Earlier this month, newly unearthed emails revealed that Clinton Foundation staffers had asked top officials at Hillary Clinton’s State Department to provide foundation donors access to other senior government employees.
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“As we have said before, neither my husband, my daughter, nor I have ever taken a penny of salary from the foundation”.
Former president Bill Clinton belatedly announced plans to tighten the ethical safeguards for the Clinton Foundation, the family charity, to eliminate “legitimate concerns about potential conflicts of interest”. But the questions about emails and the foundation keep piling up, and she is certain to be challenged at the first debate with Trump on September 26. There’s also a standing defense available to them by simply saying that the favorable action was one which they were already considering anyway and they’d have done it with or without some particular meeting or donation.
That’s exactly the argument Clinton is making when it comes to the 30,000-plus emails that were permanently deleted from her private email server because her team of lawyers deemed them entirely personal in nature. In the emails, foundation employee Doug Band asks government staff for help – for the crown prince of Bahrain who wants a meeting with Clinton; the global soccer player who needs an expedited U.S.travel visa; the billionaire who wants to speak with the ambassador to Lebanon. “We don’t want a straight line between the Clinton bank account, the State Department, the Clinton Foundation”, she said.
Her defenders: USA law says perjury requires a wilful intent to hide. We know it when we see it.
How large? nearly half of the donors wrote checks in excess of $100,000 to the Foundation – and 20 of them forked over more than a million apiece. A judge ordered them turned over to the government.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has assailed Clinton as the beneficiary of a “pay-for-play” operation that provided special access to the State Department for donors of the foundation.
“That is absurd”, she told CNN.
Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Doug Band, a former high-ranking official with the foundation and adviser to Bill Clinton during his presidency, exchanged emails between June 2009 and March 2011. She said so after words.
“The State Department does not believe it is inappropriate for the administration to consider individuals suggested by outside organizations when deciding who to invite to an official function”, State Department Director of Press Relations Elizabeth Trudeau said in a statement.
Usually the opposite is true: If the wasteful government program wasn’t sucking up so much money, someone else could use that capital to much more effectively help those who need the help.
The announcement comes as a health project connected to the Clinton Foundation is exploring a number of changes to minimize potential conflicts of interest in the event of another Clinton White House but may continue to accept foreign government and corporate funding. The tweet in question, however, touched off a firestorm of controversy around the news wire’s story on the Clinton Foundation to the point where it has actually undermined the story itself. CharityWatch says 88 per cent of its funds go directly to services.
But the only way to eliminate the odor surrounding the foundation is to wind it down and put it in mothballs, starting today, and transfer its important charitable work to another large American charity such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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The Clintons, while denying any wrongdoing, have planned a series of changes – including refusing to accept foreign and corporate contributions and shifting some of its programs to other charities – created to reduce appearances of impropriety if Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 presidential race.
