Tag Archives: Clinton Foundation

“Clinton Foundation Is Charity Fraud Of Epic Proportions”, Analyst Charges In Stunning Takedown, by Tyler Durden

Those who don’t think the Clinton Foundation is a criminal enterprise should probably be sedated and locked in a padded cell for their own protection. Charles Ortel, an outstanding financial analyst, has performed an extensive analysis of the foundation’s books. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In early May, we introduced readers to Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who uncovered financial discrepancies at General Electric before its stock crashed in 2008, and whom the Sunday Times of London described as “one of the finest analysts of financial statements on the planet” in a 2009 story detailing the troubles at AIG. Having moved on beyond simple corporate fraud, Ortel spent the past year and a half digging into something more relevant to the current US situation:”charities”, and specifically the Clinton Foundation’s public records, federal and state-level tax filings, and donor disclosures.

Four months ago, Ortel began releasing his preliminary findings in the first of a series of up to 40 planned reports on his website. His allegation was simple: “this is a charity fraud.”

To learn more about the Clinton Foundation, Ortel decided to “take it apart and see how it worked” and he has been doing that ever since February 2015.

“I decided, as I did with GE, let’s pick one that’s complicated,” said Ortel. “The Clinton Foundation is complicated, but it’s really very small compared to GE.”

When Ortel tried to match up the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings with the disclosure reports from its major donors, he said he started to find problems. That includes records from the foundation’s many offshoots—including the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Clinton Global Initiative—as well as its foreign subsidiaries.

“I decided it would be fun to cross-check what their donors thought they did when they donated to the Clinton Foundation, and that’s when I got really irritated,” he said. “There are massive discrepancies between what some of the major donors say they gave to the Clinton Foundation to do, and what the Clinton Foundation said what they got from the donors and what they did with it.”

As previously reported, last year the Clinton Foundation was forced to issue corrected tax filings for several years to correct donation errors. But Ortel said many of the discrepancies remain. “I’m against charity fraud. I think people in both parties are against charity fraud, and this is a charity fraud,” he said.

To be sure, Ortel’s efforts were to be commended: digging through the foundation’s numbers can not have been easy, considering that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits in 2015. Furthermore, the Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid. That’s because the organization spent the vast bulk of its windfall on “administration, travel, salaries and bonuses”, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director.

* * *

Overnight, on his website, Ortel released the long-awaited executive summary of his numerous, and at time confusing, findings: “Beginning today, and regularly thereafter, numerous detailed Exhibits will examine the known public record of the Clinton Charity Network within the context of applicable state, federal, and foreign laws.”

And while we await the upcoming exhibits to his summary, here are the main highlights from the executive summary, which we urge all visitors – who have an even passing interest in the effort that has consumed the Clintons’ time and energy for the two decades, and brought them substantial wealth – to read.

To continue reading: “Clinton Foundation Is Charity Fraud Of Epic Proportions”, Analyst Charges In Stunning Takedown

Lots of Smoke Here, Hillary, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Hillary Clinton admits that there’s smoke from the Clinton Foundation, but won’t admit to the raging four-alarm fire that’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition.

For consider what the Associated Press reported this week:

The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, or a phone call returned by her, it seems, was to dump a bundle of cash into the Clinton Foundation.

Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and their contributions, taken together, totaled $156 million.

Conclusion: Access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. Forty of the 85 donors gave $100,000 or more. Twenty of those whom Clinton met with or phoned dumped in $1 million or more.

To get to the seventh floor of the Clinton State Department for a hearing for one’s plea, the cover charge was high.

Among those who got face time with Hillary Clinton were a Ukrainian oligarch and steel magnate who shipped oil pipe to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and a Bangladeshi economist who was under investigation by his government and was eventually pressured to leave his own bank.

The stench is familiar, and all too Clintonian in character.

Recall. On his last day in office, Jan. 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

The Clintons appear belatedly to have recognized their political peril.

Bill has promised that, if Hillary is elected, he will end his big dog days at the foundation and stop taking checks from foreign regimes and entities, and corporate donors. Cash contributions from wealthy Americans will still be gratefully accepted.

One wonders: Will Bill be writing thank-you notes for the millions that will roll in to the family foundation — on White House stationery?

By his actions, Bill is all but conceding that there is a serious conflict of interest between his foundation raking in millions that enhance the family’s prestige and sustain its travel and lifestyle, while providing its big donors with privileged access to the secretary of state.

Yet if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the scheme is unsustainable. Even the Obama-Clinton media might not be able to stomach this.

And even Clinton seems to be conceding the game is up. “I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire,” she said in self-defense this week.

She is certainly right about the smoke.

And if, as Democratic apparatchik Steve McMahon assures us that there is “no smoking gun,” no quid-pro-quo, no open-and-shut case of Secretary Clinton taking official action in gratitude to a donor of the family foundation, how can we predict a special prosecutor?

Answer: We are not at the end of this scandal. We are at what Churchill called the “end of the beginning.”

To continue reading: Lots of Smoke Here, Hillary

Wall Street Analyst Who Warned on GE Ahead of Crash Calls Clinton Foundation “Charity Fraud” by Michael Krieger

The Clinton Foundations finances, under careful scrutiny, completely belie claims that it is anything more than a slush fund for the Clintons. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director.

– From last year’s post: Senior Fellow at Sunlight Foundation Calls the Clinton Foundation “A Slush Fund”

Thanks to Charles Ortel, it’s time to prepare ourselves for some more Clinton Foundation revelations.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Wall Street analyst who uncovered financial discrepancies at General Electric before its stock crashed in 2008 claims the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has a number of irregularities in its tax records and could be violating state laws.
Charles Ortel, a longtime financial adviser, said he has spent the past 15 months digging into the Clinton Foundation’s public records, federal and state-level tax filings, and donor disclosures. That includes records from the foundation’s many offshoots—including the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Clinton Global Initiative—as well as its foreign subsidiaries.

This week, Ortel is starting to release his findings in the first of a series of up to 40 planned reports on his website. His allegation: “this is a charity fraud.”

The Sunday Times of London described Ortel as “one of the finest analysts of financial statements on the planet” in a 2009 story detailing the troubles at AIG.

“Where you or I see pages of numbers, [Ortel] sees a narrative,” wrote Sunday Times reporter Tim Rayment. “Sometimes the theme is a company’s potential for growth. Sometimes it is the prospect of self-destruction. And at times the story does not make sense, because the figures are hiding a fraud.”

Ortel turned his attention to the Clinton Foundation in February 2015. To learn more about the charity, he decided to take it apart and see how it worked.

“I decided, as I did with GE, let’s pick one that’s complicated,” said Ortel. “The Clinton Foundation is complicated, but it’s really very small compared to GE.”

When Ortel tried to match up the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings with the disclosure reports from its major donors, he said he started to find problems.

“I decided it would be fun to cross-check what their donors thought they did when they donated to the Clinton Foundation, and that’s when I got really irritated,” he said. “There are massive discrepancies between what some of the major donors say they gave to the Clinton Foundation to do, and what the Clinton Foundation said what they got from the donors and what they did with it.”

To continue reading: Wall Street Analyst Who Warned on GE Ahead of Crash Calls Clinton Foundation “Charity Fraud”

It Said That? 4/30/16

From the Clinton Foundation website:

What do contributors receive in exchange for donations?

All of our supporters – corporations, non-profits, and individuals – get something in return, which is helping to improve lives around the world. Our contributors give to us because they want to see the circle of opportunity extended around the world; they want to see communities, businesses and governments working together to address problems that we all face but collectively have the know-how and resources to fix. That is what the Clinton Foundation does every day.

https://www.clintonfoundation.org/press/facts

From the article posted earlier on SLL, “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” some donors get a bit more than just “helping to improve lives around the world.”

Senior Fellow at Sunlight Foundation Calls the Clinton Foundation “A Slush Fund,” by Michael Krieger

The uranium deal (see “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” SLL, 4/24/15), bad enough in itself, is shining a spotlight on the Clinton Foundation, and it shows none too well in the light. From Michael Krieger at liberty blitzkrieg.com:

The hits keep on coming. Just last week, in the post, More Clinton Foundation Cronyism – The Deal to Sell Uranium Interests to Russia While Hillary was Secretary of State, I referred to the Clinton Foundation as “a veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.” Here’s the full opening paragraph to the piece:

If you looked at the U.S. economy under a microscope, what you’d see is a gigantic cancerous blob of cronyism surrounded by tech startups and huge prisons. If you zeroed in on the cancerous tumor, at the nucleus you’d see a network of crony institutions like the Federal Reserve, intelligence agencies, TBTF Wall Street banks and defense contractors. Pretty close to that, you’d probably find the Clinton Foundation. A veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one who has come to such a conclusion. In a New York Post article from Sunday that is generating a lot of buzz, Bill Allison, a senior fellow at nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, is quoted saying:

It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.

In case you’re wondering what might prompt Mr. Allison to make such a claim, it’s not just the recent pay-to-play scandals that have emerged. It appears that based on Clinton Foundation tax filings, very little of the charity’s donations are going to, well, charity. In fact, this so called “charity” is so shady, a charity watchdog recently put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits. The New York Post reports:

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/04/27/senior-fellow-at-sunlight-foundation-calls-the-clinton-foundation-a-slush-fund/

To continue reading: Clinton Foundation Called “A Slush Fund”

Hillary Clinton Exposed Part 2 – Clinton Foundation Took Millions From Countries That Also Fund ISIS, by Michael Krieger

From Michael Krieger, at liberty blitzkrieg.com (bold type added):

The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time. The Post found that the foundation, begun by former president Bill Clinton, has raised nearly $2 billion since its creation in 2001.

Foreign governments and individuals are prohibited from giving money to U.S. political candidates, to prevent outside influence over national leaders. But the foundation has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political limits.

– From the Washington Post article: Foreign Governments Gave Millions to Foundation While Clinton Was at State Dept.

Of all the idiotic wars that the dangerously inept American politicians propagandize the public into accepting, the latest ISIS conflict is the most Orwellian and terrifying. Not only was the emergence of ISIS the direct consequence of the chaos left over by the Iraq war — which in itself was based on lies and inaccurate information — but the primary funders of the latest existential terrorist threat du jour are America’s Persian Gulf allies.

This is something I’ve covered before. For example, in last summer’s piece, America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq, I highlighted:
But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.

“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.

The Gulf monarchs didn’t attain absolute power by being teddy bears. They are devious, ruthless experts in playing one side against the other. Incredibly, many of these same countries allowing funds to flow to ISIS were simultaneously padding the coffers of the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. The Washington Post reports:

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.

The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/02/26/hilary-clinton-exposed-part-2-clinton-foundation-took-millions-from-countries-that-also-fund-isis/

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton Exposed Part 2