For years, one of the most corrupt political organizations in America was allowed to operate with impunity in the state of New York. That organization is known as the Clinton Foundation.
Successive attorneys general in New York stood by in silence as the Clinton machine sold government access via foundation donations, very little of which actually went to charity. They stood by when Hillary Clinton was a U.S. senator. They did nothing when she was secretary of state. And they didn’t lift a finger against the foundation during Clinton’s latest presidential bid.
The Trump Foundation, on the other hand, has never once been accused of illegal or nefarious behavior — until Donald Trump became president. It is now the subject of a frivolous and politically motivated lawsuit from the New York attorney general’s office.
Looking at the Clinton Foundation and Trump Foundation side by side makes it crystal clear that the investigation into the Trump Foundation is a political hatchet job launched by a partisan opportunist.
The Trump Foundation has donated more than $19 million to charity — more money than it has received in donations. President Trump has contributed more than $8 million of his own money to the foundation. And unlike almost every other “charity” out there, the Trump Foundation has no administrative expenses. None.
The Clinton Foundation, on the other hand, is notorious for making money disappear. In 2013, for example, the Clinton Foundation accepted more than $140 million in grants and pledges, yet it managed to spend only $9 million in direct aid.
In 2012, the Clinton Foundation, working hand in hand with the Clinton State Department, worked to get the United States to subsidize a $300 million factory complex in Haiti, Caracol Industrial Park.
Former President Bill Clinton said 100,000 jobs would be created. Those jobs never materialized. What did materialize was between a $50,000 and $100,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation from Sae-A Trading Company, the South Korean textile giant that is the biggest employer at the site.
And who could forget the infamous Uranium One deal that Secretary Clinton approved? Shortly after the federal government approved the sale of Uranium One to Russian company Rosatom, Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin, paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech in Moscow.
Secretary Clinton also approved an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia — a country that donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation. That was just the tip of the weapons-for-cash iceberg. A 2015 International Business Times investigation actually found that during the three years of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the State Department approved arms sales totaling $165 billion to 20 different countries whose governments had given to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton Foundation is in fact so sketchy that multiple legal experts have compared it to a Mafia family and said that the foundation could be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act. In 2016, James Kallstrom, former assistant director of the FBI and the lead agent in the New York field office during the Mafia Commission Trial in the 1980s, called the Clinton Foundation “a classic RICO case.”
“The more you see … the breadth and scope of this conspiracy … it makes our taking down of organized crime in the 1980s, when we indicted the La Cosa Nostra, arrested all the families, and seized all the documents … look like child’s play,” Kallstrom said. “You could make a very strong RICO case against the Clinton Foundation and all of its minions.”
Apparently, the New York attorney general’s office under Eric Schneiderman disagreed.
Trump’s greatest violation (according to his political enemies in the New York attorney general’s office), was making charitable Trump Foundation donations while on the campaign trail — even though money taken for charitable donations was never once used for political activities.
Yet Trump and his children are still facing a major lawsuit.
This lawsuit is based on a clear political vendetta, and the good people of New York should not tolerate their tax dollars being used to support the use of a public office with vast prosecutorial powers as a weaponized tool to attack political opponents.
Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) is the founder of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital and served in the Trump administration as White House communications director.
