A Different Story

It is no crime to become wealthy. If you apply hard work, personal initiative, risk tolerance, and ethical behavior, you deserve whatever wealth you accrue. But its the "and" in the last sentence that's key.  Get rich and flaunt it, if that's your thing, but do it ethically. Don't hide behind loop holes that allow you to skate along the edges of the law; don't construct complex transactions to purposely hide questionable behavior, and don't play victim or allege conspiracies when you're caught doing unethical or illegal stuff. With this in mind, let's consider Hillary Clinton.

I contend that Hillary Clinton brings us a trifecta of bad traits—dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence. Today, we'll discuss corruption.

There is growing evidence that the Clinton Foundation (a.k.a The Clinton Global Initiative), an organization that Hillary Clinton is intimately associated with, is a quasi-criminal enterprise. Investors Business Daily reports:

Corruption: With each new revelation, the murky world of the Clinton family finances only seems to get murkier — and dirtier. And a new report suggests it’s no accident.

We wrote last week about how the Clinton Foundation gathered some $100 million from a variety of Gulf sheikhs and billionaires, not to mention taking in millions of “donations” from private businesses that later benefited from their supposed “charitable” largesse. Some of those who gave big bucks to the Clintons had interests that were, to put it mildly, not in keeping with U.S. interests.

That prompted a key question: Just what do these assorted nations, foreign officials, satraps, global fixers and top corporate execs expect in return for their money?

And now comes a more serious, far-reaching question: Is the entire Clinton Foundation so full of conflicts of interest and questionable dealings that it amounts to little more than a massive fraud intended solely to enrich its presidential namesake and his family?

Charles Ortel, a Wall Street financial analyst, who pored over the Clinton Foundation’s books, filings and records, thinks so. He concluded that “a substantial portion of Clinton Foundation activities is certainly not ‘charitable’ or ‘tax-exempt’ in the accepted legal senses, so I wonder why state, federal, and foreign regulators have allowed the Clinton Foundation to continue operating as it has done, illegally, for so long.”

Following a 15-month investigation, Ortel says that major questions “remain concerning the roles that Bill Clinton and others played in guise of charity right from the beginning in 1997, all the way to the present, and particularly before December 2009.”

He added, “Larger issues surround inconsistencies and errors in multiple state, federal, and foreign filings for Clinton Foundation entities, that remain uncorrected and defective even after most recent submissions at federal level on 16 November 2015.”

The Clinton Foundation last year was forced to refile its tax returns for the years from 2010 to 2013 to correct “errors in the report of donations from foreign governments,” the Foundation noted. As we reported before, the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator removed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation from its list of charities because of its “atypical business model.”

This might all sound technical, but it isn’t.

The genius of the Clintons is that their financial activities are purposely convoluted and vague, making investigative reporting difficult. Because its extremely hard to find a "smoking gun," Democrats who support Hillary can claim that every accusation is partisan and that there is "no evidence" that anything untoward has occurred. Of course, those claims strain credulity, but it gives Dems a comfortable fall-back position to hide behind.

Dems who back Hillary suffer from willful blindness. They choose to dismiss the tsunami of negative facts, unethical anecdotes, and yes, criminal innuendo, that have surrounded Clinton for decades. She's smart (maybe cunning is a better word) and has been able to place herself just far enough away from the action to dodge indictment. That's pretty much what someone like a organized crime boss does. He pulls the strings, but stays far enough removed to avoid the cops.

Look ... a single allegation against someone like Hillary can easily be dismissed as partisan or incorrect. Two allegations might also be dismissed with a shrug. Five would raise an eyebrow from any thinking person, and dozens? Well, that's an entirely different story.