FReepers, Let's GIT_R_DONE!
Posted on 02/25/2015 8:51:14 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Less than a year after Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, former President Bill Clinton asked the State Department to approve a paid, videotaped speech he was asked to make at a gala in Shanghai, sponsored by a Chinese sports foundation.
Wealthy hedge fund manager Kai Jiang wanted to pay the former president an undisclosed amount through a charity fund set up by his wife, Crystal Huang, a Chinese TV and film star who regularly serves as fodder for the Chinese tabloids.
But unlike hundreds of big-dollar Bill Clinton speeches that sailed through a State Department ethics approval process while Hillary Clinton served as America’s top diplomat, this one raised a note of caution that the Chinese government might actually be funding the speech or planning to profit from it.
The inconclusive bureaucratic back and forth — with weeks of emails asking for greater detail — made clear the difficulties the government faced getting information about Bill Clinton’s far-flung moneymaking efforts through an ethics review process Hillary Clinton agreed to when she joined President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.
If she decides to run for the Democratic nomination for president, the Clinton Foundation has said it will abide by similar restrictions on foreign donations. What limits would apply to her husband’s for-profit speechmaking or consulting deals is unclear.
In hundreds of documents released to POLITICO under the Freedom of Information Act, not a single case appears where the State Department explicitly rejected a Bill Clinton speech. Instead, the records show State Department lawyers acted on sparse information about business proposals and speech requests and were under the gun to approve the proposals promptly. The ethics agreement did not require that Clinton provide the estimated income from his private arrangements, making it difficult for ethics officials to tell whether his services were properly valued.
The proposed China speech and one consulting deal with a major player in Middle East policy are the only examples in the released documents where serious concerns were registered. The records include requests to speak to investment groups, colleges and foreign entities.
The records also highlight a blind spot in the ethics deal the Clintons and the Obama transition team hammered out in 2008 with the involvement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: While the pact subjected Bill Clinton’s moneymaking activities to official review, it imposed no vetting on donations to the Clinton Foundation by individuals or private companies in the U.S. or abroad.
Concerns about individuals seeking influence by dropping money in both buckets arose soon after the first few Bill Clinton speech proposals landed at Foggy Bottom. In a 2009 memo greenlighting those talks, a State Department ethics official specifically asked about possible links between President Clinton’s speaking engagements and donations to the Clinton Foundation. However, the released documents show no evidence that the question was addressed.
“In future requests, I would suggest including a statement listing whether or not any of the proposed sponsors of a speaking event have made a donation to the Clinton Foundation and, if so, the amount and date,” wrote Jim Thessin, then the State Department’s top ethics approver and No. 2 lawyer.
Both the department and the Clinton Foundation this week defended the pact that enabled Bill Clinton to conduct private business dealings while Hillary Clinton served in public office, saying it went beyond government ethics requirements. Hillary Clinton has said the couple was “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001, but they quickly amassed tens of millions of dollars through investments, book royalties and paid speeches around the globe.
“In several respects, Secretary Clinton’s commitments went beyond the requirements of applicable laws and regulations,” State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said. “We believe Secretary Clinton honored fully these undertakings.”
“President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation both held themselves to much higher standards than existing rules for spouses of government officials, and for the organizations with which they are affiliated,” a Clinton Foundation official said.
Doubts also remain about the transparency of the ethics deal. Obtaining details on how the approval process played out in practice has been difficult and slow. For nearly three years after POLITICO filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records in late 2009, the State Department released no information.
Heavily redacted documents began to emerge only after the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in 2013. So far, the department has not committed to a date to produce all of the records.
In the case of the Shanghai Sports Development Foundation gala, department ethics attorneys exchanged seven emails with President Clinton’s office over two weeks, struggling to get basic information about the event’s hosts, their possible connections to the Chinese government and the financial arrangements offered to Bill Clinton.
“There is something peculiar about [Jiang] paying for a talk that will be to an event sponsored by a Chinese Government entity, even if it is considered to be non-profit by the organization,” State ethics lawyer Chip Brooks wrote to Clinton scheduler Terry Krinvic. “Can we confirm the payment is actually from Mr. Jiang and not from the [Shanghai Sports Development] Foundation or the Chinese Government?….This entire lash up is different than some of the other ones we’ve had.”
Clinton aides sent the requests to his speakers bureau, which insisted Jiang was paying but routing the money through a charity fund his wife, Huang, started. They said the event would be a fundraising auction, with the money raised donated to the government-run sports foundation.
After extensive back and forth with State Department officials, the Clinton team backed out of the arrangement.
“Please withdrawl [sic] the SSDF/Shangahi [sic] offer,” Krinvic wrote on Dec. 2, 2009, without further explanation. “We are not going to proceed with this.”
The State Department ethics agreement is coming under new scrutiny as Hillary Clinton prepares to enter the 2016 presidential race. Her representatives have cited it as proof of the care she used in guarding against ethical conflicts as she, her husband and their daughter, Chelsea, built a global foundation that has attracted $2 billion in contributions, including many from foreign governments and business entities.
Once Hillary Clinton left office, the newly renamed Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation resumed fundraising from foreign governments that had been off-limits during her government service.
Donations in the past two years have come from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia and Germany. The foreign gifts — disclosed voluntarily on the Clinton Foundation website — have led to calls from activists and ethics watchdogs for the foundation to cease such fundraising as Clinton ramps up her expected campaign drive.
“I think the foundation should stop taking money from foreign sources — now,” said Richard Painter, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics and a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. “I would have been more conservative than the Clintons were here.”
Foundation officials have stopped short of promising to reject funds from foreign governments if Hillary Clinton enters the Democratic Party presidential race. But they have suggested that the procedures would serve as a model for the future.
“Should Secretary Clinton decide to run for office, we will continue to ensure the foundation’s policies and practices regarding support from international partners are appropriate, just as we did when she served as secretary of state,” a foundation spokesperson said last week.
The ethics agreement was struck in 2008 after Hillary Clinton’s nomination raised concerns on Capitol Hill about potential conflicts between her official duties and Bill Clinton’s varied business interests.
Hillary Clinton vowed that agency officials would screen all of Bill’s business offers and paid speaking requests and apply the federal government’s conflict-of-interest standard.
Within weeks after Hillary Clinton took office, her husband’s office sought approval for three, three-year consulting arrangements, asking that State Department ethics officials respond within five days — a turnaround time referenced in the ethics deal.
All three were with companies headed by longtime friends of the former president — Saban Capital Group, led by cartoon magnate Haim Saban; Shangri-La Industries, led by California investor Steve Bing; and Wasserman Investments, run by sports marketing and entertainment executive Casey Wasserman, son of Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman.
For the Saban and Wasserman firms, Clinton was to provide “consulting services regarding geopolitical, economic and social trends affecting the entit[ies] and philanthropic opportunities,” Clinton counselor Doug Band said in a Feb. 16, 2009, memo to Thessin.
The Bing deal was slightly different, calling for Clinton to advise on “philanthropic opportunities” as well as “the development of environmentally sustainable strategies.”
The stated limits on all three deals were the same. While all three companies are closely held investment firms, Clinton’s consulting work was not to include “provision of investment advice … or development of any investment opportunities.”
State Department records indicate that the deals with the Bing and Wasserman firms were approved, but the Saban proposal generated resistance.
“We have an objection to the first arrangement … based on the fact that Haim Saban, a founder of this entity, is actively involved in foreign affairs issues, particularly with regard to the Middle East, which is a priority area for the Secretary,” said an undated draft memo bearing Thessin’s name and directed to Bill Clinton’s scheduler.
The objection to the Clinton-Saban business deal, which did not go forward, was first disclosed last year by Judicial Watch.
Despite the rejection, Saban continued his past practice of donating generously to the Clinton Foundation. He gave a total of $7 million to the foundation in 2010 and 2011 through a family fund and had a $2.5 million pledge outstanding at the end of 2012, according to tax forms for Saban’s own family foundation.
Hundreds of paid speech requests flowed into the State Department for approval while Hillary Clinton held office. The approval requests don’t appear to have detailed the fees charged for any appearance. The amounts paid for speeches became public only after the fact, when Hillary Clinton filed annual financial disclosure forms. The forms don’t contain the amounts of consulting fees earned and don’t require such disclosure for spouses of officials.
Those filings show that during the time his wife was secretary of state, Bill Clinton earned as much as $750,000 for a speech the telecom firm Ericsson sponsored in Hong Kong in 2011 and as little as $75,000 for a speech in Shanghai in 2010 paid for by Rodman & Renshaw, an investment bank. Most of the speaking fees ranged from $175,000 to $200,000. (Between 2001 and 2013, Bill Clinton earned a total of $104.9 million in speaking fees, a Washington Post tabulation of the ethics forms found.)
How thoroughly State Department ethics officers vetted the requests remains unclear because of document redactions.
Some show lawyers there searching the Internet for information on the people or entities involved. One speech request generated a query to the acting chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, but the details of the exchange were redacted in the released documents.
Painter said that if the State Department did not know in advance about the specific fees involved for speeches or consulting deals, it would be difficult to judge whether sponsors were overpaying for Bill Clinton’s services.
“That would be a gap if they didn’t find out at all,” the ethics lawyer said.
Thessin, the State Department’s top ethics official during most of Hillary Clinton’s tenure, is a career State Department official who was named U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay in 2011. Thessin is presently a top adviser to the undersecretary of state for civil security, democracy and human rights, a State Department spokesman said.
Part of the reason for delayed records disclosure on the vetting process is a decision by State Department officials to seek input from the former president on document releases. Hundreds of pages of material have been held up for “consultation” under the terms of an executive order President Ronald Reagan signed in 1987 to protect “confidential commercial information.”
A foundation official said Clinton lawyer David Kendall responded “in a timely fashion.”
The Clinton Foundation’s own, voluntary disclosure of contributors also has limits that leave it far short of the transparency required for federal campaign contributions or for donations to presidential libraries under legislation that has bipartisan support but has never been enacted.
For example, the Clinton Foundation’s disclosure does not provide the dollar amount of gifts, the donation dates or donor details beyond the name of the person or corporation making the gift. No donor addresses are provided, and the information is made public only annually.
Clinton aides have repeatedly said that the foundation’s disclosures go beyond legal requirements.
A POLITICO review discovered that at least two entities listed as large foundation donors in past years disappeared from the foundation’s donor website sometime prior to last week. China Overseas Real Estate Development and the U.S.-Islamic World Conference were both on the donor list posted at the library in 2004 and were recorded as having given between $250,000 and $500,000 by 2008.
A foundation official said this week that those payments were actually made to the former president for speeches delivered before Hillary Clinton took office.
“These were originally mischaracterized as donations into the Clinton Foundation. President Clinton received honoraria from these organizations for speeches he made prior to 2008,” the official added. “There were no donations by these organizations to the foundation.”
The Shanghai sports gala is the only proposed event in the released records for which official questions look to have played a role in scuttling the appearance.
Jiang, the investor who was to sponsor Clinton’s talk in Shanghai, appears to have only a passing financial interest in American politics. His hedge fund, ChinaFund, is based in the Cayman Islands and Shanghai, according to legal documents.
Jiang’s only recorded donation to a federal campaign is a $10,000 donation last spring to the Democratic National Committee. Messages left at a home Jiang appears to own in Lake Forest, Illinois, were not returned.
Jiang and Huang divorced in 2010 after less than a year of marriage, according to the state-run China Daily.
Asked why the videotaped speech never took place, a Clinton Foundation spokesman said simply: “President Clinton’s office decided not to pursue this opportunity.”
The "election" of Tony Blair as Prime Minister of Great Britain market the downfall of that once great nation too.
This is all very important information and everything, but the American people have pretty much tuned out any bad publicity when it concerns Bill Clinton.
Since the 1990’s when Gingrich and Ken Starr threw everything in the world at Bill Clinton and he emerged triumphant, the American people tune out pretty much everything directed at the Clintons as political smears. This in part explains the high poll ratings both Clintons continue to garner.
The GOPe’s cowardice and ineptitude this week in Congress likely brings back memories of the ineptitude of Gingrich’s fiascos of the 90’s and will make the GOP’s presidential nominee’s task even more difficult.
Protesters gathered outside the Clinton Foundation in Harlem to complain about "missing money" from the US State Dept's recovery effort for the 2010 Haitian earthquake:
"New Yorkers with roots in Haiti protested, saying the picture [of the Haiti recovery] isn't so rosy," said the NY1-TV anchor. "People raised their voices to call attention to the missing money.
They protested outside the offices of the Clinton Foundation, which helped lead the reconstruction fund."
The protesters claimed that the US State Dept's $10 billion meant to help rebuild Haiti did little to help the country after the devastating 2010 quake. And that much of the money went to non-Haitian companies. Said one proteser, “The Haitian people are still living in very difficult conditions, still living under tents, while Bill Clinton and his cronies--they waste this money." As secretary of state under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton devoted much of her time in 2010 to the Haiti recovery.
1/15 By Daniel Halper (author of Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine).
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POINTS TO PONDER:
<><> The State Dept recently issued a "special management alert"-----that it had "no idea" what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.....it warned “significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at State has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years....under Hillary's watch.
<><> Bill Clinton got his hands on hundreds of million of dollars while Hillary ontrolled the State Dept checkbook..... monies that were meant for Haiti (the place where the Clintons spent their honeymoon).
<><> Clinton Foundation donor: Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund
“...America began its irreversible collapse.”
I had a conversation some years back with a visitor from one of our big customers in the UK. As they usually do, our talk turned to politics and I was delighted when this fellow referred to Clinton and Blair as, “A pair of smarmy gits.” Not much else needs to be said.
Hillary---and billionaire Arab potentates---mega-donors to The Clinton Foundation.
News organs report the tax-exempt Clinton foundation(s) took billions in donation from foreign governments.....foreign governments that a putative president Hillary would make policy for and for which she would wield the presidential pen.
The problem for the Buckraking Clintons isnt that they are getting foreign bucks---it's what exactly they are doing with the foreign monies once its in their Foundation's tax-exempt coffers.
A CLUE---Court documents in Clinton pal Jeffrey Epstein's underage sex investigation show that Epstein had 21 private e-mail addresses and phone numbers listed for Clinton and Clinton factotum, Doug Band.
Epstein kept Bill Clinton on speed dial as reports surfaced about Clinton attending sex parties at Epstein's "Orgy Island." Lawyers perusing documents stumbled upon e-mail addresses and 21 phone numbers for the fun-loving ex-president and his personal aide, Doug Band, stashed away in Jeffrey Epstein’s electronic directory, according to court documents.
QUESTION: Why does Clinton need 21 phone numbers? Does every phone number have an address and/or PO box number? Because L/E knows multiple phone no's is an indication of possible money-laundering and tax evasion.
CASE IN POINT One two-year federal investigation revealed an elaborate web to carry out multiple frauds. The frauds were carried out using non-existent people using fake identities, fraudulent SS nos, and phony tax ID numbers.
A sophisticated system of telephone voice-mail accounts and post office boxes were created to avoid detection. The charges involved racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud, making false statements, and bank fraud.
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HSBC Leak Exposes Shady Clinton Associates
Washington Free Beacon ^ | February 9, 2015 | Andrew Stiles / FR Posted by lbryce
A massive leak of documents from HSBC’s Swiss banking arm has revealed an array of sketchy dealings with wealthy individuals, including dictators and arms traffickers, through which the bank helped unsavory characters dodge taxes and avoid government scrutiny.
Among the unsavory characters exposed in the leak are a number of prominent donors to the Clinton Foundation. For example, the leaked documents detailed a five million Swiss franc cash transaction to British business mogul Richard Caring:
HSBC staff explained handing Caring the huge sum of cash by quoting a statement by him that he planned to deposit the cash with another Swiss bank, and did not want either bank to be aware of the other. They wrote: “RC goes to great lengths to maintain discretion.” …
The files show Caring, a major donor to British politics, transferring $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit set up by the former U.S. President Bill Clinton with the stated mission to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.” (Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
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One of the most common M/L T/E scams is one foundation writing a check to another foundation----the check receiver takes a cut then deposits the rest offshore for the donor's use later---all tax-free.
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We learn a lot from Madoff. When he went to jail, investigators found Ponzi King Bernie Madoff had stashed billions offshore---into a labyrinth of financial entities. Some $8.9 billion was funneled to Madoff through a dozen so-called feeder funds based in Europe, the Caribbean and Central America......a labyrinth of hedge funds, management companies and service providers that, to unsuspecting outsiders, seemed to compose a formidable system of checks and balances.
Although he was jailed for running a Ponzi, Madoff's main purpose was helping billionaire foundations launder money and evade taxes
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CLINTON CONNECTION TO SECRET SWISS BANK ACCOUNTS The Clinton foundations also accepted a $25,000 donation....... and Epstein wire-transferred Clinton's foundation $3.5 MILLION from a Swiss bank account.
INCONVENIENT FACTOID FOR HILLARY Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein flew on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 to meet with the Sultan of Brunei.....one of the richest men in the world.
Hollywood hotshots recently protested the Sultan's ownership of the posh Beverly Hills Hotel and his embrace of Sharia law. The Sultan has announced he plans to execute homosexuals.
The National Enquirer reported flight logs reveal Epstein — before he was arrested and jailed for soliciting teenage masseuses — picked up Clinton at a Japanese naval airport. Also onboard “the orgy jet” — were two alleged ‘madames’ for Epstein’s kiddie sex ring.
The mega-rich Sultan later donated between $1-5 million to the Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas.
The Clinton foundations also accepted a $25,000 donation....... and Epstein wire-transferred Clinton's foundation $23.5 MILLION from a Swiss bank account.
PING
Hill scooped up $300 grand plus expenses for a speech yesterday to "tech execs" in Silicon Valley.
Why aren’t Drudge and the other conservative-leaning media trumpeting these disclosures?
Looks to be an eighty year old wide load.
Waiting till she gets the nomination and are closer to the election so the voter can remember what a ——— she is !
Don't be silly Menthoops... it's not the American people that don't care - it's the butt boys in the press that refuse to make an issue about ANY democrat wrong doing...
Most Americans don't have the time to be their own newspaper editors... ferreting out what matters. Oh, wait - I mean like old school editors. I suspect the boys at the New York Times pick up their phones and their commie handlers tell them what's hot and the phone numbers of people to interview.
Clinton-bush fund. Is Jeb involved directly or just by relationships
Still bilking the taxpayers.
Gotta look that up.
If he’s involved even in the slightest he’ll not be able to mention their corruption once
The corrupt all do this. Private sector biz hire former corrupt government officials at all levels for influence, all the time. Thousands of other former government “officials” sell their well connected influence for cash profits. It goes on and on.
Government insiders are corrupt from top to bottom, even after collecting their gold plated tax paid pensions.
Our system has become a carnival of corruption.
The Mafia never had a lock on Crime Inc. like the Clintons do.
self-serving??? nah
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