The Clinton Foundation has until November 16 to amend more than ten years’ worth of state, federal and foreign filings, but it’s going to be virtually impossible to do so without acknowledging that it has engaged in massive accounting fraud since its inception
The Clinton Foundation has gotten a good deal of unflattering attention as of late, which isn’t surprising given that its best known namesakes are Bill, a former president and chronic philanderer, and Hillary, who hopes to be the nation’s next leader. Furthermore, the foundation portrays itself as do-gooder nonprofit organization but a cursory look reveals questionable and incomplete disclosures of its activities and accounts, as well as incredible misspending of donor money, virtually since its inception.
Naturally, this can’t be stated in polite society. For example, the New York Times just had a story on the Clinton Foundation that found highly questionable conduct but buried it under the bland headline, “Rwanda Aid Shows Reach and Limits of Clinton Foundation.” Other stories have mentioned that the foundation has partnered with assorted dictators and robber barons. Among the latter is Canadian “mining magnate” (read: “penny stock artist”) Frank Giustra, who donated millions to the foundation after Bill Clinton helped him land a mining concession for him in Kazakhstan.
(Note: I have an upcoming story on the Clinton Foundation’s links to Giustra and to Washington-based consultant Alexander Mirtchev, who is a front-man for powerful Kazakh government officials.)
HOW DO YOU SPELL APPARENT FRAUD? THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, SHADY ACCOUNTING AND AIDS : KEN SILVERSTEIN
People died. Hillary lied.Obama lied, too.They lied early.They lied often.They lied deliberately.
They lied about the slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, at the hands of al-Qaeda-tied terrorists.
They lied, but not to protect vital national secrets or flummox America’s enemies.They lied to get reelected.
And they lied directly, knowingly, and repeatedly to the American people.
Although I am a confirmed and consistent critic of Hillary and Obama, I long had cut them some slack regarding their first comments about the Benghazi attack. Thanks to the fog of war, I thought, they could not be blamed if they initially misattributed this deadly onslaught to a mob inflamed about an incredibly amateur Internet video that dissed the Prophet Mohammad. If they innocently got it wrong in, say, the first twelve hours after the assault began, they might deserve a grudging pass — at least for those early announcements.
October 6 Conference Call with DHS, DOJ & FBI
Several federal agencies appear to have ongoing contacts with an organization that has been connected to international terrorism.
On October 6, 2015, according to Department of Homeland Security spokesman S.Y. Lee, DHS convened a conference call with “senior officials from the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, DOJ Community Relations Service, DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection and Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Also on the call were what Lee characterized insipidly as “faith-based, community-based, and civil rights and civil liberties advocacy stakeholders,” and what the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) characterized as “American Muslim community leaders.”
CAIR’s press release on the subject coyly does not say whether CAIR was one of the “American Muslim community leaders” participating in the meeting.
If Congress votes it down this winter, then the next President will be able to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the same fast-track authority that Congress gave Obama.
In his October 24 speech in Jacksonville, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump discussed the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade pact which President Obama just finished negotiating. Trump asked a key question of the Republicans in Congress: “Why can’t they put it off until I become elected?”
If Congress votes it down this winter, then the next President will be able to renegotiate the deal with the same fast-track authority that Congress gave Obama. Trump says that if he renegotiates: “Believe me, it will not be that deal, believe me.”
From a speech by Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James B. Comey at the University of Chicago Law School, Oct. 23:
Part of being clear-eyed about reality requires all of us to stare—and stare hard—at what is happening in this country this year. And to ask ourselves what’s going on.
Because something deeply disturbing is happening all across America. I have spoken of 2014 in this speech because something has changed in 2015. Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And let’s be clear: far more people of color are being killed in America’s cities this year. And it’s not the cops doing the killing.
We are right to focus on violent encounters between law enforcement and civilians. Those incidents can teach all of us to be better. But something much bigger is happening. Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being American cities—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.
President Obama’s IRS is still holding nonprofit applications from conservative and Tea Party groups hostage even now, years after the IRS targeting scandal first made headlines.
It is yet more proof that even after years of bad press arising from the sordid saga, the Internal Revenue Service remains a powerful instrument of political repression in the hands of Obama, who apparently treats the agency as his personal fiefdom. Always on the hunt for new ways to disadvantage his political adversaries, Obama is also now moving forward with a fresh campaign of political intimidation against nonprofit groups that strikes at the heart of the American democratic process.
The relatively incurious mainstream media has never shown much interest in Obama’s serial acts of malfeasance even when those activities have gotten people killed. Without much help from journalists, House Oversight Committee investigators uncovered the specifics of the unlawful IRS conduct despite billowy smokescreens of official obstruction worthy of Third World banana republics.
Obama’s plotting comes after the administration officially absolved the targeting ringleader, the now-retired IRS tax-exempt organizations division chief Lois Lerner, a hyper-partisan, left-wing Democrat, last week of criminal wrongdoing for illegally subjecting right-of-center activist groups to intrusive scrutiny and wildly inappropriate processing waits. Cheered on by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), a reliable Obama attack dog, the exempt organizations branch brutally harassed conservatives like Catherine Engelbrecht, leader of the Houston-based good-government group True the Vote. Other federal agencies joined in the harassment campaign, subjecting Engelbrecht’s family business to unexpected audits, inspections, and fines.
On October 24, 2015, the Obama administration condemned “over-testing” in schools. It called for a cap on testing, limiting it to two percent of a child’s class time. It called on Congress to enact this cap and on teachers to “step back and make tests less onerous and more purposeful.” This accompanied the release of a study by the Council of the Great City Schools.
In a smooth move, the Obama administration called on Congress to fix a problem that had been foisted on the people without the consent of Congress—namely the national Common Core standards, even as the widely hated name was scrupulously avoided. The Obama administration also told teachers to fix tests that they had not devised and were forced to administer.
In an even smoother move, the New York Times summed up the blame this way:
The administration’s move seemed a reckoning on a two-decade push that began during the Bush administration and intensified under President Obama. Programs with aspirational names — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top — were responding to swelling agreement among Democrats and Republicans that higher expectations and accountability could lift the performance of American students. . . . .”
NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed last week. But the bullet that murdered him had been fired years ago. And it was the Democrats of the New York State government that took the shot.
The trigger had been pulled in 2009 when New York lawmakers passed drug crime “reforms” that targeted mandatory minimum sentences, a particular obsession of the pro-crime lobby, and allowed drug offenders to bypass jail.
Governor Paterson, who had used cocaine and whose close associate was a former drug dealer whose scandal would play a role in the governor’s downfall, claimed that sentencing reform would “Give judges the discretion to divert non-violent drug addicted individuals to treatment alternatives that are far more successful than prison.”
Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, New York’s first black Temporary President of the Senate, who would later be busted by the FBI on corruption charges, promised that the reforms would “Reverse years of ineffective criminal laws.”
The House Oversight & Government Reform Committee led by Chairman Jason Chaffetz introduced on Tuesday a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, accusing him of making “false statements” under oath, failing to comply with a lawful subpoena, and overseeing the destruction of documents that were being sought under a congressional subpoena.
The move comes less than a week after the Justice Department issued a report finding no criminal behavior in the IRS’s decision to target conservative groups for improper scrutiny. The DOJ investigation was led by a career Justice Department lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who happened to be a “maxed-out” Obama campaign donor.
Via Fox News:
“Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust,” Chaffetz said in a statement Tuesday. “He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.
“Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.”
At close to midnight Monday, Republican leadership in Congress – outgoing House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – dropped a bomb on members of their respective chambers: a budget bill secretly negotiated with the Obama White House. Without consulting GOP representatives elected on a promise of stopping the Obama agenda, the deal provides yet another huge increase in the debt ceiling – i.e., the bill to be presented to our children and grandchildren for our refusal to live within our unprecedented means today – and further busting the caps from the 2011 budget deal.
CNN reports that GOP leaders will attempt to ram the deal through as early as tomorrow (Wednesday).
Of course, by giving the president the spending and borrowing authority he wants, Republicans forfeit the leverage to demand concessions from him in policy battles over the final 15 months of his term. Obama gets a green light and a blank check.
Republican voters get yet another demonstration that electing Republicans yields Washington As Usual.
