stir up controversy as it debuts at Cannes

05/10/16 04:01 PM—UPDATED 05/10/16 06:54 PM

By Dana Kennedy

CANNES, France — A massive police force will be guarding the Cannes Film Festival this year. But the only scuffle on the horizon may come in response to the right-wing producers of a devastating new documentary about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged influence peddling and favor-trading. That film, “Clinton Cash,” screens here May 16 and opens in the U.S. on July 24 — just before the Democratic National Convention.

The allegations are as brazen as they are controversial: What other film at Cannes would come up with a plot that involves Russian President Vladimir Putin wrangling a deal with the alleged help of both Clintons, a Canadian billionaire, Kazakhstan mining officials and the Russian atomic energy agency —all of which resulted in Putin gaining control of 20 percent of all the uranium in the U.S.?

RELATED: Latest anti-Clinton book promises to be most ‘fantastic’ yet

MSNBC got an exclusive first look at “Clinton Cash,” the flashy, hour-long film version of conservative author Peter Schweizer’s surprise 2015 bestseller, which The New York Times called the “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle.” The Washington Post said that ”on any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta denounced the book as a bunch of “outlandish claims” with “zero evidence.”

The film portrays the Clintons as a greedy tag team who used the family’s controversial Clinton Foundation and her position as secretary of state to help billionaires make shady deals around the world with corrupt dictators, OMG all while enriching themselves to the tune of millions.

The movie alleges that Bill Clinton cut a wide swathe through some of the most impoverished and corrupt areas of the world — the South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, India and Haiti among others — riding in on private jets with billionaires who called themselves philanthropists but were actually bent on plundering the countries and lining their own pockets.

In return, billionaire pals like Frank Giustra and Gilbert Chagoury, or high-tech companies like Swedish telecom giant Ericsson or Indian nuclear energy officials — to name just a few mentioned in the film — hired Clinton to speak at often $750,000 a pop, according to “Clinton Cash.” When a favor was needed at the higher levels of the Obama administration to facilitate some of the deals, Hillary Clinton was only willing to sign off on them, the movie reports.

As a film, it powerfully connects the dots — whether you believe them or not — in a narrative that lacks the wonkiness of the book, which bore a full title of “The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”

It packs the kind of Trump-esque mainstream punch that may have the presumptive GOP nominee salivating. He recently declared, “We’ll whip out that book because that book will become very pertinent.”

RELATED: Clinton Foundation: ‘We made mistakes’

The hour-long documentary is intercut with “Homeland”-style clips of the Clintons juxtaposed against shots of blood-drenched money, radical madrassas, villainous dictators and private jets, all set to sinister music.

Produced by Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, with Schweizer as the film’s talking head, the documentary might be easy to dismiss as just another example of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” the former secretary of state referenced so many years ago.

But what complicates matters for Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that the book resulted in a series of investigations last year into Schweizer’s allegations by mainstream media organizations from The New York Times and CNN to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, many of which did not dispute his findings — and in some cases gathered more material that the producers used in the film. More recently, some information uncovered in the Panama Papers has echoed some of Schweitzer’s allegations in the movie and book.

ANDREA MITCHELL REPORTS, 5/1/15, 12:43 PM ET

‘Clinton Cash’ author responds to criticism

The Clinton campaign loudly denounced the book as a “smear project” last year and Schweizer’s publisher, the Murdoch-owned Harper Collins, had to make some corrections to the Kindle version. But the changes, in the end, involved seven or eight inaccuracies, some of which were fairly minor in the context of the larger allegations, Politico reported.

Neither the Clinton campaign nor the Clinton Foundation responded to calls and emails requesting comment about the film Tuesday.

One of the most damning follow-ups to Schweizer’s most startling accusation — that Vladimir Putin wound up controlling 20 percent of American uranium after a complex series of deals involving cash flowing to the Clinton Foundation and the help of Secretary of State Clinton — was printed in The New York Times.

Like Schweizer, the Times found no hard evidence in the form of an email or any document proving a quid pro quo between the Clintons,Clinton Foundation donors or Russian officials. (Schweizer has maintained that it’s next to impossible to find a smoking gun but said there is a troubling “pattern of behavior” that merits a closer examination.)

But the Times concluded that the deal that brought Putin closer to his goal of controlling all of the world’s uranium supply is an “untold story … that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.”[vs MANAFORT? TRUMP?]

“Other news outlets built on what I uncovered and some of that is in the film,” Schweizer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, told NBC News Tuesday. “To me the key message is that while U.S. politics has long been thought to be a dirty game, it was always played by Americans. What the Clinton Foundation has done is open an avenue by which foreign investors can influence a chief U.S. diplomat. The film may spell all this out to people in a way the book did not and it may reach a whole new audience.”

[HAS PETER VID ON PAGE]

==-

Clinton Fdn

History

Board of directors:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Programs and initiatives:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and CGI U:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Global Citizen Awards:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Development Initiative (CDI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Disaster relief:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

No Ceilings project:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Charity review sources:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Private philanthropy

Controversies

Transparency

2015 State Department subpoena

References

House hearing to shine spotlight on Clinton Foundation

MORE ON:

CLINTON FOUNDATION

Bill Clinton's upcoming windfall

DOJ reportedly launches new probe into Clinton Foundation

Donations to Clinton Foundation plunged along with Hillary's election defeat

Jeff Sessions denies Trump is pressuring him into probing Clinton

Did the Clinton Foundation Pay for Chelsea’s Wedding?

The rumor that the charitable foundation paid for Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding at Haiti's expense appears to be without merit.

CLAIM

RATING

ORIGIN

Chelsea Clinton allegedly used Clinton Foundation funds to help pay for wedding

Did the Clinton Foundation pay for Chelsea’s wedding?

Trump’s Lawyers Sharing Space With Anti-‘Deep-State’ Group

The powerful conservative non-profit happens to be suing the administration over, among other matters, Uranium One.

03.22.18 2:44 PM ET