The latest Los Angeles Times poll has Donald Trump up over Hillary Clinton by 5.4 points. That’s the largest lead Trump had since the “Clinton collapse” story broke.
Polls are screwy this year, and Trump has a way of defying all conventional wisdom, but given the in-the-tank media loudly proclaiming “No, Hillary’s polls are just fine, I tell you! Just fine!” in the wake of the FBI and Wikileaks revelations, the LA Times poll seems significant.
So the big Wikileak topic today, the Friday before the election, is a John Podesta email which mentions “spirit cooking,” which involves “blood, sperm and breastmilk.”
(Blink. Blink.)
Cue Scott Adams:
Do any Clinton scandals NOT involve sperm? #SpiritCooking
Caveat: This is one of those stories where this tiny little email is being spun out into “sex cult” and “Satanist” headlines. I find it hard to believe that Clinton’s inner circle are dabbling in Neo-Satanism, because that would mean worshiping something other than money and power. But maybe Podesta might want to break his silence on this one email because what the hell, dude?
Now for some slightly less icky Clinton Corruption news:
“The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official. These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server.” So CBS is stopping just short of saying “Clinton perjured herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.
The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.
Vanity Fair writer: The Washington Post is every bit as fair and balanced as Breitbart. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “For the first time in my memory, some of the major media organizations in this country have now abandoned all semblance of objectivity in furtherance of electing Hillary Clinton, or perhaps more accurately, in furtherance of the defeat of Donald Trump.” False. They’ve merely stopped pretending to that objectivity.
“But no one has ever been elected president who has been so hobbled by such festering wounds as Hillary Clinton would be if she is elected on Nov. 8.”
Chelsea Clinton shared her complaints about Doug Band with “a Bush-43 kid“? That’s like Fredo Corleone complaining to the FBI that Moe Green isn’t getting a big enough cut.
The Democrats are in bad shape even if Hillary wins. (Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg’s G-File email.)
Michael Moore on why Trump will win: “He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they’ve been waiting for; the human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.”
The polls pervasively understate his support (the “shy Trump voter”).
Enthusiasm for Clinton is low, enthusiasm for Trump is high. Early voting is showing a pattern closer to 2008 than 2012 (high turnout). Given the enthusiasm gap, this is bad news for Clinton and supports the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
This (like 2008) is a “Change Election”. Three quarters or more of voters think that the country is on the wrong track. Clinton is the insider, Trump is the outsider. Advantage: Trump.
The Clinton camp is paralyzed by the emerging scandals. It’s been 5 days [post is from 11/2 – LP] and there’s no coherent reply to the FBI reopening the email investigation. The paralysis says that Clinton’s inner circle is divided on what to do, and she has poor leadership skills – and so the campaign twists in the wind. This is a very, very bad sign for her.
The Marc Rich announcement today is almost inexplicable. There’s no reason that a FOIA request announcement couldn’t wait until after the election. Instead, it came out 4 days after the previous FBI announcement. My take is that Obama has polling showing that she’s going to lose, and lose big. It’s no secret that the Obamas and the Clintons despise each other – this is his chance to dismantle the Clinton machine in the Democratic party (and hill the resulting power vacuum with his people).
The UK betting markets are showing the same pattern as before the Brexit vote – a few big money bets on Clinton (as with Remain), but a huge number of small bets on Trump (Leave).
Independents are leaving Gary Johnson and breaking hard for Trump. The latest poll from North Carolina has Johnson down 5 and Trump up 5. This feels like more confirmation of the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
There is very little or no equivalent data pointing to a strengthening by Clinton. If she were actually as far ahead as we’ve been told, there would be evidence dropping from the trees. There isn’t.
Things are getting really, really bad in Turkey. This is not a surprise, and the writing was on the wall when the “coup” failed and Erdogan’s crackdown began. But Erdogan’s purge is even more extensive than I anticipated.
What China learned from the Gulf War. And what they then unlearned: “China did try adding more officers selected for skills rather than loyalty but since 2010 have shifted back to the “loyalty first” model. This was necessary because of problems eliminating the corruption in the military and the realization that the military would more likely be needed to deal with an internal threat rather than an external one.” (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
ESPN lost 621,000 cable subscribers in October. “Of we’re very conservative and project that ESPN continues to lose 3 million subscribers a year…within five years ESPN will be bringing in less subscriber revenue than they’ve committed for sports rights.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
There are commentators who take it as a given that Trump is going to lose the black vote by a larger margin than Republican Presidential candidates usually do.
I doubt it.
First and foremost, Obama is no longer on the ballot, and it is deeply unlikely that Hillary Clinton get as many black votes as the real first black president.
Second, if you consider Trump not as a standard Republican, but as a celebrity candidate (which he most obviously is), his chances among black voters begin to look a lot better. Take, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The former body-builder, former Kennedy-in-law, was up for re-election in 2006 in one of the bluest states in the country. He was re-elected by a huge 17-point margin and won 27% of the Black vote in California. Schwarzenegger also won 39% of the Hispanic vote and a huge 62% of the Asian vote and 63% of the White Vote.”
Trump may not get 27% of the black vote (though I think that’s far more likely than Clinton getting the 96% of the black vote Obama got in 2008), but he doesn’t have to. Getting somewhere between that and the 10% of the black vote Republicans have historically garnered in Presidential elections will be enough to doom Clinton in several swing states.
“Trump saw a 16.5 percentage-point increase in backing from African-American voters in a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California tracking poll, up from 3.1 percent on Sept. 10 to 19.6 percent through Friday. Meanwhile, the same poll showed Clinton’s support among that group plummeting from 90.4 percent on Sept. 10 to 71.4 percent.”
There are also some signs that Trump’s economic message is resonating with at least some parts of the black community the same way it has blue collar white voters.
Chicago attorney Brunell Donald-Kyei, a former Bernie Sanders supporter and Barack Obama voter, believes that Donald Trump’s economic message is resonating in American’s urban centers and elsewhere as well.
Donald-Kyei is now the vice chair of the Trump campaign’s diversity outreach coalition and has been making media appearances on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee during the campaign season. The lifelong Democrat who once ran for Illinois lieutenant governor explained in a previous interview that “I was a Bernie Sanders girl. Once… I saw how we were treated at the Democratic National Convention, I knew that I would not vote for Hillary Clinton, and the Trump Train just kept calling my name.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s real enthusiasm for Trump in some quarters of the black community, enthusiasm that simply wasn’t there for previous Republican Presidential candidates.
While Hillary racked up overwhelming support among black Democratic primary voters, enthusiasm about her in the black community at large has been noticably lacking. “Clinton and her entire campaign don’t care about black people unless their bodies are lifeless and cold, donating to her foundation, or paying them to give speeches…Nothing about this woman is genuine. Nothing.” Indeed, Democrats themselves are fretting about an enthusiasm gap among black voters for Clinton, and talk that the Clinton campaign is in panic mode over lack of black voter enthusiasm in Florida.
The entirety of the George Soros-funded #BlackLivesMatter seems to be a desperate attempt to keep the black community riled up about an imaginary epidemic of police brutality in order to get them to vote for Hillary. Whether it will work, or whether it can more than offset the white voters and police officers turned off by the tactic remains to be seen.
Finally, Trump has garnered some black celebrity Support. Some of those might strike you as pretty crappy black celebrities (like Mike Tyson), but the fact that there are some willing to publicly support him despite the relentless demonization of Trump by the mainstream media, and that many of them (Tyson, Herschel Walker) have worked with Trump, have to be encouraging signs for Team Trump.
As has been proven many, many times in this campaign, Donald Trump is such an unusual candidate that many of the usual rules simply don’t apply to him. “Blacks never vote for Republicans in Presidential races” may be one of those rules.
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.”
The poll with the best track record over the last three presidential elections gave Donald Trump a 2-percentage-point edge over Hillary Clinton on Saturday.
The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll has Trump with 42.1 percent and Clinton at 39.7 percent.
Thoughts on #NeverTrump: “They are putting a great volume of energy into bringing about a disaster, for which they will not take any ownership.”
No one trusts the media anymore. “Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is ‘honest and trustworthy.’ They don’t trust the media’s cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth. The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
Here’s a New Yorker piece on the failure of the Euro. It provides a good, but incomplete, overview of the Euro’s failure (nowhere does it note that Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable, and it fails to note that none of the nations practicing “austerity” in southern Europe have cut outlays to match receipts). And the myopic policy prescription offered is, of course, more central planning. But there are some good bits. Like this:
The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and is still in double digits. In some European countries, youth unemployment is more than forty per cent. America’s economy is bigger than it was when the crisis hit. The eurozone’s is smaller. To take just one example, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a per-capita G.D.P. that’s lower than it was at the end of the last century.
Also this:
Stiglitz observes that if the countries that committed to the single currency in 1992 had known what they know now, and if people had had the chance to vote on the proposal, “it is hard to see how they could have supported it.” That’s a hell of an indictment.
Hey, remember how we were told California’s assisted suicide law would only apply to terminally ill people who wanted to die? Now insurance companies are enouraging suicide rather than pay for life-extending drug treatments.
But if you’re not sure yet what you want to do, then take time to decide before you spend $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 you don’t have for something you don’t need. In the meantime, start working. You’ll probably only find low-paying, hard-working jobs at first, but guess what? If you go to college, you’ll be working those same jobs when you get out, only you’ll be four years older and fifty grand poorer.
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol. Better idea than corn subsidies…
For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.
Wikileaks also brought back to light a bit of information that was mostly swept under the rug at the time: Eric McFadden, Hillary’s 2008 Catholic community liaison, was arrested in 2009 for running an underage prostitution ring. Just another member of the Clinton Campaign Moral Freakshow…
The list of MSM reporters who take their marching orders from Hillary. On the list: ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (Duh) and Diane Sawyer, New York Times‘s Gail Collins, etc. The only surprise is no one from the Washington Post on that list. Maybe they just assumed they already had marching orders to support Hillary. (Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)
Most evident from their downloads is the unremitting, almost incestual, alliance between elites (read: Democratic Party leadership) and the press, those who are informing us of what we are supposed to think. The myriad emails between New York Times reporter and CNBC anchor John Harwood and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta would approach the risible were they not so disturbing by implication. Presidential debate moderator Harwood, putatively a journalist, actually acts as an advisor to Podesta in them, warning the campaign manager of the dangers of a potential Ben Carson candidacy and even bragging to him about having tripped up Donald Trump at a debate.
But the presidential debate moderator is far from alone in his fealty to the ways and means of the nomenklatura. The New York Times and the Boston Globe—the emails show, as if we hadn’t guessed already—colluded with the Clinton campaign.
But the level of collusion goes much deeper than press and politicians. The Department of Justice itself—the emails also reveal—was in private communication with the Clinton people during the investigation of the Hillary Clinton homebrew server, warning her campaign in advance of a State Department release of emails. Everybody was colluding!
Excerpts from Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speech. In which Hillary declares she has nothing in common with those peons in the middle class, admits that jihadists are coming over among Syrian refugees, and proclaims her love of open borders.
More on the subject: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Sounds like the EU written large.
Hard to believe it’s been a mere five days since Trump held a press conference with women Bill Clinton sexually assaulted. So much news has come down the pike since…
The long list of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Eileen Wellstone, Carolyn Moffet, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Becky Brown, Helen Dowdy, Cristy Zercher… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Scott Adams: “If the new battleground is spousal fidelity, you have to like Trump’s chances.”
New Trump ad hits Hillary on Pay-to-Play corruption:
Nigel Farage on Brexit and Trump: “I believe we are witnessing a popular uprising against failed politics on a global scale. People want to vote for candidates with personality, faults and all. It is the same in the UK, America and much of the rest of Europe. The little people have had enough. They want change.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
That NBC poll showing Hillary up 11 points is pure hogwash with biased samples from a company that’s on the Hillary campaign’s payroll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
No, I didn’t watch it. So here are some reactions from people who did:
Vodka Pundit Stephen Green: “I’ve never seen one candidate come on so week, then reverse course — in his own limited, almost demented fashion — so strongly. I’ve never seen another candidate, so thoroughly programed, act as though her various subroutines had been corrupted by one of those nasty Russian viruses.”
Scott Adams: “Trump won bigly. This one wasn’t close.” Also:
The best quotable moments from the debate are pro-Trump. His comment about putting Clinton in jail has that marvelous visual persuasion quality about it, and it was the laugh of the night, which means it will be repeated endlessly. He also looked like he meant it.
Clinton’s Abe Lincoln defense for two-faced politicking failed as hard as anything can fail. Mrs. Clinton, I knew Abe Lincoln, and you’re no Abe Lincoln. You know that was in your head. Or it will be.
Powerline’s John Hinderaker: “Some of the rats might want to consider returning to the ship. Donald Trump came through pretty well tonight, mainly because the focus was on the issues. As long as issues are being discussed, Trump wins….In short, Trump won. In my opinion, he won big. We will see whether it matters.”
Another week, another bumper crop of links on Clinton corruption:
That amazing thing about the Clinton web of corruption is that there are tentacles of the Clinton Foundation you’ve likely never even heard of, including the Clinton India Foundation:
Three months after leaving the White House in 2001, former President Bill Clinton arrived in India to cheering throngs to help those who had just lost a million homes in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed 20,000 and injured 166,000.
In classic Clinton style, he solemnly promised that his new nonprofit — called the American India Foundation (AIF) — would rebuild 100 villages. Rajat Gupta, his millionaire co-chairman, pledged $1 billion for the victims.
It never happened. Years later, AIF’s annual reports were reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation and show only seven villages were partially rebuilt by Clinton’s group, and a mere $2.7 million of $53 million raised over a decade went to the earthquake victims.
It gets worse:
The sheer number of AIF executives who ran afoul of the law is dramatic. Clinton’s handpicked AIF co-chairmen — Rajat Gupta, then head of McKinsey & Company and Victor Menezes, then Citibank chairman — were both convicted of insider trading. Gupta served 19 months in federal prison and Menezes was fined $2.7 million.
Gupta was close to the Clintons. He hired Chelsea Clinton right out of college for a six-figure salary to work at McKinsey and he donated between $10,000 to $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
Raj Rajaratnam was perhaps the most notorious AIF trustee. He was convicted of 14 counts of security fraud in one of the largest and most spectacular Wall Street prosecutions in decades. He is currently serving serving a sentence of 11 years in prison. Gupta passed on insider tips to Rajaratnam.
Then there’s Vinod Gupta, an AIF director who the Securities and Exchange Commission helped remove as CEO of InfoUSA because he used company funds to support a lavish lifestyle. He was forced to resign and pay $9 million in restitution.
Vinod also bestowed large financial rewards to Clinton. He paid Bill $3.3 million and gave him 100,000 stock shares of his company without prior approval from the board of directors. Vinod allowed the Clinton family to use the company’s jet, also without board approval. The Clintons got $900,000 worth of air travel. And Vinod gave between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Vinod had spent a night in the White House Lincoln bedroom when the Clintons opened it up to donors.
Sant Singh Chatwal, another AIF trustee, pleaded guilty in 2014 to funneling more than $180,000 in illegal contributions to candidates for federal office, including Hillary. The Times of India reported the close relationship Chatwal had with the Clintons.
“Chatwal and his wife Daman were regular visitors to the White House during the Clinton presidency. A fortnight after the Clintons left for their new home in Chappaqua, New York, Sant Singh Chatwal and his elder son, Vikram, dropped in to meet them,” the newspaper wrote.
Naveen Jain, an AIF trustee, was accused of buying and selling stocks with insider knowledge as CEO of InfoSpace. He eventually paid $107 million in a civil suit over insider trading.
Ajay Shah, another trustee was forced to pay $14.8 million for contributing to the collapse of the Trust Bank of Kenya. He fled the country to avoid the Kenya High Court decree.
Sudesh K. Arora, president of Natel, entered the criminal plea for a major Department of Defense fraud investigation. He settled and his company paid a $1 million fine.
A new batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department offered fresh evidence Wednesday of the pains Clinton’s staff took to accommodate her husband’s paid speeches and her family’s foundation — just hours after Sen. Tim Kaine dismissed the possibility that the Clinton Foundation had wielded influence over his running mate.
Emails showed Clinton’s aides teamed up with the foundation to perform donor maintenance, craft messaging on key policies and put together guest lists for both diplomatic and philanthropic events. State Department staffers were often asked to advise Clinton’s husband on how to handle politically-fraught speaking engagements or foundation events, such as an effort to bring the new Libyan president to a Clinton Global Initiative meeting that was held less than two weeks after the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
The trove of roughly 200 pages of records made public Wednesday was just the latest and most convincing indication that, rather than operate as an independent organization, the Clinton Foundation leaned heavily on the State Department to expand its global reach.
But the four-star rating had hardly been announced before the Associated Press reported that Charity Navigator was a member of the CGI from 2012 to 2014. The CGI is one of the Clinton Foundation’s best-known programs, as it regularly convenes glittering gatherings of celebrities, government officials and philanthropic stars.
The $20,000 CGI membership fee was waived for Charity Navigator, which reported it as an in-kind contribution, according to the AP. The news organization said Charity Navigator chairman Michael Thatcher claimed his group joined CGI “to mingle with world leaders and promote its ratings.
Photograph evidence suggest that Hillary Clinton suffers from permanent double vision. On the bright side, that means she’s probably not a shape-shifting reptoid. Probably. (Hat tip: Dircetor Blue.)