The Clinton Foundation has come under a microscope this election cycle. What has come to light about the Clinton Foundation has revealed that the so-called charity is truly a quagmire of Clintonian corruption and sleaze through quid pro quo deals for the Clintons and their cronies to enrich themselves.
Here are the Clinton Foundation’s seven worst scandals.
1. When Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state, she was required to sign a document stating she would keep the State Department independent from the Clinton Foundation. She was also required to disclose the Clinton Foundation’s donors. Needless to say, Clinton did not follow this agreement, as is made clear below.
2. A newly unearthed memo reveals that the Clinton Foundation was nothing more than a vessel for the Clintons to get rich. The memo, written in 2011 by a Doug Band, a confidant of Bill Clinton, explained how Band used his consulting firm Teneo to encourage people to donate to the Clinton Foundation. Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro explains:
Band explained how Teneo would solicit “in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.” As the Washington Post reports, Band talked openly of a “circle of enrichment in which he raised money for the Clinton Foundation from top-tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm, Teneo, while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president.” Band made serious cash for Clinton: they’d raised $8 million for the foundation, and created contracts worth $66 million to the Clintons over the next nine years. For example, Teneo brought together Clinton and Dow chief executive Andrew Liveris, helped facilitate Dow’s donation of millions to the Clinton Foundation and tens of millions to Teneo; simultaneously, Hillary visited Northern Ireland and thanked Dow for their creation of jobs in the country.
The connection between Teneo, the Clinton Foundation, and the State Department was beyond cozy. Declan Kelly, a former Hillary fundraiser, was one of the partners at Teneo – and ended up as an ambassador appointed by Hillary at State. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s top hatchet woman, worked heavily with the Clinton Foundation. Huma Abedin worked at the State Department for Hillary while still receiving a waiver to work for a company connected to Teneo. And Abedin worked to assure “a presidential appointment for a supporter of the Clinton Foundation, according to a chain obtained by Politico.” Chelsea Clinton was upset enough by Teneo’s infiltration of the Clinton Global Initiative – Bill eventually had to return pay he received directly from Teneo thanks to Teneo’s connection to scandals including former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s MF Global – that she ripped on Teneo to John Podesta, Hillary’s current campaign chair. That led Band to call Chelsea “a spoiled rich brat who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn’t found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.”
The report is such an obvious example of corruption that even leftist reporter Chris Cillizza had to admit the obvious:
If this isn’t a textbook example of buying access, I don’t know what is [link fixed]https://t.co/OPs4JZtFd1
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) October 27, 2016
3. Numerous companies donated to the Clinton Foundation and then lobbied the State Department with lobbyists who were connected to the Clintons. A USA Today report poured through data from the Center for Responsive Politics and financial records to determine that “at least a dozen of those same companies lobbied the State Department, using lobbyists who doubled as major Clinton campaign fundraisers.” These lobbyists even had a name if they raised at least $100,000 for the Clinton campaign–”Hillblazers.” There were at least four Hillblazers used as a lobbyists.
Some of the companies that engaged in this practice included:
• Microsoft has given between $1 million and $5 million to the foundations, as the tech giant also lobbied for visa issues, protection of critical infrastructure and cybersecurity, software industry licensing and government procurement.
• Pfizer, one of the world’s top biopharmaceutical companies, has also given between $1 million and $5 million to the foundations, while lobbying for such issues as intellectual property rights overseas and issues related to medicines in Turkey and India.
• ExxonMobil, the global oil and energy company based in Texas, gave the foundations between $1 million and $5 million. The company lobbied the Department of State for issues involving hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as fracking, oil sands and other provisions.
• The Northeast Maglev, a Washington, D.C.-based company that advocates for high-speed, magnetic levitation rail service in the U.S., donated as much as $100,000 while lobbying the Department of State to help provide support for the issue.
• Mexico TV network Azteca and its affiliates donated as much as $375,000 while lobbying for U.S. business opportunities, an education initiative involving students from the U.S., Mexico and Latin America, and other causes.
USA Today provided a little more detail on some of these companies and their use of Hillblazers:
- Pfizer hired Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a law firm, to lobby the State Department for “issues relating to intellectual property protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.” One of the law firm’s representatives, Brian Pomper, became “a key fundraiser for Clinton’s 2016 campaign.”
- Microsoft’s lobbying was represented by Hillblazer Frederick Humphries. While this lobbying occurred, Microsoft paid Bill Clinton a total of $400,000 to give two speeches.
- The Northeast Maglev’s CEO, Wayne Rogers, is also a Hillblazer and had donated to Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign.
All of these present a serious conflict of interest for a President Hillary Clinton, as these companies wouldn’t give these donations without expecting something in return. There has already been plenty of examples of quid pro quo between Clinton Foundation donors and the State Department.
4. Hillary’s State Department emboldened Russia through Clinton Foundation quid pro quos. Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that as secretary of state, Clinton corralled U.S. tech companies — including those who were donors to the Clinton Foundation — to provide funding to Skolkovo, which was dubbed “Russia’s version of Silicon Valley.” Skolkovo returned their favor by having Russians connected to the “innovation city” donate to the Clinton Foundation and gathering together 28 “Key Partners,” 17 of which “made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton.”
Here’s the problem with all this: Skolkovo is funded by the Russian government, which has utilized the “innovation city” to enhance their military technology and steal classified information from the U.S.: (emphasis bolded)
Amid all the sloshing of Russia rubles and American dollars, however, the state-of-the-art technological research coming out of Skolkovo raised alarms among U.S. military experts and federal law-enforcement officials. Research conducted in 2012 on Skolkovo by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a “vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.”
Moreover, the report said: “the Skolkovo Foundation has, in fact, been involved in defense-related activities since December 2011, when it approved the first weapons-related project—the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine. . . . Not all of the center’s efforts are civilian in nature.”
Technology can have multiple uses—civilian and military. But in 2014 the Boston Business Journal ran an op-ed placed by the FBI, and noted that the agency had sent warnings to technology and other companies approached by Russian venture-capital firms. The op-ed—under the byline of Lucia Ziobro, an assistant special agent at the FBI’s Boston office—said that “The FBI believes the true motives of the Russian partners, who are often funded by their government, is to gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology from the companies.”
Ms. Ziobro also wrote that “The [Skolkovo] foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”
It would be bad enough if this were the only quid pro quo deal that benefited the Russian government, but there was another deal that was just as bad, if not worse.
Clinton’s State Department approved the sale of Uranium One to essentially be under the control of the Russian government. The deal allowed the Russian government to be in control of at least 20 percent of the U.S.’s uranium output, with some estimates putting it as high as 50 percent. Uranium One had donated $2.6 million to the Clinton Foundation.
For all of Clinton’s tough talk against Russia in the 2016 election cycle, her actions as secretary of state do not substantiate her rhetoric.
5. Hillary’s State Department approved arms deals to countries with poor human rights records. As the Daily Wire reported previously, the State Department “approved of ‘$165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation,’ including ‘Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar, according to International Business Times.”
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both countries that treat women as second-class citizens and provide aid to Islamic terror organizations.
6. The Clintons scammed the people of Haiti after devastating natural disasters to enrich Clinton Foundation donors. The Daily Wire reports:
- A $10 million federal loan went to InnoVida, a manufacturing firm run by Clinton donor Claudio Osorio, to build houses in Haiti. Osorio plead “guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in 2013” when it was discovered that Osorio used company money to “to pay for his Miami Beach mansion, his Maserati, and his Colorado ski chalet.” He never built the houses in Haiti.
- “Hundreds of millions in taxpayer money” went to building the Caracol Industrial Park, which naturally, was run by Clinton cronies. Caracol today is mostly “abandoned,” failing to produce the number of jobs and homes that Bill Clinton promised.
- Contracts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) went to Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm that has donated to the Clinton Foundation, in order “to identify relocation sites for Haitians.” However, Dalberg reportedly thought that “uninhabitable mountains with steep ravines” would suffice as relocation sites, suggesting that they “did a terrible job.”
Dinesh D’Souza has chronicled the seedy details of the scam here.
7. Hillary confidant Sidney Blumenthal lobbied for the U.S. to take out Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi. According to The Federalist:
Blumenthal had invested in Osprey Global Solutions, a military contractor that wanted to do business with the Libyan rebels. While this was going down, he pushed Clinton, who was serving as Secretary of State at the time, to support business relations between western military contractors and Libyan rebels. This kind of prompting, combined with his financial interests, seems to be on the illegal side of things, according to National Review. A cynic might even characterize Blumenthal’s efforts as blatant war-profiteering.
Blumenthal at the time was employed by the Clinton Foundation, and using his influence he essentially ousted an American ally who provided intelligence on Islamic terrorists, resulting in the country being overrun by jihadists. And it was all so Blumenthal could profit off of it.
For more on the Clinton Foundation, the Daily Wire‘s primer on the foundation here as well Ben Shapiro‘s “list of countries and figures who have benefitted thanks to Hillary Clinton’s dramatic corruption.”