To pardon or not to pardon

Bruce Bialosky at Townhall says the new administration should forego any more prosecutorial activity regarding Madame BleachBit:

I am choking as I am writing this and you may choke as you read it, but Trump should put a stake into the heart of any investigation into the Clintons.  Sure they will get away with it again and walk away with their $100 million of graft, but for the sake of the country we need to move forward and make America great again.  Let these grifters fade into oblivion.  I thought about making a deal with them to shut down the Clinton Foundation, but no one will contribute to it anyway since they cannot buy influence. 

But Andrew McCarthy at NRO reminds us that where MBB fits in the layers of wrongdoing is an important consideration:

Among the salient factors considered in pardon decisions are (a) where the offender under consideration fit in the pecking order of conspiratorial activity and (b) how similar offenders are typically treated. To be sure, Hillary Clinton is a special case: A prosecution against a major party’s most recent presidential candidate (which may also implicate her husband, the former president) would roil the nation and could complicate its governance. Still, we are talking about serious crimes, and Mrs. Clinton is the most culpable participant. Is the plan to pardon everyone involved, or should Mrs. Clinton get a pass while her minions face the anxiety and costs of potential legal jeopardy? 

After all, the Clinton machine was rather extensive.

Of course, as McCarthy points out, if the Most Equal Comrade does the pardoning, it's moot.

Doug Band's 2011 memo

12 pages of searing truth about what the Clinton machine is about:

Longtime Clinton aide Doug Band wrote the memo in 2011 to justify himself to lawyers at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett who were reviewing his role and conducting a governance review of the Clinton Foundation at the insistence of Chelsea Clinton. In an email two weeks earlier, also published on WikiLeaks, Ms. Clinton said her father had been told that Mr. Band’s firm Teneo was “hustling” business at the Clinton Global Initiative, a regular gathering of the wealthy and powerful that is ostensibly about charitable activity.

Poor innocent Chelsea. Bill and Hillary must never have told her what business they’re in. If she had known, she would never have hired a blue-chip law firm to sweep through the hallways of the Clinton Foundation searching for conflicts of interest. Instead of questioning Mr. Band’s compensation, she would have pleaded with him never to reveal the particulars of his job in writing.

But she didn’t, and so Mr. Band went ahead and described the “unorthodox nature” of his work while emphasizing his determination to help “protect the 501(c)3 status of the Foundation.” That’s the part of the tax code that has allowed the Clinton Foundation to remain tax-exempt on the premise that it is dedicated to serving humanity. 

Mr. Band graciously copied John Podesta, then adviser to the board, who would eventually become Hillary’s campaign chief. His helpful reply was to suggest that Mr. Band “strip the defensive stuff out” and later “go through the details and how they have helped WJC” [William Jefferson Clinton].

The Band memo reveals exactly what critics of the Clintons have long said: They make little distinction between the private and public aspects of their lives, between the pursuit of personal enrichment, the operation of a nonprofit, and participation in U.S. politics.
Mr. Band writes that he and his colleague Justin Cooper “have, for the past ten years, served as the primary contact and point of management for President Clinton’s activities—which span from political activity (e.g., campaigning on behalf of candidates for elected office), to business activity (e.g., providing advisory services to business entities with which he has a consulting arrangement), to Foundation activity.” 

This excerpt and all the potential conflicts it describes, plus Chelsea’s warning about business “hustling” at foundation events, would seem more than ample cause to trigger an IRS audit of the foundation. For that matter, why aren’t the IRS and prosecutors already on the case? Any normal foundation has to keep records to show it is separating its nonprofit activity from any for-profit business. 

Mr. Band’s memo confirms that donors were not seeking merely to help the sick and the poor. He explains that the Clinton Foundation had “engaged an array of fundraising consultants” over the past decade but “these engagements have not resulted in significant new dollars for the Foundation.” In other words, it wasn’t working as a conventional charity.

Mr. Band then explains how he and his Teneo partner Declan Kellyhad to carry the fundraising load, and did so by packaging foundation solicitations with other services such as a meeting with Bill Clinton, $450,000 speeches or strategic advice. Many of the donations, from U.S. companies like Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical and foreign firms like UBS and Barclays, occurred while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

Why exactly were donors writing checks? The Band memo makes clear that donations untied to additional Clinton or Teneo services weren’t all that appealing to potential supporters. This is significant, because the large grant-making foundations in the U.S. are almost entirely run by Clinton voters. So you know they weren’t turned off by the brand name. They’d contribute more if they thought they were also buying goodwill and influence with a current Secretary of State and a potential future President. 

As the WSJ op-ed excerpted above points out, there's surely even more, and should Madame BleachBit be the next president  dictator of post-America, it makes her ripe for blackmail from all kinds of parties in this world that have her number.

 

In a sane world, these revelations would destroy the Clinton machine

The explicitness of the pay-to-play ethos is such that there's no plausible spin for it:

The overlap between Hillary Clinton’s State Department, her family’s foundation, and a consulting firm run by members of her inner circle has reaped a windfall for all involved, steering tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton family and generating lucrative contracts for a consulting practice run by a close confidante, an internal memo reveals.

The 2011 memo, authored by Clinton confidante Doug Band, reveals for the first time the precise financial flows between the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.

The Band memo also provides additional details on the specific relationships between his consulting clients, which include multinational corporations and deep-pocketed foundations, and the Clinton family’s business and charitable efforts.

Band sent the memo to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, then the president of the left-wing Center for American Progress, in a November 2011 email. It was one of thousands released by Wikileaks after hackers believed to be acting in concert with the Russian government breached Podesta’s email account.

At the time the memo was written, Bill Clinton had four existing business “arrangements,” Band wrote. “We secured all of them; and, we have helped manage and maintain all of his for-profit business relationships.”

Since 2001, those relationships netted “more than $30 million for him personally, with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years,” Band wrote.

Teneo’s work on behalf of the former president included arranging paid speeches at major multinational companies. With the help of Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly, the firm arranged speeches at UBS, Ericson, BHP Billiton, and Barclays that together earned the former president more than $2.5 million.

Ericson also chipped in another $400,000 to cover the cost of a private jet, Band revealed.

Kelly’s involvement with Teneo has recently come under scrutiny due to his overlapping roles at Clinton’s State Department, where he served as an envoy to his native Ireland, and his consulting work for a firm that would later be absorbed by Teneo.

According to an April report in Politico, Clinton’s State Department expanded the use of a designation known as “special government employees” in order to employ Kelly in a role that allowed him to continue operating a private consulting business, and working on behalf of clients that might be affected by State Department policy, while he served in an official government capacity.

When Kelly left his State post in 2011, he and Band co-founded Teneo, which took over work for Kelly’s three existing clients: UBS, Coca-Cola, and Dow Chemical.
Those companies were already donors to the Clinton Foundation, but Band and Kelly worked to dramatically scale up their financial commitments.

“Cognizant of the Foundation’s significant fundraising needs as well my role as the primary fundraiser for the Foundation for the past 11 years, as a partner in Teneo, Mr. Kelley [sic] and I have asked and encouraged our clients to contribute to the Foundation,” Band wrote.

“The foundation donors require significant maintenance to keep them engaged and supportive of the foundation,” he added. “We have sought to make that the case.”
According to Band’s memo, 11 of the firm’s clients have donated six- or seven-figure sums to the foundation.

In many cases, his and Kelly’s work to secure additional commitments from Teneo clients involved leveraging their personal relationships with the Clintons.
Coca-Cola had already contributed $530,000 by the time Hillary Clinton joined the State Department (and given an official post to Kelly). Kelly not only advised the company, he “enjoy[ed] a close relationship with one of the company’s largest shareholders Don Keogh,” Band wrote.

Kelly arranged an introduction between Bill Clinton and CEO Muhtar Kent at Clinton’s DC home in January 2009. By the following year, he had secured $5 million from the company for the foundation.

Dow Chemical paid $75,000 in membership fees for the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative summit from 2007 to 2009. After Kelly arranged a golf outing between Bill Clinton and CEO Andrew Liveris, the company increased its support nearly ten-fold. It gave more than $700,000 in 2010 and 2011.

Insurance giant Allstate had donated just $15,000 to the foundation by 2009. After Kelly arranged a meeting between Clinton and executive vice president Joan Walker, “his long time friend,” the company gave $250,000 in 2011 alone.

In some cases, Teneo’s business relationship with foundation donors moved in the other direction: Band’s closeness with the Clintons gave him access to donors that he then leveraged into contracts for his firm.

By 2011, for-profit education company Laureate International Universities had donated about $1.35 million to the foundation. According to Band, “that evolved into a personal advisory services business relationship for President Clinton. I have managed this relations [sic] and, since 2011, Teneo partners have helped manage this relationship.”

Laureate paid Clinton $3.5 million annually to serve as its “honorary chairman,” according to Band. While Hillary Clinton led the State Department, the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, awarded millions of dollars in grant money to a nonprofit chaired by Laureate’s chief executive.

Will this be the lead story on any major-network newscast this evening?

 

It's not just Morocco by a long shot

The previous post looked into a pay-for-play arrangement involving the king of Morocco and the Clinton Foundation.

It was typical in its stickiness:

Saudi Arabian Influence: 

When Clinton first took office in 2008, the foundation disclosed that Saudi Arabia donated between $10 to $25 million, with some donations coming as recently as 2014 when Clinton prepared her run for the presidency. The foundation received an additional $1 to $5 million donation from the “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” which was cofounded by a Saudi prince. Critics question the ethics of taking such vast sums of money from individuals and a government with one of the worst human rights records in the world.

King Of Moroccan Meeting : 

Emails released by WikiLeaks, in a likely attempt to influence the U.S. election, also reveal Clinton arranged for her foundation to host a meeting in Morocco in return for a $12 million donation from the country’s king. The donation came from a Moroccan state-owned mining company, which later received a $92 million loan guarantee while Clinton served as secretary of state.

“This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx. $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting,” Clintons aide Huma Abedin wrote in a leaked email to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Russian Uranium Ties: 

In another troubling instance, foundation donations were closely linked to a uranium mining company tied to the Kremlin. Canadian leaders of a mining company funneled millions of dollars to the foundation while Clinton was secretary of state, at the same time they needed Department of State approval for the sale of their company to Russia. The Clinton State Department-approved deal gave Russia control of one-fifth of the entire uranium supply in the U.S.

The chairman of the uranium mining company donated $2.35 million to the foundation, without any disclosure from the Clintons. After Russia announced its intention to make a bid for the uranium mining company, former President Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to deliver a speech in Moscow.

Indonesian Tobacco Magnate:

The Clinton Foundation’s ties also extend to powerful individuals seeking assistance from the U.S. government, with the help of the Clinton network. Indonesian tobacco magnate Putera Sampoerna donated and worked with the foundation before he “got the U.S. government to underwrite millions in loans offered by the foundation and secured high-profile support for its activities from Sec. Clinton and other senior federal officials,” according to a report by The Washington Free Beacon.

Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman: 

The Clinton Foundation further accepted donations from several foreign governments while Clinton served as secretary of state, including Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman.

In the instance of Algeria, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged to The Washington Post in 2015 it should have sought clearance from the Department of State’s ethics office before taking $500,000. After Clinton left office, the foundation received a large donation from the United Arab Emirates.

Clinton Foundation officials ignored nearly all “best practices” urged by good governance organizations, a July Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found. When Trump challenged Clinton to return donations from countries that abuse women and homosexuals, a DCNF investigation found it would amount to between $19.3 million and $55.7 million.

This one's especially grisly:

The Clinton Foundation invited the prime minister of Kosovo to the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting knowing full well that he had been implicated in a human organ trafficking scheme as leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s.

“What are USG views on WJC inviting former Kosovo PM [Hashim] Thaci and the current PM to CGI?” Clinton Foundation foreign policy adviser Amitabh Desai wrote in an Aug. 17, 2011 email to several top Hillary Clinton State Department officials.

“Is Thaci still embroiled in organ harvesting issues and is that of consequence?” Desai asked in the email, which the State Department recently released to Citizens United.

Desai clarified in a follow-up email that Thaci was actually prime minister at the time. He now serves as president of Kosovo.

Who within the Clinton machine knew this and when?

Thaci’s alleged atrocities, which have not led to prosecution for him or anyone in the KLA, have been laid out in detail in other news reports.

Vice News reported in 2014 that an American diplomat who was appointed in 2011 by the European Union to investigate the claims, found that the KLA murdered 10 Serbian and Albanian prisoners and sold their kidneys and livers on the black market.

Vice also reported that Thaci was known in his KLA days as “The Snake.”

But at this point, what difference does it make?

HuffPo: This Clinton campaign move is so stinky, we'd be remiss not to report it

Unseemly in the extreme:

In the beforetime, in the long, long ago of 2015, a woman named Hillary Clintonwas about to launch her campaign for president. She was also trying really hard to secure $12 million for her family’s charitable foundation from King Mohammed VI of Morocco. And her campaign was freaking out about it.

Campaign manager Robby Mook and longtime Clinton confidant John Podesta thought the deal ― in which Clinton had committed to speak at an event for the king on the condition of his $12 million donation ― would look bad. Clinton aide Huma Abedin tried to explain that it was simply too late to back out.

“This was HRC’s idea,” Abedin wrote in an email to Podesta. “Our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months.” 

The team eventually reached a compromise. Hillary Clinton didn’t show up, but Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton did, and the money came through. 

It is generally frowned upon for presidential candidates to be pumping foreign leaders for money, and her staff recognized it. And so they exchanged a series of contentious emails. On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace pressed Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on the controversy.

“Why wasn’t that classic pay-to-play?” Wallace asked.

“There’s nothing new here,” Mook replied, deflecting to Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers.

“But, Robby, there is some new stuff,” Wallace responded. “Emails show ― and I’m going to go through some of them ― you were not happy at all the idea of this meeting and her going there.”

Mook maintained that it was all just a scheduling issue that had nothing to do with corruption or public perceptions of corruption.

“We didn’t want her going overseas,” Mook said. “I didn’t want her going overseas before the campaign was kicking off. Again, these are stolen documents.”

Well, yes, Robby, but the truth they reveal is a genie that's not going to go back into the bottle.

 

Madame BleachBit's own daughter didn't like the way things smelled at the Foundation

Were you aware of this?

Chelsea Clinton’s bold decision in 2011 to launch an “internal investigation” into the finances of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative was the equivalent of a declaration of war by the first daughter and a bombshell about the financial mess she discovered at the foundation.

The latest revelation came out Tuesday in a new batch of WikiLeaks emails sent to and from Clinton confidant John Podesta, who now is Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman.

Two emails — one dated Nov. 12, 2011 and another dated Jan. 4, 2012 — show Chelsea was aggressively looking into the foundation’s money flows and talking to others about it.

Her actions worried President Bill Clinton’s long-time handler Doug Band, who complained to Podesta about Chelsea’s intervention into the internal operations of the foundation.

The disclosure suggests that Chelsea was shocked by what she found inside her parent’s organization that secured millions of dollars from despots, Eastern European tycoons, Arab Sheiks and foreign billionaires — all of whom also were seeking favors from her mom and dad.

In the 2011 email, Band complained to Podesta about Chelsea’s activity within the foundation, accusing her efforts to reform the organization as the behavior of  a “spoiled brat.”

But in his January 2012 email Band discloses that Chelsea, “is conducting an internal investigation of money within the foundation from cgi to the foundation.”

“CGI” is the Clinton Global Initiative where the Clintons annually assemble the world’s richest people and connect them to U.S. and foreign government officials.

And now we have access to the investigation's findings:

An independent “governance review” conducted by a prominent law firm that specializes in philanthropic issues concluded in December 2010 that the Clinton Foundation had a weak, rubber stamp board of directors and that many of its donors had “an expectation of a quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts.”

The blistering review — made public Thursday by WikiLeaks — described a tax-exempt public foundation with none of the independent oversight required under federal charity law. The Clinton Foundation reported $187 million in net assets in 2011.

The investigation was carried out by a crack team:

The review was conducted by the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher and was requested by Chelsea Clinton who had profound misgivings about the operation of her parent’s foundation. Leading the review was Victoria Bjorklund, one of the nation’s top-ranked legal experts on good-governance practices for foundations and charities. She came out of retirement to lead the review.

Chelsea's been rather low-profile throughout this campaign, not much more than an occasional speech. What methods are being employed to keep her that way?

Congress has to be tireless in getting to the bottom of the Comey affair

There was a time when I had high regard for FBI director James Comey. To this day, it seems to me he comports himself like a man of integrity and substance.

But we have to look at the way he has handled the matter of the Clinton Machine's emails:

 he not only held back critical details about his investigation, he repeatedly misrepresented his actions and findings.

In his July 7 testimony, Comey assured Congress that he examined all the evidence of Clinton’s lawyers and aides deleting her e-mails, and concluded they weren’t trying to hide anything. “We did not find evidence to indicate that they did the erasure to conceal things of any sort,” he swore. “We didn’t find evidence of evil intent to obstruct justice there.”

“In his statements before Congress, Director Comey repeatedly assured us that the FBI investigated whether charges of obstruction of justice and intentional destruction of records were merited,” the chairmen of three House committees and a Senate committee complained last week in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The facts of this investigation call those assertions into question.”

Congress has now obtained letters detailing unprecedented immunity agreements and side deals with multiple witnesses in the case — including one in which Comey agreed to prevent his investigators from reviewing any e-mails from Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills to Clinton’s server administrator Paul Combetta generated in late 2014 and early 2015. The off-limits correspondence, the chairmen point out, could reveal information “directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”

Astonishingly, before Comey agreed to the June side deal with Mills’ attorney, he “already knew of the conference calls between Secretary Clinton’s attorneys and Mr. Combetta, his use of BleachBit, and the resulting deletions, further casting doubt on why the FBI would enter into such a limited evidentiary scope of review.”

In other words, Comey never really investigated Clinton and her aides for obstruction of justice, as he claimed. Lacking access to key evidence, he couldn’t have explored the possibility, though the circumstances were beyond suspicious.

“The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s e-mails — the conference call, the work ticket, the use of BleachBit, and [Combetta’s] subsequent refusal to discuss the conference call with the FBI — raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton, acting through her attorneys [including Mills], instructed [Combetta] to destroy records relevant to the then-ongoing congressional investigations,” noted House Oversight Committee Chair­man Jason Chaffetz.

In his July testimony, Comey said it was unclear if anyone had helped Clinton’s lawyers delete e-mails — yet he had to have known that Combetta, in his final interview under his immunity deal, had admitted destroying evidence under subpoena.

Comey also swore his team asked Clinton if she knew her lawyers had wiped clean the devices containing her e-mail archives, when it seems clear from the summary of her interview that agents did not ask her that question.

“Did you ask that question?” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked.

“Yes,” Comey replied.

In 4½ hours of testimony, Comey never once mentioned that he’d agreed to give Mills, Combetta and three other key subjects of his investigation immunity from prosecution. Also belying his pronouncements of “transparency,” he failed to reveal the unusual side deals that severely limited the scope of his probe.

Congressional investigators only learned about the deals weeks later, and still have not obtained all of the documents.

Lynch and Comey have redacted parts of the side-deal letters, including the names of all Justice Department and FBI personnel. They have also restricted access to the letters to certain members of Congress, while prohibiting even those members from removing them from the secure viewing room where they are kept. They’re also barred from taking notes.

“These onerous restrictions are not consistent with the high degree of transparency you and director Comey promised to Congress,” the chairmen complained.

Though Comey has turned over some 250 pages of investigative-case summaries and witness-interview summaries known as FBI 302s, he’s still withholding summaries of interviews with some 30 other witnesses.

Somebody has been leaning on Comey real hard for some time. Who? It's not going to be a task for the faint-hearted to get the answer to that question.

Tuesday morning roundup

How bad is the tension between Russia and the West over Syria and other issues getting? Putin is canceling a trip to Paris after Hollande accuses Russia of war crimes in Aleppo.   State TV presenter Dmitri Kiselyov says that "offensive behavior toward Russia has a nuclear dimension." British Parliament member Andrew Mitchell likens Russian behavior in Aleppo to that of Nazi Germany in the 1937 bombing of the historic Spanish town of Guernica. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, says the world is at a "dangerous point."

Remind me never to apply for work at this outfit:

Bill and Chelsea Clinton’s “office crap” nearly drove the Clinton Foundation’s chief operating officer to commit suicide in 2011, according to hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.

Former President Bill Clinton’s chief adviser at the time, Doug Band, sent an email to the former president’s staff involved with the Clinton Foundation that he talked the nonprofit’s COO, Laura Graham, out of ending her life.

“Late last night, laura graham called me as she couldn’t reach my brother or her shrink,” Band wrote in a Dec. 2011 email chain discussing the Clinton Foundation’s “infrastructure.”

“She was on staten island in her car parked a few feet from the waters edge with her foot on the gas pedal and the car in park,” he wrote. “She called me to tell me the stress of all of this office crap with wjc and cvc as well as that of her family had driven her to the edge and she couldn’t take it anymore.”

How great is the contempt your overlords have for the post-American cattle-masses? This great:

The head of the liberal Center for American Progress privately warned Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign staff against endorsing a $15-an-hour minimum wage, saying that it would be bad for the economy.

Despite that, both the Clinton campaign and the center have since promoted state and local activists' efforts to push a $15 rate, and Clinton has even said she would sign $15 federal legislation.

Neera Tanden made the warning in an April 2015 email to top Clinton campaign staffers John Podesta, Robby Mook, Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri. The five were discussing a recent email from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio that gave them a heads up on a rally he was planning that would promote, among other issues, a $15 federal minimum wage. That would more than double the current federal rate of $7.25.

"Substantively, we have not supported — you will get a fair number of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs. Most of rest seems fine (obviously trade sticks out)," Tanden said in response to de Blasio's email.

Evangelist Wayne Grudem withdraws his endorsement of Squirrel-Hair.

Peter B. Josephson, a professor at St. Anselm College, has an incisive essay at AEI on the points of departure between Hobbes and Locke on the subject of natural law. It mainly comes down to how each regards the concept of property.

A Gallup poll says that 54 percent of post-Americans think that government tries to do too many things that ought to be the purview of individuals and private organizations.

For the Clinton machine, it's all about the gravy

After the travel expenses and the glitz, it seems there's not much left over for do-gooder-ism:

The Clinton Foundation spent less than 6 percent of its budget on charitable grants in 2014, according to documents the organization filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2015.

During the 2014 tax year, the tax-exempt foundation spent a total of $91.2 million, but less than $5.2 million of that money, or 5.7 percent, was granted to charitable organizations, the group’s tax filings show. The Clinton Foundation raised nearly $178 million in 2014. The organization’s charitable grants also declined significantly when compared to its donations in 2013. Compared to its 2013 charitable grants of $8.8 million, the Clinton Foundation’s grants in 2014 declined by more than 40 percent, even as its revenue over the same period increased by 20 percent. According to the tax filings, the Clinton Foundation is currently sitting on $354 million in assets, including $125 million in cash or cash equivalents and $108 million in property or equipment.

The tax records, which were filed with the IRS in November of 2015, show that the Clinton Foundation spent far more on overhead expenses like travel ($7.9 million) than it did on charitable grants in 2014. The group also spent more on rent and office supplies (a total of $6.6 million) than it did on charitable grants. The Clinton Foundation’s IRS forms show that even its depreciation expense ($5.3 million) — an accounting classification that takes into account the wear and tear of an organization’s assets — exceeded the tax-exempt organization’s charitable grant outlays.

Have this at the ready when you encounter anyone from the dwindling band of dyed-in-the-wool Madame BleachBit devotees this fall.

Think about how hard you work for the money you turn around and pay in taxes; then think about this

You toil away to keep America's most elite crime family in its regal lifestyle:

Bill Clinton's staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.

The thousands of pages of newly uncovered records reveal sometimes granular detail about how Bill Clinton’s representatives directed the spending of taxpayer cash allocated by the GSA under the Former President’s Act.

The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”

The Clintons did not have this problem.

After leaving the White House “dead broke”, in the words of Hillary Clinton, they quickly raked in tens of millions of dollars from book deals, speaking fees and consulting gigs. At the same time, Bill Clinton was relying on his connections to some of the world’s deepest-pocketed donors, corporations and governments to seed a global philanthropy operation that overlapped with his consulting work and speaking fees and his wife’s work as secretary of state — and served as a jumping-off point for her presidential campaign.

But even as the Clintons got rich and grew their foundation into a $2 billion organization credited with major victories in the fights against childhood obesity and AIDS — while paying six-figure salaries to top aides — Bill Clinton continued drawing more cash from the Former President's Act than any other ex-president, according to a POLITICO analysis. The analysis also found that Clinton’s representatives, between 2001, when the Clintons left the White House, and the end of this year, had requested allocations under the Act totaling $16 million. That’s more than any of the other living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush — requested during that span.

The program supplemented the income of Clinton’s staff, while providing them with coveted federal government benefits, alleviating the need for the Clinton Foundation or other Clinton-linked entities to foot the bill for such benefits. Similarly, Clinton aides got the GSA to pay for computer technology used partly by the foundation.

An analysis of the records provided by GSA, combined with Clinton Foundation tax returns, found that at least 13 of the 22 staffers who have been paid by GSA to work for Clinton’s personal office also worked for the Clinton Foundation.

So what becomes of this foundation should Hillionaire get her grip on post-America's throat come this winter? You're not the only one asking. Even the Grey Lady now wonders how it can go on existing in anything like its current form.

But we are talking about the Clintons, let us remember.

And now the Clinton machine wants to make its Godmother dictator of post-America

The new batch of emails tell of lots of ring-kissing:

Judicial Watch today released 725 pages of new State Department documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which former Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state. In many instances, the preferential treatment provided to donors was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.

The new documents included 20 Hillary Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to 191 of new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department).  These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.

The Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In many instances, Clinton Foundation top executive Doug Band, who worked with the Foundation throughout Hillary Clinton’s tenure at State, coordinated closely with Abedin. In Abedin’s June deposition to Judicial Watch, she conceded that part of her job at the State Department was taking care of “Clinton family matters.”

Included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange revealing that when Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment. Abedin advised Band that when she went through “normal channels” at State, Clinton declined to meet. After Band intervened, however, the meeting was set up within forty-eight hours. According to the Clinton Foundation website, in 2005, Salman committed to establishing the Crown Prince’s International Scholarship Program (CPISP) for the Clinton Global Initiative. And by 2010, it had contributed $32 million to CGI. The Kingdom of Bahrain reportedly gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. And Bahrain Petroleum also gave an additional $25,000 to $50,000.

From: Doug Band
To: Huma Abedin
Sent: Tue Jun 23 1:29:42 2009
Subject:
Cp of Bahrain in tomorrow to Friday
Asking to see her
Good friend of ours
From: Huma Abedin
To: Doug Band
Sent: Tue Jun 23 4:12:46 2009
Subject: Re:
He asked to see hrc thurs and fri thru normal channels. I asked and she said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel. Also she says that she may want to go to ny and doesn’t want to be committed to stuff in ny…
From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:35:15 AM
To: Doug Band
Subject:
Offering Bahrain cp 10 tomorrow for meeting woith [sic] hrc
If u see him, let him know
We have reached out thru official channels

Also included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange in which Band urged Abedin to get the Clinton State Department to intervene in order to obtain a visa for members of the Wolverhampton (UK) Football Club, one of whose members was apparently having difficulty because of a “criminal charge.” Band was acting at the behest of Casey Wasserman, a millionaire Hollywood sports entertainment executive and President of the Wasserman Foundation. Wasserman has donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation through the Wasserman Foundation.

From: Tim Hoy [VP Wasserman Media Group]
Date: Tue. 5 May 2009 10:45:55 – 0700
To: Casey Wasserman
Subject: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
Casey: Paul Martin’s [popular English footballer] client [Redacted] needs to get an expedited appointment at the US Embassy in London this week and we have hit some road blocks. I am writing to ask for your help.
The Wolverhampton FC is coming to Las Vegas this Thursday for a “celebration break.” [Redacted] so he cannot get a visa to the US without first being “interviewed” in the visa section of the US Embassy in London …
I contacted Senator Boxer’s office in SF for help … They balked at the criminal charge and said they “couldn’t help.”
I’m now trying to get help from Sherrod Brown’s office but that’s not going well either. So do you have any ideas/contacts that could contact the US Embassy in London and ask that they see [Redacted] tomorrow?
From: Casey Wasserman
To: Doug Band; Trista Schroeder [Wasserman Media Group executive]
Sent: Tue May 05 2:23:50 2009 [PT]
Subject: FW [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
Can you help with the below [Hoy email], or maybe Huma??? I am copying trista as I am on the plane in case I lose connection … thx.
From: Doug Band
Sent: Tue May 05 7:08:21 2009 [ET]
To: Casey Wasserman; Trista Schroeder
Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
Will email her.
From: Doug Band
To: Huma Abedin
Sent: Tue May 5 7:26:49 2009
Subject: Fw: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
[As per subject line, Band apparently forwarded Abedin material sent to him by Casey.]
From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 7:39:38 PM
To: Doug Band
Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
I doubt we can do anything but maybe we can help with an interview. I’ll ask.
From: Huma Abedin
To: Doug Band
Sent: Tue May 05 5:50:09 2009
Subject: Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
I got this now, makes me nervous to get involved but I’ll ask.
From: Doug Band
To: Huma Abedin
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 7:43:30 PM
Subject:  Re: [Redacted] Wolverhampton FC/visa matter
Then don’t

The Abedin emails also reveal that Slimfast tycoon S. Daniel Abraham was granted almost immediate access to then-Secretary of State Clinton, with Abedin serving as the facilitator. According to the Clinton Foundation website, Abraham, like the Wasserman Foundation, has given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. The emails indicate that Abraham was granted almost immediate access to Clinton upon request:

From: Huma Abedin
To: H
Sent: Mon May 04 4:40:34 2009
Subject: Danny
Danny abraham called this morning. He is in dc today and tomorrow and asked for 15 min with you. Do u want me to try and fit him in tomorrow?
From: H
To Huma Abedin
Sent: Mon May 04 5:14:00 2009
Subject: Re: Danny
Will the plane wait if I can’t get there before 7-8?
From: Huma Abedin
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 5:15:30 PM
Subject: Re: Danny
Yes of course

Additional Abedin emails in which the top Clinton aide intervenes with the State Department on behalf of Clinton Foundation donors include the following:

• On Friday, June 26, 2009, Clinton confidant Kevin O’Keefe wrote to Clinton saying that “Kevin Conlon is trying to set up a meeting with you and a major client.” Clinton wrote to Abedin, “Can you help deliver these for Kevin?” Abedin responded, “I’ll look into it asap” Kevin O’Keefe donated between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Kevin Conlon is a Clinton presidential campaign “Hillblazer” who has raised more than $100,000 for the candidate.

• On Tuesday, June 16, 2009, Ben Ringel wrote to Abedin, “I’m on shuttle w Avigdor Liberman. I called u back yesterday. I want to stop by to see hrc tonite for 10 mins.” Ringel donated between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• On Monday, July 6, 2009, Maureen White wrote to Abedin, “I am going to be in DC on Thursday. Would she have any time to spare?” Abedin responded, “Yes I’ll make it work.” White donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• In June 2009, prominent St. Louis political power broker Joyce Aboussie exchanged a series of insistent emails with Abedin concerning Aboussie’s efforts to set up a meeting between Clinton and Peabody Energy VP Cartan Sumner. Aboussie wrote, “Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months. This is, by the way, my first request. I really would appreciate your help on this. It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick [Gephardt] and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s.” After further notes from Aboussie, Abedin responded, “We are working on it and I hope we can make something work… we have to work through the beauracracy [sic] here.” Aboussie donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

• On Saturday, May 16, 2009, mobile communications executive and political activist Jill Iscol wrote to Clinton, “Please advise to whom I should forward Jacqueline Novogratz’s request [for a meeting with the secretary of state]. I know you know her, but honestly, she is so far ahead of the curve and brilliant I believe she could be enormously helpful to your work.” Clinton subsequently sent an email to Abedin saying, “Pls print.” Jill and husband Ken Iscol donated between $500,000 and $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton subsequently appointed Novogratz to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

The newly obtained Abedin emails also contain a memorandum sent to Cheryl Mills from State Department White House liaison Laura Pena revealing that Rajiv Fernando was proposed for his controversial appointment to the sensitive International Security Advisory Board as early as June 2009. Fernando was not actually appointed until 2011, and his appointment raised a firestorm because, according to an ABC News report, “he had no obvious experience in the field.” Fernando donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The Abedin emails reveal that even U2’s Bono got into the act when former Bill Clinton aide Ben Schwerin, who helped set up the Clinton Foundation, urged Abedin to help the aging rock star broadcast from the international space station. In a May 27, 2009, email with the subject line “Bono/NASA,” Schwerin wrote, “Bono wants to do linkup with the international space station on every show during the tour this year.… Any ideas? Thks.” Bono has been a donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. And in 2011, he gathered top entertainers for “A Decade of Difference: A Concert Celebrating 10 Years of the William J. Clinton Foundation.” According to USA Today, “Some tickets were sold to the public for $50 to $550, and premium seats went for $1,000 to $5,000 on the Foundation website.”

“These new emails confirm that Hillary Clinton abused her office by selling favors to Clinton Foundation donors,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “There needs to be a serious, independent investigation to determine whether Clinton and others broke the law.”

This goes in everybody's need-to-know file.