Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton on January 5, 2009, in a letter to State Department Designated Agency Ethics Official James H. Thessin:
“For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party….”
They violated that agreement almost immediately. They took multi-million dollar donations from foreign governments and businesses that had interests before the State Department. Those were never disclosed. According to Bloomberg, there was a lot of non-disclosure going on at the Foundation.
“There are in fact 1,100 undisclosed donors to the Clinton Foundation, [Clinton Foundation board member Frank] Giustra says, most of them non-U.S. residents. ‘All of the money flowed through to the Clinton Foundation –every penny — and went to the [charitable] initiatives we identified,’ he says.”
But even that raises significant issues, since according to the Foundation’s own tax filings, only 10 percent of its donations ultimately make it to “charitable grants” for their professed causes. That’s a whole lot of donations that go for expenses, salaries and benefits, travel, office supplies, rent and payouts to the Clintons themselves. And of course there’s the 2 percent that goes to IT (information technology), for that’s where all of Clinton’s emails were stored, in two separate email accounts, until they were mostly erased, in violation of federal record-keeping laws.
That’s likely where much of the hard evidence alleged in Peter Schweitzer’s book, Clinton Cash, would have been found. Absent the hard evidence, most of the public evidence is circumstantial. Charges that official State Department policy toward countries like Libya, Saudi Arabia, and India, were altered or softened after contributions by those countries to the Foundation certainly raise serious questions of paying for influence.
The most serious, however, is well documented. As explained by the New York Times, a Canadian businessman was purchasing up to 1/5 of the U.S. uranium assets. The Canadian firm, Uranium One, was then sold to Russia’s atomic energy agency, Rosatom, which was celebrated in Russia’s Pravda with the headline, “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”
According to The Gateway Pundit, 2017 reports of corporations turning their back on the foundation come amid a report largely ignored by the mainstream media, where hedge fund manager and self-described Wall Street whistleblower, Charles Ortel, alleges the Clinton Foundation purposely hid payments attached to the now infamous ‘Russia-Uranium One’ deal.
Infowars reports…
To stress the gravity of the Clinton Foundation’s Russian Uranium One scandal, Ortel told Infowars.com that he believes Clinton Foundation financial reports are criminally fraudulent in failing to report payments received in relation to the Russian Uranium One Scandal.
*****
Take 2009 results , for example, completed during 2010,” Ortel argued. “You will not find combining results for the Clinton Foundation, by “Initiative” on the Clinton Foundation website as these are purposefully omitted. But you will find these key results on versions of the required audit that are obtained here in New York (punch in EIN: 31-1580204) and look at the 2009 filing.” […]“These show total contributions (normally these are from the general public) of $82.9 million and total grants (normally these are from governments and from foundations) of $162.9 million,” he continued. “Focus on the column “CHAI” (Clinton Health Access Initiative) that shows contributions of $15.5 million of the combined total) and $159.7 in grants of the total). Clearly “CHAI” existed during 2009 as a material portion of the Clinton Foundation.”
Wall Street whistleblower, Charles Ortel wonders, “who contributed $159.7 million to “CHAI” in 2009?”
Charles Ortel points out…
“By going here, we find that a Swiss NGO called UNITAID may have contributed $85 million during 2009.”
“There is no $85 million grant from UNITAID listed and there is no grant listed in 2009 that may have been routed through CGSGI from Russia or from any other source–in fact the combining statement shows $100 (not a typo) in contributions, and only $1.5 million in grants for ‘CGSGI.’”
From 2009 up to 2013 (the year the Ukrainian coup erupted), the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which is headquartered in Kiev.
Foreign Donors to Clinton Foundation by Ranking:
Ukraine: $10.0 million
England: $8.4
Saudi Arabia: $7.3 million
Germany: $6.7 million
Ireland: $6.5 million
India: $5.0 million
Canada: $4.5 million
Argentina: $2.0 million
United Arab Emirates: $1.4 million
China: $1.3million
Source: Wall Street analysis of Clinton Foundation disclosures
RT further reports on the pay-to-play involving Pinchuk and The Clinton Foundation…
In 2008, Viktor Pinchuk, who made a fortune in the pipe-building business, pledged a five-year, $29-million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a program that works to train future Ukrainian leaders “to modernize Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal revealed the donations the fund received from foreigners abroad between 2009-2014 in their report published earlier this week .
Several alumni of the program have already graduated into the ranks of Ukraine’s parliament, while a former Clinton pollster went to work as a lobbyist for Pinchuk at the same time Clinton was working in government.
Between 2009 and 2013, the very period when Hillary Clinton was serving as US secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation appears to have received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.
That places Ukraine as the leading contributor among foreign donators to the Clinton Foundation.
The Pinchuk foundation said its donations to the Clinton-family organization were designed to make Ukraine “a successful, free, modern country based on European values.”It went on to remark that if Pinchuk was hoping to lobby the US State Department about Ukraine,“this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing,” WSJ quoted it as saying.
However, critics have pointed to some disturbing aspects regarding the donations, including the coincidence of the Ukrainian crisis, which began in November 2013, and the heavy amount of cash donations being made to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of wealthy Ukrainian businessmen.
To make this even more salacious, a Kremlin-linked bank that was promoting the stock of Uranium One, paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speaking engagement. But the contribution went not to the former president, but to the Clinton Foundation, as many of the speaking fees are funneled for non-taxable reporting purposes.
According to The Daily Caller, three separate FBI field offices have gathered enough evidence to bring corruption charges against the Foundation. So far, the Justice Department has rebuffed those requests, likely for the same political reasons that kept Clinton out of jail for her cavalier handling of national security communiqués.
The Clinton Foundation meets all of the criteria for a money-laundering entity: placement, layering, and integration, while enjoying the benefit of tax-exemption. They collect millions in donations (placement). Then through layering (or structuring), distance is created between the donation and the source, to obscure the audit trail. And finally the integration stage, which in the Foundation’s case, is the returning of favors and influence to donors. Classic “pay to play.”
Operationally, the Clinton Foundation functions as a shell corporation for the Clintons, and the pass-through conduit for buying influence and tax avoidance. Thanks to the IT staff at the Foundation, and Hillary’s obfuscation, we may never fully grasp the breadth and reach of the corruption.
WND reported:
The Clinton Foundation was engaged in a pay-to-play scheme to obtain Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support for giving asylum to the Turkish Muslim preacher the Erdogan government holds responsible for the attempted coup, Fethullah Gulen, according to sources close to the Turkish government and emails released by WikiLeaks and Judicial Watch.
Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin sent several emails that suggest she was the intermediary between Gulen’s organization in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in the Pocono Mountains and the Clinton Foundation.
Sources close to the Turkish government have explained to WND on the condition of anonymity their concern that a Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scheme is behind the Obama administration refusal to extradite Gulen, the radical Turkish imam the Turkish government considers the mastermind behind the failed July 15 coup.
The Gulen movement boasts an estimated 8 million followers worldwide and $50 billion in assets. (Read more…)
There’s also the pardon of Marc Rich, an FBI 10 most wanted criminal, following Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, donating more than $1 million to various Clinton and Democratic entities, including the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and the Clinton Foundation. (FBI release via FOIA)
In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release. Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.
The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.
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. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.
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.
The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.
Sources:
