The deck, Hillary Clinton declared in her much-hyped campaign announcement video, is too often stacked in favor of the wealthy and powerful. How true this is.
The average middle class American, for instance, can hardly hope to sit in judgment over the business affairs of corporations that can pay his family or his family foundations millions of dollars. Clinton, on the other hand, did just that while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state.
Several examples of this are set to appear in Peter Schweizer’s forthcoming book “Clinton Cash,” which is to be released May 5. For example, when State Department approval was pending for the Keystone XL pipeline, President Bill Clinton was paid $1 million by Toronto Dominion Bank — a major investor in the project — to give speeches. Regardless of the project’s merits, or of Secretary Clinton’s personal position on the pipeline before the money hit her bank account, it is hard not to view this as an attempt to buy influence.
Newsweek recently reported that a major Clinton Foundation donor, a Ukrainian named Victor Pinchuk, was doing business with Iran between 2009 and 2013 — a possible violation of U.S. sanctions. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been the one deciding whether Pinchuk would be penalized. Is this why he gave so generously?
A more recent and alarming revelation, unearthed by Schweizer and reported in greater detail on Thursday by the New York Times, involves a major international business deal in which a Russian government-controlled company obtained control of 20 percent of the United States’ uranium production capacity.
Given its national security implications, that deal required approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, on which Clinton sat as secretary of state. It was approved after a lot of money was sent the Clintons’ way by involved parties. Most of it was donated to the Clinton Foundation — including $2.35 million from the chairman of Uranium One. President Clinton was also personally paid $500,000 to give a 2010 speech at a Moscow conference put on by a Russian investment bank involved in promoting the stock of the Russian company involved.
Hillary Clinton, who had voluntarily agreed to disclose her family foundation’s donors while serving under Obama, disclosed only a fraction of the donations from parties involved in the uranium deal. In a related development, the Clinton Foundation announced this week that it will be re-filing erroneous tax reports that apparently conceal the foreign-government-linked nature of some contributions.
In case you’re wondering, this is what impropriety looks like. Such apparent conflicts of interest undermine public trust in government decisions. And one can only wonder now about how this ties in to the 30,000 emails from her personal server, which she claims were private communications. You know — the typical sort of emails people send their friends about yoga class, furniture patterns, and oh, how about hitting up so-and-so for a few million, doesn’t he have business before the State Department?
The Clintons learned during the 1990s that they face no urgent need to keep up an appearance of propriety. But times have changed, and the mainstream press is suddenly on their case. With a large majority of Americans viewing Clinton as untrustworthy even before these stories broke, it’s time they offered some real no-spin answers about how they went from “dead broke” to being too rich to care about money.
