Clinton and corruption are two words irrevocably associated with each other since the days of the Whitewater land deal and Mrs. Clinton’s 100-for-1 winnings as a first-time cattle futures trader in the late 1970’s.
Those early deals revealed the Clinton business model that flourishes today. Unlike Donald Trump it has nothing to do with creating real wealth. Instead, it is all based on selling access and influence. It remains a mystery why an FBI public corruption investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State has not been front-page news since it was first revealed in January.
It is no mystery, however, why Mrs. Clinton never appointed an Inspector General for the entire time she served as Secretary of State. Based on the recently released State Department IG report, we now know how much she had to hide.
Many of the facts about Mrs. Clinton’s apparent selling of favors for cash have been reported in the media – and then promptly ignored. Donald Trump has promised to mainstream the facts in speeches around the country. His campaign has just announced it will soon launch a new website, LyingCrookedHillary.com.
Here’s are just a few of the most egregious examples of Mrs. Clinton’s corruption scandals:
The commodities trader who “bought” his appointment to a Top Secret nuclear weapons security advisory board. Mr. Trump began speaking about commodities trader Raj Fernando on Friday, just hours after ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross broke the story that tied Mr. Fernando’s appointment to the prestigious International Security Advisory Board in 2009 to his donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Newly released emails, acquired by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act, show that career Department officials questioned Fernando’s appointment because he had no national security experience. Other emails show that Mrs. Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, bypassed the normal nomination process to put Mr. Fernando on the board.
It turns out Mr. Fernando was a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. It’s hard not to see the quid pro quo.
Corrupt self-dealing at Laureate University. The Clintons’ tax returns show that the former president earned $16.46 million between 2010 and 2015 as “honorary chancellor” for Laureate University, the largest for-profit college company in the U.S. During that same time, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department awarded grants to Laureate and its affiliates worth $55.2 million.
In other words, Mrs. Clinton ensured that U.S. taxpayers would pay her husband’s generous private sector salary, to the tune of nearly $4 million per year.
Author Peter Schweizer revealed the back-scratching arrangement in his 2015 book, Clinton Cash. “When the Clinton campaign team obtained a copy of the book and its Clinton-Laureate connection revelation, Bill Clinton abruptly resigned,” Schweizer wrote.
The man behind Laureate, Douglas Becker, got involved with the Clinton Global Initiative as early as 2007. In addition to paying handsomely for Bill Clinton’s “services,” Laureate International Universities gave between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
“Throughout ten Democratic Party debates, Establishment Media have not asked Hillary Clinton a single question about her and her husband’s for-profit education scam,” Schweizer noted. That may now change.
The speeches. The Clintons pulled in more than $153.6 million in speaking fees between February 2001 and May 2015, according to an analysis by CNN. That included $7.7 million for 39 speeches to big Wall Street banks, eight of them by Mrs. Clinton. What did Mrs. Clinton tell these generous donors behind closed doors that she is unwilling to share with the American public?
Several companies and trade associations paid the former president large speaking fees “just before or just after the firms lobbied his wife’s State Department,” according to one report, while Mrs. Clinton enlisted State Department underlings to steer potential donors who had contacted them on official business to the family foundation, according to another. A separate investigation listed nine companies that were given “special access” to the State Department, apparently because of their donations to the Clinton Foundation. No quid pro quos there?
Selling U.S. uranium supplies to Russia. The biggest potential scandal involves Uranium One, the Canadian corporation owned by a Clinton crony that sold its U.S. uranium deposits to the Russian government.
Initially revealed in Clinton Cash, a New York Times investigation found that Clinton crony Frank Giustra pledged to donate $100 million to the Clinton Global Initiative at a time when Giustra needed State Department approvals for his deal with Russia. The Clinton Foundation lists two Giustra entities as having each donated more than $25 million.
While all of these scandals have been reported in the press, even the New York Times investigation became a dead letter. No national media organization has been willing to beat the drum on the Clinton corruption scandals the way they did, say, on Watergate or the Valerie Plame affair.
Perhaps all that will change once Donald Trump starts swinging.
Timmerman is a Donald Trump supporter. He was the 2012 Republican Congressional nominee for MD-8 and is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, forthcoming from Post Hill Press in July.