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Saturday, May 23, 2015
Clinton Cash: errors dog Bill and Hillary exposé – but is there any 'there' there?
Clinton Cash: errors dog Bill and Hillary exposé – but is there any 'there' there?
While some of the boldest claims about the Clintons’ finances have
been shown to be unsubstantiated, it could still damage Hillary
Clinton’s White House hopes
Former president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in New York City in June 2014.
Photograph: Noam Galai/WireImage
Even in the hyper-partisan world of American political publishing,
the storm generated by the latest book about the Clintons has been
impressive. Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer goes on sale on Tuesday, yet
already the fuss it has kicked up has hung in the air for days.
As suggested by its subtitle, The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign
Governments Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, the book is an
unrestrained attack on the former president and first lady.
Across its slender 245 pages, it seeks to show that since they left
the White House in 2001 the Clintons have engaged in a succession of
seedy dealings with shady characters around the world, amassing more
than $130m for themselves in exchange for favors.
From Russia
to Colombia, Haiti to India and the Congo, the couple has repeatedly
blurred the lines between private endeavor, public service, philanthropy
and friendship – exposing themselves to blatant conflicts of interest,
the book alleges. While Hillary Clinton was working as Barack Obama’s
secretary of state, America’s top diplomat, Bill was commanding
exorbitant speaker fees as high as $750,000 and attracting
multimillion-dollar donations to the family charity (now known as the
Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), often concurrently and
in the same corrupt countries.
“Who else in American politics would be so audacious as to have one
spouse accept money from foreign governments and businesses while the
other charted American foreign policy?” Schweizer asks.
The accusation is powerful. But the pushback from the Clinton camp
has also been formidable. Well ahead of publication day, the legendary
Clinton rebuttal machine cranked into gear, bombarding news outlets with
talking points, mobilizing liberal media watchdogs and denouncing the book as a “smear project”.
Compared with previous nemeses such as Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who stalked Bill Clinton
during his White House years, the man at the center of the current
furor makes for a relatively easy opponent. For a start, Schweizer is
unashamedly partisan. His previous books – How Big Government Liberals
Wrecked the Global Economy, Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Reagan’s War:
The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over
Communism – speak for themselves, as does the fact that he used to work
as a speechwriter for George W Bush and as foreign affairs tutor to the
then Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton attend the
Clinton Global Initiative in 2013. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
He also makes the Clintons’ job easy for them by admitting in several places in the book that he has discovered no smoking gun.
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If his aim were to show that Hillary Clinton
was swayed in her decision-making while US secretary of state by money
flowing to the Clintons from foreign governments and elites, then he has
failed – by his own admission – to have found the key evidence that
proves it.
“We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately
prove the links between the money they took in and the benefits that
subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their
associates,” Schweizer writes in the book’s conclusion.
In an interview with the sympathetic Fox News (owned by Rupert
Murdoch, who also owns Harper, the publisher of Clinton Cash) it was put
to Schweizer that he hadn’t “nailed” his thesis. “It’s hard for any
author to nail it – one of the strategies of the Clinton camp is to set a
bar for me as an author that is impossible to meet,” he replied.
Then there have been the errors. The most cringe-inducing involves a
passage in the book in which Schweizer draws from a press release from
TD Bank in which the Canadian financial institution supposedly announced
its divestment from the contentious Keystone XL oil pipeline. The
author suggests TD Bank tried to persuade the US government to back the
pipeline using Bill Clinton as a conduit – an attempt that eventually
failed when Obama kicked the decision down the road until after the 2012
presidential election, leading to TD Bank’s decision to divest.
Yet the press release was revealed to be a fake the same week it was circulated.
Similarly, Schweizer attempts in the chapter on the Haiti earthquake,
Disaster Capitalism Clinton-Style, to link three lucrative speeches
given by Bill Clinton in Ireland for a total of $600,000 to the awarding
of a major contract in Haiti to Digicel, the telecoms company owned by
Irish magnate Dennis O’Brien who had arranged Clinton’s appearances.
But as Buzzfeed pointed out, Bill Clinton was not paid on those occasions.
Perhaps the most seriously misleading element of the book involves
the purchase by the Russian State Atomic Nuclear Agency (Rosatom) of a
Canadian company, Uranium One, that had a large stake in US uranium
output. Schweizer claims that a “central role” in the decision of the US
government to approve the purchase was played by Hillary Clinton at the
State Department at the same time as large donations were being made to
the Clinton Foundation by individuals directly involved in the deal.
Yet in this case, as Time has shown,
the State Department was only one of nine members of the inter-agency
committee that made the final call, and even then there is no evidence
that Clinton herself ever took part in the discussions.
Hillary Clinton speaks at Columbia University in New York last month. Photograph: Trevor Collens/AFP/Getty Images
Such errors and omissions have given the Clintons scope to revive,
albeit in more muted language, the famous claim made by Hillary in 1998
that they were victims of a “vast rightwing conspiracy”. On Monday Bill Clinton told NBC News while on a Clinton Foundation tour of Africa with daughter Chelsea that the book and its enthusiastic embrace by Republicans was part of a “very concerted effort to bring the foundation down”.
David Bennett, professor of modern American history at Syracuse
University and author of a 2014 biography of Bill Clinton, said he was
wholly unsurprised by what had happened – both in terms of the Schweizer
attack and the Clintons’ response to it.
“There’s a new Clinton coming forward for the presidency, and all
this is to be expected given what happened to Bill in the 1990s. He was
accused of corruption of money and corruption of power, but nothing was
ever found. Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater: everybody was digging
deeply but as one Clinton aide put it ‘there was no there there’.”
But now that Clinton Cash has finally been published, and the
American voting public can read it for themselves, the question remains:
this time round is there any “there, there”? While some of the boldest
claims in the book have been shown to be erroneous or unsubstantiated,
does the charge that the Clintons exposed themselves to real or
perceived conflicts of interests stand up?
Certainly, pundits were warning about the problem of the large sums
of money flowing into the Clinton Foundation’s coffers even before
Hillary Clinton took up her position as Obama’s global
emissary-in-chief. A month before she became secretary of state, the Washington Post warned
in an editorial that her husband’s fundraising activities were
problematic. “Even if Ms Clinton is not influenced by gifts to her
husband’s charity, the appearance of conflict is unavoidable.”
Since the foundation was formed in 2001, some $2bn has been donated,
mainly in big lump sums. Fully a third of the donors giving more than
$1m, and more than a half of those handing over more than $5m, have been
foreign governments, corporations or tycoons. (The foundation stresses
that such largesse has been put to very good use – fighting obesity
around the globe, combating climate change, helping millions of people
with HIV/Aids obtain antiretroviral drugs at affordable prices.)
Schweizer may have made mistakes about aspects of Bill Clinton’s fees
on the speaker circuit, but one of his main contentions – that the
former president’s rates skyrocketed after his wife became secretary of
state – is correct. Politifact confirmed
that since leaving the White House in 2001 and 2013, Bill Clinton made
13 speeches for which he commanded more than $500,000; all but two of
those mega-money earners occurred in the period when Hillary was at the
State Department.
Though Schweizer has failed to prove actual corruption in the
arrangement – at no point in the book does he produce evidence showing
that Bill’s exorbitant speaker fees were directly tied to policy
concessions from Hillary – he does point to several glaring conflicts of
interest. Bill Clinton did accept large speaker fees accumulating to
more than $1m from TD Bank, a major shareholder in the Keystone XL
pipeline, at precisely the time that the Obama administration, and
Hillary Clinton within it, was wrestling with the vexed issue of whether
to approve it.
It is also true that large donations to the foundation from the
chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer, at around the time of the Russian
purchase of the company and while Hillary Clinton was secretary of
state, were never disclosed to the public. The multimillion sums were
channeled through a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation, CGSCI, which
did not reveal its individual donors.
Such awkward collisions between Bill’s fundraising activities and
Hillary’s public service have raised concerns not just among those who
might be dismissed as part of a vast rightwing conspiracy. Take Zephyr
Teachout, a law professor at Fordham university who has written
extensively on political corruption in the US.
Teachout, who last year stood against Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic
party nomination for New York governor, points out that you don’t have
to be able to prove quid pro quo for alarm bells to ring. “Our whole
system of rules is built upon the concept that you must prevent
conflicts of interests if you are to resist corruption in its many
forms. Conflicts like that can infect us in ways we don’t even see.”
Teachout said that the Clintons presented the US political world with
a totally new challenge. “We have never had somebody running for
president whose spouse – himself a former president – is running around
the world raising money in these vast sums.”
Hillary and Bill Clinton in 2008. Photograph: Ana Martinez/Reuters
The threat of conflict of interest is all the greater today, she
said, as Hillary Clinton begins to put flesh on the bones of her policy
pledges in her presidential bid. “Her policy is being formed as we
speak, and how are we to know that the generosity of donors to the
Clinton Foundation will not depend on a particular policy outcome?”
Though Bill Clinton insisted this week
that his charity has done nothing “knowingly inappropriate”, that is
unlikely to satisfy the skeptics from left or right. They say that a
family in which one member is vying for the most powerful office on
Earth must avoid straying into even the unintentionally inappropriate.
In the wake of Clinton Cash, the foundation has admitted that it made mistakes in disclosing some of its contributions. It has also implemented new rules
that will see its financial reporting increase from once annually to
four times a year, while large donations from foreign governments will
be limited in future to six countries including the UK and Germany.
But with Bill refusing doggedly to give up his speaker engagements –
“I gotta pay our bills” – and foreign corporations and super-rich
individuals still able to donate to the family charity, it looks like
this controversy may run and run. Politically, too, Hillary Clinton is
confronted with a potential credibility gap between her appeal to
ordinary Americans on the presidential campaign trail and the millions
that continue to flow to the foundation.
“Is she going to be in touch with the needs and dreams of poor
America when her spouse and daughter are working with the world’s global
elite?” said Dave Levinthal of the anti-corruption investigative
organization, the Center for Public Integrity. “That’s a question she
will have to answer, every step of the way.”
More like, any mere accusation against
her, even if flatly disproved, will be believed and endlessly repeated
as fact: witness below the "Jerry Zeifman fired HRC from the Watergate
prosecution team for the House Judiciary Committee" debunked lie; witness Ken Starr's report concluding "no evidence" — but the accusations lingering even in this thread.
On the other side of the aisle, meanwhile, it was on official record
that the Bush family was in business (in the Carlisle Group) with the
bin Laden family — and the first thing George W. Bush did about Osama
bin Laden when he took office was call off the FBI pursuit
of Osama that Bill Clinton had ordered. No conflict of interest? Bush
himself got into office on a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, in which two
Justices whose immediate family members worked for George W. Bush (one for his campaign, one for his transition committee) neglected to recuse themselves.
No conflict of interest? These facts were fully on record, not in
dispute, not denied, simply ... ignored. Tell me about fairness and
balance.
The boldest claim is that 90% of the
money were used for travel and other expenses, and 10 % to some
registered charity or program; $19,000,000 in travel expenses for Bill,
Hill and Chelsea over a 2 year period.
Illegal or not, those are the facts.
"Clinton Foundation failed to disclose
$500,000 from Algeria at the time the country was lobbying the State
Department over human-rights issues." -- Business Insider
How many Secretaries of State can get a country to give her foundation half a million dollars?
Why is this not on the front page of all newspapers daily?
How is the Guardian going to "spin" the
discrepancy between what the Foundation says goes to charity - 83%, and
what their tax filing says goes to charity 10%?
The Clintons are opportunistic scum. Fine. Just don't try to further this by running for president!
The material covered in the book has
generated coverage and concern in every form and political stripe of US
media. The previously unquestioning coverage of the Clintons has nearly
evaporated as more and more reporters sense Pulitzers and Peabodys and
profitable book deals.
There are other well-qualified Democrats. All that is needed is a scintilla of courage.
Sanders is in now, keep up please.
O'Malley was heading that direction, but has been derailed temporarily
with Baltimore and his 'broken windows' policies. Chaffee looks weak,
but Webb is speaking up, ample press on him.
18 months to go.
#allvotesmatterin2016
Shame on the Dems for not working to give
us an alternative to the influence-peddling Clintons, and shame on the
media for trying to minimize their corrupt, lying ways. There are so
many people who absolutely refuse to vote for Clinton, yet don't want to
vote for the Republican alternative, you are betraying all of us.
'When in doubt throw it out' applies to politicians also.
Take a step back and ignore their last name.
Why would foreigners, including foreign governments, give obscene amounts of money to a pair of private US citizens?
In
the ENTIRE history of the USA is their any one or two US citizens who
have received hundreds of millions of donated dollars from foreigners
for doing nothing in return?
Is there any US citizen who has been
donated hundreds of millions of dollars from foreigners for rendering
some personal service in return?
Is there any private citizen of the
USA who has been donated hundreds of millions of dollars by foreigners,
including foreign governments, for any reason?
The total so far uncovered hovers near a BILLION dollars.
This is beyond a donation.
This is the Marshall Plan by foreign governments to the Clintons.
The amount of money just HANDED to these two is beyond comprehension.
To claim that there is no expectation of something in return for that enormous pile of money is beyond comprehension
beyond reason
and beyond belief.
dr. o
Well I don't know about foreign
donations, but if you want to see US citizens given millions of dollars
for nothing, I would like to direct your attention to every
televangelist ever.
Rightwing logic:
1. A foreign
government donating 2 million dollars to a charity in exchange for, at
best, the approval of ONE of NINE separate government departments for a
purchase=TOTAL CORRUPTION!!
2. Two brothers give 92 million dollars directly to one party in
exchange for their continued support of an obsolete century-old
technology that will kill us all=FREE SPEECH!
She's obviously bent but maybe only as
bent as any other candidate in an electoral system that requires
mountains of cash to join the race. But she also seems to be a weird
combination of sloppy and entitled so she does bad stuff (the e-mails
are a good example) and then offers an excuse worthy of a dim teenager. I
wonder if the piss-poor standard of republican opposition is indirectly
weakening the quality of democratic party nominees.
That stupid stunt with having her own
server was the epitome of "dumb" for me. Sure, she deleted all the
e-mails that she deemed harmful to her own cause, and you all are sure
that her server was secure, but I'm not, and with the skills that the
Chinese and the Russians have regarding hacking, who can say that this
woman wouldn't be a candidate for blackmail if she holds any political
office in the future?
Hillary has said, “Why do I have to keep proving to people that I am not a liar?!"
(From the book "The Survivor," by John Harris, p. 382 - Hillary in her 2000 Senate campaign)
Hillary Congenital Clinton Lies:
She “removed” a boatload of stuff from the White House and called it a clerical error, returning everything.
She didn’t know that her staff would fire the travel staff….she told them to do so.
She lied about her missing billing records which “showed up” on their own.
She was “always” a Yankees Ball team fan when she was running for NY senator.
She lied as a member of the house judiciary committee.
She lied about flying into Bosnia under sniper fire but admitted the falsehood later.
She misrepresented her record opposing the Iraq war—she actually voted for it.
She lied about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary.
She lied about her role in passing Family and Medical Leave Act.
She lied about the “uninsured” woman who died after childbirth.
Like we asked of Nixon;
“Would you buy a used car from her?"
Who wants a lying U.S. president?
In 1974 Hillary Rodham was a 27-year-old staffer for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation.
John Labovitz, who shared office space with her said Hillary gave
“erroneous legal opinions” and tried to “deny Nixon representation by
counsel.”
Hillary Rodham was fired by her supervisor, lifelong Democrat Jerry Zeifman.
When asked why Hillary Rodham was fired, Zeifman said in an interview,
“Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer, she
conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules
of the committee, and the rules of Confidentiality.”
Hillary wrote a “fraudulent legal brief” and “confiscated public
documents.” Zeifman fired her and wouldn’t give her a letter of
recommendation. Zeifman later wrote a book stating that “Hillary Clinton
is ethically unfit to be either a senator or president.”
Now she wants us to believe her?
Considering that her trail of hubris goes
back to the actual Watergate, that she's been slinking around
Washington since the days of Nixon, 18 months would not be nearly enough
time to drag it all out.
The fact alone that she is a political
dinosaur would discredit her amongst most die-hard 'progressives', save
for having a vagina of course which gives her a free pass. She's rich,
entitled and out of touch...yet more issues that should discredit her
from the left entirely BUT of course she's a woman so none of those
facts matter either.
She's completely evil yet the lefties will vote
her into the presidency for the simple reason they'd cut off their left
hand just to spite the right.
The author said it himself: there is no smoking guns
They convict white collar criminals and insider traders with just
circumstantial evidence all the time. There is an abundance of
circumstantial evidence here.
Just because you can't find a smoking gun doesn't mean that there is no case.
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