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Surprise: Most Clinton Foundation donors got larger weapons deals from Hillary’s State Department

Of 20 nations that donated to the Foundation, 17 had more robust weapons transactions in the three fiscal years that State was led by Hillary than in the last three years of the previous administration. How do you convince a president who got elected in 2008 on an anti-war platform repudiating warmongering cowboy George W. Bush to ramp up arms deals to unsavory regimes in the Middle East? Slipping a fat envelope into the Clinton slush fund’s collection box couldn’t hurt. And evidently didn’t.

Personally, I’m pretty excited to have every foreign-policy transaction the United States engages in through 2020, at a minimum, scrutinized after the fact to see just how much the president and her husband personally benefited from our partner’s largesse.

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House.
American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012…
In all, governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible. 

. . .But none of that proves or disproves that donations made to the Clinton Foundation and the weapons that followed were matters of correlation, not causation. On the contrary, foreign regimes arguably would have had more reason to slip Bill and Hillary an envelope if they had reason to believe Obama was planning to turn on the arms spigot during his first term. They might have gotten more weapons whether they donated or not, but that’s true of many bribes; they’re insurance that a course of action will be taken even if independent motives to take that action exist. And of course, however Team Hillary spins this, the sober fact remains for the left that their next nominee will have presided over an unprecedented spree of weapons dealing, including to brutal authoritarian regimes, which complicates the tried-and-true Democratic narrative that Republicans are the party of warmongers.

This sort of influence peddling doesn't even require any active participation by the Clintons. All it requires is a few henchpeople at State to know who is in favor with her Highness.