The case continues about the pattern of behavior relating to shady behavior in the very individuals whom the American people should be able to trust but absolutely cannot trust. An informed and motivated public is our last resort when the command structure has sold out to international money power.
As Hillary famously noted, the Clintons were "dead broke" when they left the White House in 2001. This statement was immediately challenged as a gross exaggeration." Still, their means were modest compared to those of other politicians, such as George W. Bush, whose net worth is $20 million, or John Kerry, whose net worth is well over $100 million. Because the Clintons' financial public disclosures are given in ranges, it's impossible to know their precise net worth. The Clintons' confirmed income between 2001 and 2012 was at least $136.5 million, according to the Washington Post.
USA Today estimates Bill Clinton's personal net worth to be $55 million. That's a very big jump from "dead broke" in a very short time. It is important to consider the fact that payments made to Bill Clinton for speeches or consulting fees benefit wife Hillary and their married net worth. Some of this income comes from book deals. The Clintons have been paid handsomely to write their public memoirs. But the greater part of it by far comes from Bill's speechmaking. According to financial disclosures, since leaving the White House, Bill has been paid an annual average of over $8 million for giving speeches around the world. The fees he collects are enormous and unprecedented, sometimes as much as $500,000 or even $750,000 per speech. It's hard to imagine that Clinton's pearls of wisdom are worth that much to even the most worshipful audience.
But as this book will try to show, Bill's speechmaking does not happen in a vacuum. It is part of a larger pattern of activity that has never before been exposed to public scrutiny. During Hillary's years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions (either as private citizens or government officials) with foreign governments, corporations, and private financiers. Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets thanks to Bill's lucrative lecture career. Others were part of US foreign policy. Others put millions into their legacy project, the Clinton Foundation.
As we will see, the sums involved are nothing short of staggering. What's more, many of these exchanges have taken place at a time when these outside interests had matters of importance sitting on Hillary's desk, whether in the Senate office building or on the third floor of the State Department. The issues seemingly connected to these large transfers are arresting in their sweep and seriousness: the Russian government's acquisition of American uranium assets; access to vital US nuclear technology; matters related to Middle East policy; the approval of controversial energy projects; the overseas allocation of billions in taxpayer funds; and US human rights policy, to name a few.
Of even greater concern is that the foreign players giving money to the Clintons include foreign governments (and controversial politicians) in countries like Russia, India, and the United Arab Emirates, where there are major foreign policy issues at stake. In other cases, foreign businessmen appear to have benefited shortly before or after private meetings with foreign officials involving one or both Clintons. There is nothing clearly illegal about these payments. But their source, size, and timing raise serious questions deserving of deeper investigation. While some particular facts or instances have been reported on sporadically elsewhere, the convoluted methods, shady characters, and cumulative pattern of behavior will be described in this book for the first time. Also described for the first time is the role of the Clinton Foundation at the center of an elaborate system for generating large donations and fees.
In June 1999, as his second term was winding down, Bill sat down with his chief fundraiser and forty business leaders at La Grenouille in midtown Manhattan to outline his future vision for a nonprofit organization. The Clinton Foundation would become the centerpiece of his post-presidential work. And both the Clintons were engaged. Hillary played "an important role in shaping both the foundation's organization and the scope of its work," in the words of the New York Times. As the foundation's first chief of staff, Karen Tramontano, put it, "She and I would speak frequently. She had a lot of ideas. All the papers that went to him went to her."
She even attended foundation planning sessions while she served in the US Senate. The foundation's mission appeared as much as anything to protect President Clinton's legacy as well as to bolster his philanthropic work around the world. Its method of operation would be to raise money from donations and regrant the funds or use them to finance its own philanthropic programs, including initiatives involving health care, the environment, and development in the third world. Yet even before Clinton left office, the foundation found itself mired in controversy. The timing of certain contributions raised questions as to whether they were tied to official favors.
On October 6, 1999, Anheuser-Busch Companies gave the first of five payments totaling $1 million for the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum (or Clinton Library for short), which was funded in part by donations given through the Clinton Foundation. As the New York Times reported, less than a month earlier "the Clinton administration's Federal Trade Commission dropped a bid to regulate beer, wine, and liquor advertising" allegedly aimed at underage drinkers.
In May 1999 a bankruptcy attorney from Chicago named William A. Brandt Jr. also pledged $1 million. At the time the Clinton Justice Department was investigating Brandt's testimony to Congress to determine whether he had lied under oath concerning a Clinton fundraiser and the lobbying of federal offcials. Three months later, in August, the Department of Justice dropped the investigation and determined that "prosecution is not warranted."
In 1999 Dr. Richard Machado Gonzalez and his lawyer, Miguel Lausell, were lobbying President Clinton to boost Puerto Rican hospital Medicare reimbursements. This would benefit, among others, Machado, who owned one of the eligible hospitals. Eight months prior to Clinton proposing increased Medicare payments, Lausell gave the Clinton Library a $1 million gift. Machado gave the foundation $100,000 six months after that. The controversies reached a fever pitch during Clinton's final days in office, when he pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, an oil trader and financier who had been indicted on numerous charges by US prosecutors and had fled the country. Rich's business ties included a "who's who" of unsavory despots, including Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Rich had traded oil with the Ayatollah in violation of US law while Iran held American hostages.) He owed $48 million in back taxes that he unlawfully tried to avoid and faced the possibility of 325 years in prison. As a result, he was on the FBI's Most Wanted List. On his last day in office, President Clinton infamously pardoned Rich, sending shockwaves through Washington. The pardon came after his ex-wife, Denise Rich, donated $100,000 to Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign, $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and $1 million to the Democratic Party.
Condemnation of the whole affair was immediate and nearly universal. Maureen Dowd labehed the Clintons as "grifters" and the New York Times bemoaned President Clinton's "outrageous abuse of the pardoning power."
Former president Jimmy Carter called it "disgraceful." Even longtime Clinton supporters, like James Carville and Terry McAuliffe, were critical. The Washngton Post wondered if the "defining characteristic" of Bill and Hillary Clinton was that "they have no capacity for embarrassment." This last comment expresses a view of the Clintons frequently voiced by journalists and establishment figures over the years. Indeed, speculating on their motives has become something of a Washington parlor game. In this view, either the Clintons are utterly shameless, cynically assuming they will survive whatever scandal comes their way, or they are so convinced of their own virtue and benevolence that they are able to excuse whatever they have to do in the pursuit of their noble ends, no matter how low or unethical. We may never know the answer to this fascinating riddle.
Since Podesta and friends discredited this book, I figured there must be some truth to it.
The Clintons were just getting started. Once liberated from the White House, Bill hit the lecture circuit, collecting $105.5 million from 2001 through 2012 and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation. Significantly, his biggest payments came not from sources in the United States but from foreign investors, businesses, and governments eager to please the former president - and probably hungry for access to the corridors of American power.
Meanwhile, Hillary was quickly rising in the ranks of the US Senate, gaining influence and power, especially on matters concerning national security and foreign policy. When she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her power prospects rocketed. While Barack Obama's unexpected victory in the Democratic primaries apparently derailed this inexorable ascent, she still ended and up in an even more powerful position than before.
An elaborate theater production brought to you by money power cover up services?
Hillary Clinton asks Lynn de Rothschild: “Let me know what penance I owe you.”
