As the crimes and misdemeanors of the Clintons — both Hillary and Bill — continue to come to light and gain greater media attention, the case of the continued operation of their family’s supposedly “nonprofit” Foundation appears to be increasingly suspect.
The Clinton Foundation, which has been in existence for 19 years — since before the end of the Clintons’ first stay in the White House — has been accused of being a phony charity by numerous pundits, authors and agencies.
Researchers and writers such as Peter Schweitzer, author of the hugely successful book-turned-film Clinton Cash and Jerome Corsi, author of Partners in Crime: The Clintons’ Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit have documented the Clinton Foundation as a ‘fraud’ and ‘a slush fund for grifters,’ respectively.
Both Schweizer and Corsi among many, many others have shown that donors to the Clintons’ humanitarian “charity” resulted in political favors, most recently from the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton, but in the past under the presidency of Bill Clinton and during the senatorial term of Hillary.
Up to the present day, the donors to the Foundation have been mostly foreign, with notorious human rights-abusing regimes such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman among the biggest contributors.
Other donors have been government contractors, in particular multinational defense companies, many of whom needed government approval to sell weaponry or equipment to many of these same aforementioned regimes. But those donors are just the more high-profile patrons of the Clintons’ dubious enterprise.
Thousands of individual donors (the majority of whom are multimillionaires and billionaires) have also given to the organization, clearly with the intent of receiving something other than just small feelings of goodwill in their hearts.
According to financial analyst and whistleblower Charles Ortel, the Clintons had “developed a methodology of exploiting epidemics and natural disasters [such as the 2001 earthquake in India or the 2010 quake in Haiti] to raise hundreds of millions in ‘charitable donations’ that in a relaxed regulatory environment could be diverted to personal gain, funding Hillary’s political campaigns and supporting Democratic Party causes.”
According to author Jerome Corsi, some of those causes were paying off those with knowledge of Bill Clinton’s many extramarital affairs, including a number of his ex-mistresses themselves.
Other donors might have been lucky enough to get kickbacks through secret “pass-through” bank accounts Bill Clinton established after writing their charitable “donations” off for tax purposes. In many cases, such accounts benefited the Clintons themselves.
Using India as an example, Ortel noted that in the years immediately following his presidency, Bill Clinton “used India and the earthquake to cloak himself in a philanthropic mantle that helped him change the channel on his public image as he transitioned back to private life… All years from 2001 onward when the Clinton Foundation operated are not audited as required, so it is difficult to be precise, but total Clinton Foundation fraud runs to hundreds of millions of dollars, with diversions for political purposes and personal enrichment likely to exceed $200 million.”
It’s a simple formula — raise billions, skim millions off the top, kickback a certain percentage of the total to the original donors, and pocket the rest for “expenses.” By some estimates, the intended benefactors of the donations to the Clintons’ Foundation received less than 10 percent of the total amounts given.
Ortel says that the Clinton Foundation motto ought to be “No natural disaster should go to waste”; he believes they have succeeded wildly at benefiting financially from human misery.
The annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an outgrowth of the Clinton Foundation, costs attendees $20,000 each to attend. The more money attendees give, the more “camera time” they get with the Clintons, allowing them to boost credibility with their business associates and others they hoped to do deals with.
Getting the CGI to boost the profile of a donor’s company or cause within the CGI’s network of multinational contributors and diplomatic contacts is as easy as simply giving more money.
A case in point is that of Ron Burkle, an owner of supermarket chains and one of the world’s wealthiest men. He hoped to increase the visibility of his Yucaipa Companies and do deals involving renewable energy via sponsorship of the CGI.
By giving to the CGI, Burkle was able to appear onstage with Bill Clinton and take the ex-president on trips on his personal jet while Hillary Clinton as New York State senator passed legislation favorable to his companies that were invested in ethanol.
Burkle was also accused of using a pimp to procure call girls for the former president, whose company they enjoyed while riding “Air F**k One,” as Burkle’s plane came to be nicknamed. Eventually, the Clintons’ association with Burkle came to be so toxic that they disassociated from him prior to Hillary running for president in 2008.
All of this behavior clearly mandates investigation, but inquiries under the Obama administration have been stymied. In July of this year, following a private meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a jet at, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she would not be indicting Hillary Clinton for her illicit use of a private email server to conduct government business from Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York.
This, along with other inaction on behalf of government agencies and appointees of President Obama (such as Lynch) has essentially established prosecutorial immunity for the Clintons, and given the public the sense that America’s former First Family is “above the law.”
Outraged conservatives such as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, GOP Senator John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Fitton, the president of legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, have called for an independent prosecutor to examine the Clinton Foundation, as it’s fundamentally at the very heart of so many Clinton scandals and appears to act as the Clintons’ personal piggy bank and slush fund.
An independent prosecutor not beholden to political interests would not be without precedent, even for the Clintons. When Bill Clinton was president, his Attorney General Janet Reno appointed special prosecutor Robert Fiske to look into the infamous Whitewater Affair, in which both Clintons were accused of corruption in relation to an Arkansas real estate deal.
Fiske was later replaced by Kenneth Starr, who was celebrated for ultimately leading the case for the impeachment (but subsequent acquittal) of Bill Clinton in 1998 for Bill’s lying under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Ultimately, 15 people — including Bill Clinton’s successor as the Governor of Arkansas and Hillary Clinton’s law partner Webster Hubbell — were convicted of no less than 40 crimes relating to Whitewater over the course of four years of investigation, but the Clintons escaped charges.
Certainly, in the case of the Clintons’ Foundation, due to their relationship with President Obama and due to the fact that the three of them are prominent members of the Democratic Party, a special prosecutor would be necessary as well.
If a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton Foundation were called for, it’s doubtful that such an investigation could even start before Election Day in November; but just the opening of such a case would have widespread effects on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. By making the prosecutor independent, claims that the prosecution was being politically directed could be reduced.
Even if Clinton was elected president, a dismissal of the prosecutor by her would be effectively suicidal politically. Ironically, it was Clinton herself who contributed to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon when she served on the staff advising the House Committee on the Judiciary in 1974, so it would be poetic justice if, as with Nixon, a special prosecutor were the cause of her own resignation from office in the near future.
