Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Banking with Clinton.com

By way of Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox: 11.17.15", and the Weasel Zippers:
Clinton Foundation Failed To Report $20 Million In Donations From Foreign Governments
The Clinton Foundation failed to report $20 million in donations from governments to the Internal Revenue Service, newly refiled tax returns show.

Reuters reported that the foundation disclosed the $20 million it received from governments, most of them foreign, between 2010 and 2013 when it and a spin-off organization refiled tax returns from six years to fix errors.

The Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation did not previously separate out its donations from governments on old tax returns as is mandated by the IRS.

The foundation refiled tax returns from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 and a charity spun off from the foundation, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, refiled its own returns from 2012 and 2013 after both were found to have made errors reporting funds from foreign governments. The revelations about inaccuracies came just as Hillary Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president, endured scrutiny for the millions of dollars that her family foundation has received from foreign governments.
I'm sure the Obama administration is going to get right on that, just like they did enforcing the laws against the partisan war against the Tea Party conducted by Lois Lerner of the IRS.

Laws are for the little people, not the like of the Clintons or Obamas.

Speaking of Clinton.com, it turns out that despite Hillary's proclaimed skepticism of big banks Clinton Foundation Running Private Equity Fund in Colombia 
The Clinton Foundation is operating a $20 million private equity firm in Colombia, raising concerns from government and consumer watchdog groups who say the practice is unusual and could pose a significant conflict of interest.

The Bogota-based company, Fondo Acceso, could also lead to uncomfortable questions for Hillary Clinton as she criticizes the private equity industry on the campaign trail.

Fondo Acceso was founded by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, and mining magnate Frank Giustra in 2010, financed with a $20 million joint contribution from the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation.

According to the firm’s Spanish-language website, Fondo Acceso is “a Private Equity Fund that seeks investment opportunities in the small and medium Colombian compan[ies] with the purpose of obtaining economic and social returns.”

However, the line between the firm and the Clinton’s nonprofit world is hazy. Fondo Acceso is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office and staffed by foundation employees, a representative at the office told the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday.

The firm is managed by Carolina Botero, who is also chief financial officer at the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership. It lists various Clinton Foundation and CGEP officials as directors in its corporate filings. The Clinton Foundation’s tax returns list Fondo Acceso as a related corporation in which the foundation holds a 50 percent stake.
I hear that drugs are a big export from Columbia. I wonder how much drug money is being laundered through the Bogata office of Clinton.com?

Just Who Is Sidney Blumenthal, the Clintons’ Closest Advisor?
. . .Faulting the Benghazi committee for scrutinizing Mr. Blumenthal is like saying the Warren Commission was preoccupied with Lee Harvey Oswald.

In fact, Sidney Blumenthal is all over the Benghazi affair. And Ms. Clinton’s long, strange, close relationship to this shadowy and increasingly untrusted figure might just keep her from winning the White House.

Last Friday, the State Department released emails showing that Mr. Blumenthal had reached out to Ms. Clinton on behalf of Jonathan Powell, ex-chief of staff to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Powell proposed establishing “below the radar” channels between insurgents and governments and making money off of it through an NGO of Mr. Powell’s. Ms. Clinton was receptive to the idea, according to the Daily Caller. When he was at The New Yorker, Mr. Blumenthal wrote an ass-kissing profile of Mr. Blair in which he called his subject, among other things, a man of “impeccable Oxford diction.”
. . .
To cite another striking example, Mr. Blumenthal sent then-Secretary of State Ms. Clinton reports on the political situation in Libya written by a former senior CIA officer, the recently deceased Tyler Drumheller. Those reports, which Mr. Blumenthal emailed to her in 2011 and 2012, apparently were intended to influence American policy toward Libya in a way favorable to a business project with which Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Drumheller were involved.
. . .
Going back to the Bill Clinton impeachment crisis, Mr. Blumenthal, then the president’s special adviser, spread false rumors that one of Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors abused young boys at a Christian summer camp and that Monica Lewinsky was stalking the president. In 1995, Mr. Blumenthal told reporters that Alma Powell, Colin Powell’s wife, suffered from clinical depression and was thus unfit to be a first lady. At the time, there were rumors that Colin Powell would run in the Republican presidential primaries, a prospect that terrified the Clinton re-election campaign.
I think it's pretty clear that we can expect Sid "the Shiv" Blumenthal to have a pretty important role in any Clinton administration.

AP rebukes State Department for lengthy response to Clinton docs
The Associated Press rebuked the State Department on Monday, accusing the agency of dragging their feet on producing documents related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary.

The State Department, asked to produce Clinton’s public schedule for the duration of her time in office, has said it will need a month to process 400 pages of the material—a pace that, according to AP calculations, would require four years for the department to complete the task.

"AP (and the citizens of this nation) should not have to wait another four years, long after the 2016 election in which Secretary Clinton is a presidential candidate, to receive a full set of her schedules from her tenure as Secretary of State. AP respectfully suggests that a reasonable production schedule would require State to produce all of Secretary Clinton’s ‘mini schedules’ and ‘final schedules’ no later than the Spring of 2016," the AP wrote in court-filed response to the State Department.

The AP sued the State Department in March after the department "failed to satisfy repeated document requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, including one made five years ago," the AP said. At least one judge has already criticized the State Department for being slow to respond to the AP.
Transparency under the Obama administration has been anything but; transparency under a hypothetical Clinton administration will be much worse.

1 comment:

  1. Carolina Botero is a skirt... Bill is a skirt chaser.. add them together and you get the next Clinton scandal....time for someone to start doing some addition and get to what this is all about...

    ReplyDelete