When objective accounts of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation are written, important truths will finally emerge.
Escalation of a small, sloppy misadventure with an Arkansas-based records repository into the largest unprosecuted set of charity frauds in history will not be seen as an accident, but writers and readers will understand its growth arose through “the weakness of others.”
While Bill Clinton was president, no one dared regulate the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation. Similarly, as long as Hillary Clinton had a chance of becoming the first female president of the United States, no one marshaled the resources necessary to bring obvious and massive charity frauds to justice here and around the world. The regulatory system manifestly failed from 1997 through 2016.
Then, President Donald J. Trump happened. And now Americans, disenchanted with two-party bungling and globalist cronyism, stoke demands for real investigations into the long, sordid history of the Clinton Foundation, to explain why so much money has gone missing that was intended for desperately poor victims around the world.
Corrupt, arrogant globalists trigger populist reforms. Troubles for Hillary Clinton accentuated days ago when she pointed attention to the supposed good works of Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea in some ill-considered President’s Day greetings to her remaining (and dwindling) slew of followers.
Displaying the tin ear for which she is justifiably infamous, Hillary accompanied her tweet extolling supposed Clinton Foundation “virtues” with announcement she will be traveling, no doubt “platinum-class,” to far-off New Zealand and Australia, where high-priced tickets will be sold to fund her speaking costs.
Related: Multiple Governments Are Targeting Clintons’ Biggest Charitable Frauds
This certainly will rekindle interest in whether the governments of Australia and New Zealand will ever decide to investigate the long-standing scandal, evident in public filings of Clinton charities, that these overseas programs were never validly authorized in advance by the IRS to solicit funds for any purposes other than endowing, constructing and operating a presidential archive and research center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Clinton Foundation has no valid, tax-exempt authority for any international activities whether for “disaster-relief,” for “fighting HIV/AIDS,” or for “climate change.”
Moreover, the Clinton Foundation is a “public charity,” and as such it must be controlled by an independent, conflict of interest-free board of directors, it cannot be used to promote political campaigns or causes, and it certainly cannot magically transform a near-bankrupt former president and his family into multimillionaires.
Important questions that deserve informed answers. The public records of the Clinton Foundation are voluminous and date back to Oct. 23, 1997, when Bill Clinton flirted with perils, was impeached in 1998, and escaped conviction in 1999, only to leave the White House in disgrace, having pardoned fugitives Marc Rich and Pincus Green during the waning hours of his presidency.
Leaving aside birthing pains from 1997 through 2000, and questions surrounding early solicitations for the foundation, for the second Legal Expense Trust, and for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, the known record of the presidential archive and research center from Jan. 20, 2001, forward raises vexing, and still unanswered, questions.
Who actually controlled the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation once Bill Clinton left the White House?
Who attempted to manage conflicts of interest between the supposed charitable aims of the Clinton Foundation, and the for-profit and political goals of the Clinton family?
Related: Trump’s ‘Draining the Swamp’ Is a Real-Life ‘Game of Thrones’
Why were no independent trustees or professional auditors appointed to oversee the affairs of the public charity as it solicited and spent funds to erect a campus in Little Rock, Arkansas?
Most of all, how did the foundation acquire legal authority to transform itself from a Little Rock presidential library and research center into an international charity conglomerate?
When Joseph Conrad wrote these lines in “Heart of Darkness,” perhaps he had the Clintons and their charity frauds in mind: “[Their] very existence was improbable, inexplicable and altogether bewildering. [They were] an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how [they] had existed, how [they] had succeeded in getting so far, how [they] had managed to remain …”
The Clintons, their associates, and their financial backers will never escape justice by fleeing to darker corners of this world.
Charles Ortel, a retired investment banker, concentrates on exposing complex frauds in his new career as an investigator, writer and commentator. Since August 2017, he has been hosting the “Sunday with Charles” podcast and covering the Clinton Foundation case in depth, using publicly available source materials.
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