As part of their ongoing Clinton-related FOIA document dump, the FBI has released the Vince Foster investigation files. Team Clinton must be jumping out of their skin about now.
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.
Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.
Snip.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.
In other words: Agents had jobs to do, and senior officials had Democrats to protect. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A small law firm that has given money to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Harry Reid, President Obama and many others is accused of improperly funneling millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers. The program was exposed by the Center for Responsive Politics and the same team of Boston Globe investigative reporters featured in the movie “Spotlight.”
The Thornton Law Firm has just 10 partners, but dollar for dollar, it’s one of the nation’s biggest political donors, reports CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil.
But according to the firm’s own documents – leaked by a whistleblower — days or even hours after making these donations, partners received bonuses matching the amount they gave.
If a Republican were benefiting, this would receive wall-to-wall network coverage, but it doesn’t even make Hillary Clinton’s top 10 scandals list. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
EmailGate is deadly for the Clintons because it reminds so many Americans of so many things they’ve disliked about Bill and Hillary for so long. The overweening sense of entitlement. The compulsive lies and dissimulations. The blame-shifting and scapegoating rather than taking responsibility. The personal profiteering while posing as upright public servants. Above all, the overpowering belief that laws are for lesser people, never for Clintons and their privileged coterie. Bill and Hillary have gotten away with this for decades, turning the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their own aggrandizement, but trying to publicly pin EmailGate on the FBI—rather than on Hillary Clinton herself—may be one step too far.
Then came the Wikileaks. And Project Veritas. And the FBI’s latest announcement about the emails on Weiner’s computer. We watched Clinton physically collapse in public. Individually, none of that news was big enough to make a difference. But collectively it framed Clinton as a drinker in dubious health, who hired bullies to start violence at Trump rallies, and runs a Mafia-like shadow-government called The Clinton Foundation, funded in part by companies that benefit from war. Add that to Clinton’s confrontational language about Russia, and suddenly Clinton looks as dangerous as Trump. The fear persuasion was approaching a tie.
Snip.
In summary, Clinton’s message this closing week is that Trump is politically incorrect, offensive to many people, and sexually aggressive beyond the point of appropriate social behavior. That’s all the stuff you already assumed about Trump a year ago. And it doesn’t scare you, no matter how badly it offends you.
Meanwhile, the current news cycle along with Trump’s supporters have framed Clinton as a low-stamina liar with a drinking problem who is running a criminal enterprise (The Clinton Foundation) that sells influence to foreign countries and companies that are more interested in war than peace. While she trash-talks Putin. That stuff could get all of us killed.
“Trump closer: How did Hillary get so rich?” “Don’t forget that the Clintons had been in federal office continuously from January 1992 to February 2013, a period of twenty-one years, while they amassed a nine-figure net worth.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
To many who knew the Clintons behind closed doors, it is unimaginable that she may be elected to the highest office in the land. There is a good chance she will actually become the most powerful person on the planet. John Adams must be spinning in his grave at the mere thought. One thing is true: Many have tried to hold them accountable. All have been thwarted at every turn.
Yesterday’s suspicious church burning reeks of a false flag operation, and should remind us of the 1990s “black church burning” epidemic that wasn’t.
We have written frequently in recent weeks about a feud that erupted between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band back in 2011 after Chelsea raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest between Band’s firm, Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department (see here, here, here and here). The feud ultimately resulted in Band being forced to draft a memo spelling out, in vivid detail, the many entangled relationships between himself, Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. Fortunately, today’s Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.
The memo starts with a brief background on Teneo, which was created in June 2011, shortly after Declan Kelly resigned from his position as “United States Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland,” a position to which he was appointed by Secretary Clinton.
In June 2009, DK Consulting was founded by Declan Kelley. Mr. Kelly served as COO of FTI Consulting until June 2009, when he stepped down and established DK Consulting. At that time, he also became the United States Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland. Pursuant to the terms of his exit agreement with FTI and consistent with the ethics agreement of his uncompensated special government employee appointment at the State Department, Mr. Kelly retained and continued to provide services to three paying clients (Coke, Dow, and UBS) and one pro bono client (Allstate). In late 2009, Declan retained me as a consultant to DK Consulting to help support the needs of these clients.
Stop right there. Who takes Allstate, a Fortune 100 company, as a pro bono client?
Here’s a copy of the document Zero Hedge is relying on (though alas, whoever put that up through some encoding bullshit to keep you from copying from it). Band goes into detail about just how much scratch is involved in scratching the Clintons’ backs:
“Cognizant of the Foundation’s significant fundraising needs as well as my role as the primary fundraiser for the Foundation for the past 11 years, as a partner in Teneo, Mr. Kelley [sic] and I have asked and encouraged our clients to contribute to the Foundation,” Band wrote. “Through our efforts, we have brought new donors to the Foundation and garnered increased giving from existing donors.”
And let’s look at the donors (all amounts for the period 2004-2011 except where noted):
The Coca-Cola Company: Total giving: $4,330,000
The Dow Chemical Company: Total giving: $780,000
UBS: Total giving: $540,000
The American Ireland Fund: Total giving: $350,000 (all 2010-2011)
The All-State [sic] Corporation: Total giving: $265,000 (with an additional $500,000 pledge)
Barclays Capital: Total giving: $1,100,000 (2008-2011)
Indo Gold: Total giving: $100,000
BHP Billiton Limited: Total giving: $20,000
Teneo: Total giving: $100,000
There’s a further list of Teneo clients (GEMS Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Laureate International Universities) who were already donating to the Clinton Foundation.
The memo, made public Wednesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, lays out the aggressive strategy behind lining up the consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements for Bill Clinton that added tens of millions of dollars to the family’s fortune, including during the years that Hillary Clinton led the State Department. It describes how Band helped run what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.,” obtaining “in-kind services for the President and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”
That’s called “quid pro quo.” Also this: “Emails show that Cheryl Mills, who at the time was serving as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was deeply involved in the foundation’s proceedings.” Yeah, I think that’s been pretty well established at this point. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
More Clinton pay to play: “The head of a for-profit university that donated up to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation was rewarded with an invite to a high-profile State Department dinner at the request of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The five most disturbing donations to the Clinton Foundation. Including the Saudis, the Russian uranium deal money, and Indonesian tobacco magnate Putera Sampoerna who “donated and worked with the foundation before he got the U.S. government to underwrite millions in loans offered by the foundation and secured high-profile support for its activities from Sec. Clinton and other senior federal officials.”
“Five mega-donors and their wives are responsible for one in every $17 dollars that have been spent on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
The political backers of a longtime Clinton crony and fixer, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, made $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions to the election campaign of the wife of the FBI official who later ran the investigation of Mrs. Clinton.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the contributions went to the 2015 Virginia state senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, the wife of then-associate-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McAuliffe had recruited Dr. McCabe to run. After her campaign ended unsuccessfully (Dr. McCabe lost to incumbent Republican Dick Black), Andrew McCabe was promoted to deputy director, a role in which he assumed oversight of the Clinton e-mail investigation.
“The fact that Hillary Clinton’s inner circle was raising substantial funds for Gov. McAuliffe’s PAC and this same PAC gave close to a half-million dollars to the campaign of the wife of the senior FBI official involved in the Clinton investigation sure looks like a payoff – a major payoff.”
It’s not just the FBI. Department of Justice employees as a whole are hevaily backing Clinton:
Employees of the Department of Justice, which investigated Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State, gave Clinton 97 percent of their donations. Trump received $8,756 from DOJ employees compared with $286,797 for Clinton. From IRS employees, Clinton received 94 percent of donations.
Which brings up the question: Why are federal government employees even allowed to make campaign donations?
Scott Adams endorses Trump for all the bullying Democrats carried out against him and other Americans:
I’ve been trying to figure out what common trait binds Clinton supporters together. As far as I can tell, the most unifying characteristic is a willingness to bully in all its forms.
If you have a Trump sign in your lawn, they will steal it.
If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car.
if you speak of Trump at work you could get fired.
On social media, almost every message I get from a Clinton supporter is a bullying type of message. They insult. They try to shame. They label. And obviously they threaten my livelihood.
We know from Project Veritas that Clinton supporters tried to incite violence at Trump rallies. The media downplays it.
We also know Clinton’s side hired paid trolls to bully online. You don’t hear much about that.
Yesterday, by no coincidence, Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos all published similar-sounding hit pieces on me, presumably to lower my influence. (That reason, plus jealousy, are the only reasons writers write about other writers.)
Joe Biden said he wanted to take Trump behind the bleachers and beat him up. No one on Clinton’s side disavowed that call to violence because, I assume, they consider it justified hyperbole.
Team Clinton has succeeded in perpetuating one of the greatest evils I have seen in my lifetime. Her side has branded Trump supporters (40%+ of voters) as Nazis, sexists, homophobes, racists, and a few other fighting words. Their argument is built on confirmation bias and persuasion. But facts don’t matter because facts never matter in politics. What matters is that Clinton’s framing of Trump provides moral cover for any bullying behavior online or in person. No one can be a bad person for opposing Hitler, right?
Erica Garner rips Hillary for trying to make political hay out of her father’s death.
“Hillary Clinton campaign aides had a frantic email exchange in August 2015 over who should call the candidate to ‘sober her up some’ at around 4:30 in the afternoon.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Sources close to Hillary tell me that her doctors have discovered she suffers from arrhythmia (an abnormal heart beat) and a leaking heart valve. They have recommended that she consider having valve replacement surgery, but Hillary has refused because she does not want to risk the negative political fallout from stories about such a serious operation.
In addition to the arrhythmia and leaking heart valve, Hillary suffers from chronic low blood pressure, insufficient blood flow, a tendency to form life-threatening blood clots, and troubling side effects from her medications.
It looks like this week’s Clinton Corruption update is being pushed to Friday as well, so enjoy Pat Condell explaining why voting for Donald Trump is necessary to keep America America.
“One thing that the Trump campaign has already achieved in this election is that it has given the progressive media the chance to fully reveal just how contemptuous they are of the American people. There’s no attempt to provide them with balanced objective coverage on which to make an informed decision. It’s all about manipulating their opinion. CNN couldn’t be any more partisan if they had a ‘Stop Trump’ banner on the screen twenty-four seven.”
Yesterday was devoted to lies about Hillary Clinton’s obvious ill health (and her team’s blatant lying about it). Today is all about Clinton’s corruption.
When Ortel tried to match up the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings with the disclosure reports from its major donors, he said he started to find problems. That includes records from the foundation’s many offshoots—including the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Clinton Global Initiative—as well as its foreign subsidiaries.
“I decided it would be fun to cross-check what their donors thought they did when they donated to the Clinton Foundation, and that’s when I got really irritated,” he said. “There are massive discrepancies between what some of the major donors say they gave to the Clinton Foundation to do, and what the Clinton Foundation said what they got from the donors and what they did with it.”
As previously reported, last year the Clinton Foundation was forced to issue corrected tax filings for several years to correct donation errors. But Ortel said many of the discrepancies remain. “I’m against charity fraud. I think people in both parties are against charity fraud, and this is a charity fraud,” he said.
To be sure, Ortel’s efforts were to be commended: digging through the foundation’s numbers can not have been easy, considering that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits in 2015. Furthermore, the Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid. That’s because the organization spent the vast bulk of its windfall on “administration, travel, salaries and bonuses”, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.
More: “An educated guess, based upon ongoing analysis of the public record begun in February 2015, is that the Clinton Foundation entities are part of a network that has defrauded donors and created illegal private gains of approximately $100 billion in combined magnitude, and possibly more, since 23 October 1997.”
How did Clinton toady Sydney Blumenthal get his hands on top secret NSA reports less than 24 hours after they were presented? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Clinton Foundation officials repeatedly skirted or ignored federal laws and regulations while converting the non-profit from its tax-exempt purpose of building a presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a $2 billion global machine selling political influence and access on an unprecedented scale, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.”
Random Slashdot comment on how in-the-tank for Hillary (and hypocrisy) “Public Citizen” is: “That’s right: a 501(c)(4) corporation made a movie with the express political purpose of protesting the Supreme Court decision that a 501(c)(4) corporation could make a movie with an express political purpose!”
A pre-collapse Hillary, enjoying smaller than expected crowds, walls off portion of room to give illusion of fullness.
What happens if Hillary drops out? However, I don’t think the DNC would actually try to foist Chelsea off on us as the Democratic candidate, for a host reasons too extensive to explicate here.
More on the same theme. Also, hats off to the New York Post graphics department for this:
“The media elites are in a panic. They witnessed the meltdown of their candidate in broad daylight and can feel that shiver up their spine — except that this time, it is not the delight of victory they are feeling, but the dread of defeat.”
And as a bonus, here are a few more links about Hillary’s obvious ill-health:
“The most charitable reading of this timeline is that her campaign — presumably with the blessing and perhaps insistence of the candidate — fully intended to keep her illness a secret from the public. Let’s be clear about what this means: Her campaign intended to lie.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Longtime Huffington Post writer fired for questioning Hillary’s health vindicated. “It turns out Dr. Drew and I lost our media perches for simply sharing incontrovertible truth, which I knew at the time: Hillary Clinton’s health is not just bad. It’s not just allergies. Hillary Clinton’s health is horrific.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Thanks to some fabulous work by American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen digging through on Tuesday e-mails from Clinton State Department staffer Philippe Reines, he found that suspended CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott had communicated with Reines on multiple occasions to the point of taking marching orders over what she tweeted.
Amidst the e-mails obtained by Gawker (which included Politico’s Mike Allen promising soft pieces on Chelsea Clinton), Kerpen unearthed a series of instances where Labott (in words of Kerpen) “tweet[ed] on request” for the Clinton camp, ranging from so-called acts of transparency in her State Department to when exactly Clinton would depart her post in 2013.
This will no doubt be a great shock to anyone who didn’t already consider CNN an extension of the Democratic Party…
Why Hillary’s email scandal (still) matters: “Ignoring the fact that ordinary people are deciding that Hillary Clinton is an untrustworthy liar won’t actually make that issue go away for the Democrats.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz continues to work her special brand of magic at the DNC. “I’ve begun to deeply question whether she has the leadership skills to get us through the election. This is not just about how many debates we have. This is one of a series of long-running events in which the chair has not shown the political judgment that is needed.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Shockingly, A.) It’s pretty evenhanded, and B.) It doesn’t suck.
On the other hand, Too Many Cooks was four months ago. It shouldn’t take more than a week to crank this out. Even if they did take a day to get the perfect font match…
Here are some updates to the story of California Democratic State Senator Leland Yee and Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow’s federal weapons trafficking charges, via Dwight and Instapundit (among others):
“State Sen. Leland Yee spent campaign donations in recent years to travel to the Philippines, the country from which federal authorities accuse him of arranging to smuggle hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military-style weapons.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
How did Yee escape terrorism charges? The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is not among the “56 foreign terrorist organizations designated by the U.S. State Department.”
Yee wasn’t just a gun control fanatic, he was an anti-corruption crusader as well. (Insta again.)
It took more than a week for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to finally mention that Yee was indicted for arms trafficking…and she still failed to mention he was a staunch advocate for gun control.
San Francisco journalist spends a thousand or so words not explaining why San Francisco’s numerous professional journalists didn’t even catch a whiff of the the scandal. Hey, I think my tweet above just may have a clue…
Enter Mr. Olbermann himself, who I like to imagine scanning Twitter in a darkened room while wearing an off-brand superhero costume. “Peasants? Making fun of me??? I will be avenged!”
Also, former Democratic state Rep. Jim Solis has been debarred for professional misconduct. “Solis pleaded guilty in April 2011 after admitting to involvement in the extortion scheme of former state District Judge Abel C. Limas, who pleaded guilty to racketeering in March. Solis’ sentencing is scheduled for August.”
I may have posted this before, but it bears repeating: the “Texas only creates low-paying jobs” myth debunked. “It turns out that the opposite is true. Since the recession started hourly wages in Texas have increased at a 6th fastest pace in the nation.”
Warren is playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future. Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich… If Warren, a rich, white, Harvard professor, is a victim, everyone is.
Why does this matter? Because it reveals that the left thinks affirmative action is a joke, another cudgel with which to attack political opponents at the expense of minorities who might, thanks to liberalism’s insistence on keeping students in failed school districts, actually put the policy to some good use. And because if Elizabeth Warren is unable to advance coherent liberal policy arguments, then there may be none to advance.
There’s a Tea Party Express event in Austin on the south Capitol steps at 2 PM Sunday, May 6th, with Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Ron Paul. I will try to attend if my busy schedule permits.
