In her book, “Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling,” Amy Chozick of The New York Times recounts grumblings by Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation employees that the Clinton parents unfairly set Chelsea up with a “nest egg” by taking advantage of quirks in charity laws that, to date, are not enforced vigorously enough.

On this point, I quite agree, having pored over documents that government authorities and investigators have ignored for way too long.

Financial information found here on pages 21 and 22 show that the Clinton Foundation scored $182.1 million for a capital endowment, of which $133.5 million had been collected from donors, with the balance outstanding in uncollected pledges by Dec. 31, 2016.

The endowment was chiefly raised once the Clinton family usurped control over the affairs of the foundation on Nov. 2, 2013, by claiming they had amended the entity’s bylaws to entrench themselves for life as “Class A Directors.”

For, at the end of Dec. 31, 2012, the endowment stood at only $250,000, even following 18 months of work led by super fundraiser Dennis Cheng, who had arrived as the foundation’s chief development officer in July 2011. He had previously served approximately 18 months as deputy chief of protocol for the U.S. Department of State under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Apparently, the Clinton family sings to a different tune when it comes to honest work, and that tune seems to be a variant of the Dire Straits hit we might retitle “Money for Nothing and Tricks for Free.”

Oh, the irony of using “philanthropy” to score wealth for Chelsea. She did not build her father’s foundation, but the Clinton family record shows a willingness to milk political contacts and “charities” for lots more than any of them actually are worth outside the rigged marketplace.

Perhaps the Clintons liked what they saw when they studied the long pattern of patrician Bush family history, protecting and building wealth through decades of public service.

But back at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, when Ann Richards mocked George H.W. Bush for having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” few Democrats (perhaps excluding the Kennedys) believed paupers (and the Clintons claimed they were paupers until 2001) could become multimillionaires as “philanthropists,” without ever earning many honest nickels in the private sector,

Since 1988, Bill and Hillary Clinton executed a very different plan, as Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. so ably explained in “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” published in June 2007.

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Related: No, the Clintons Are Not Too Big to Jail

But for Donald J. Trump’s historic upset win of the 2016 presidential contest, the Clintons almost cemented a political dynasty, first by electing Hillary as president, and then by positioning Chelsea for a trifecta win when she ultimately came of age politically.

For decades in the past century, a slogan embraced by Democrats was “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” That’s what most Americans, including Republicans, wanted. Sadly, it’s what too few actually got, once the Republocrat Uniparty moved to yoke us all under the twin burdens of a job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a world “without borders.”

No clearer example of hypocrisy is seen examining what actually happened to incomes of working men and women from 1988 forward, with the Clinton family exiting “dead-broke” from the White House in January 2001, then swiftly preening themselves as entitled, pasha-class swells all over the world.

How did the Clintons morph from misfortune to become plutocrats so rapidly? They dared rivals and political opponents to challenge their eventual return to power, meanwhile relentlessly soliciting donors for contributions and other favors from people who understood well that Clinton friends land rewards while Clinton enemies suffer mightily.

When you think of decades that Democrats have spent bashing the rich for schemes that transfer “ill-gotten” gains to progeny, the Clinton family charity fraud scams cry out not simply for attention, but for prosecution.

Reckoning for the Clintons is at hand. Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz is close to issuing his long-awaited report into how the FBI “investigated” Hillary Clinton’s massive mishandling of classified information on the private server and email system she used while serving as the nation’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.

For the Horowitz report to be credible, it must examine what really happened to those thousands of missing emails from those years while Hillary ran Foggy Bottom and Bill and Chelsea ran the family foundation.

The Horowitz report must also tease out all relevant facts concerning transactions that likely helped enrich favored foundation donors during and after Hillary’s State Department tenure. Many if not all of these transactions are almost certainly discussed or at least touched upon in the missing trove of emails and attachments.

Starting in 2009, illegally organized and operated Clinton-connected “charities” have seemingly been used to entrench the only child of Bill and Hillary Clinton in control of an organization with, as yet, unchecked powers to invest and spend hundreds of millions of dollars.

Related: How $37 Million from the Clinton Foundation Disappeared in Baltimore

Did the contributions come from caring donors to charitable causes, or rather from political supplicants? Count me cynical as heck because the foundation is an independent “public charity” that cannot legally be controlled by one person or family.

As a tax-exempt public charity, the Clinton Foundation certainly can’t legally be used to subsidize political campaigns nor to feather personal nests. So, exactly how and why did the nominally independent directors vote to transfer governance to Chelsea as Hillary and Bill eyed returning to the White House in November 2013?

And now today, despite all the scandals and despite unresolved investigations, the Clintons fully expect to raise millions of dollars more next week at the latest foundation gala. Will their charity frauds be allowed to continue?

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.​ To view his previous LifeZette contributions, go here.

(photo credit, homepage image: Chelsea Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article image: Chelsea Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)

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