Just when the Clintons thought they might open a new chapter in their lives, shining at a fundraising gala for their “foundation,” hell has broken loose and is assaulting the family from myriad directions.
On the worse-than-tawdry side, New York state and federal prosecutors are ramping up criminal cases against sex ghoul and Clinton family pal Harvey Weinstein, whose horrific practices against Hollywood starlets Hillary only belatedly and half-heartedly condemned; she profited politically for years from Weinstein’s direct and indirect financial support.
Making matters even worse, the FBI just released extensive files on its investigation into another Clinton pal and financial supporter, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Related: No, the Clintons Are Not Too Big to Jail
Bad as these latest developments are, however, they pale in comparison to looming negative consequences now that the State Department has begun dribbling out more than 30,000 missing Clinton emails, together with supporting attachments.
These long-awaited and, until now, hidden documents are all but certain to make an ironclad case that the Bill, Hillary & Clinton Foundation went into high gear as a “pay-for-play corruption” and personal enrichment scheme through its various “initiatives” — while Hillary served as secretary of state and, later, as she sought the U.S. presidency for the second time.
Why the new batch of missing State Department emails matters. Bernie Sanders may not have cared about “those damn emails,” but Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), does care.
After years of dogged pursuit, Sekulow has finally forced the State Department to disclose initial portions of a “treasure trove” of long-suppressed documents. If the initial 339 pages are any clue, the complete batch of 30,000 emails should ultimately convince even the most ardent Clinton supporters that the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, and other Clinton-controlled entities were actually influence-peddling vehicles — and certainly not charities.
Particularly noteworthy in the first batch of information released to ACLJ are multiple emails and email chains concerning events prior to Sept. 4, 2009, when the Clinton Global Initiative Inc. (aka New CGI) was organized as an Arkansas nonprofit corporation.
These emails show Clinton Foundation employees and directors working closely with Hillary Clinton (using at least one personal email address) and other State Department personnel to wrangle favors for Clinton Foundation donors and Clinton political allies at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, August 2009 in New York.
Note carefully the September and August timeline because it shows multiple activities conducted even before New CGI was organized, which is a strict no-no under federal charitable laws and regulations.
Beyond the obvious conflicts of interest presented, another difficulty for donors is that New CGI did not disclose its pre-formation activities in its application for federal tax exemption, which it didn’t submit to the IRS until Aug. 9, 2010.
Doubly difficult is that New CGI did not even receive formal notice that it was federally tax-exempt until Oct. 6, 2010, and this was on the basis of a false and materially misleading application that the current IRS can and should revoke retroactively.
What this means is that CGI donors funded the 2009 and 2010 annual meetings without being sure their contributions were tax-deductible. Imagine how much pressure Lois Lerner’s IRS Department must have felt back then to approve the New CGI application for federal tax exemption, and who may have intervened, leaving IRS emails that remain missing.
Donors to New CGI and to other Clinton “charities” should fear that the IRS and Department of Justice could soon move to disallow income tax deductions claimed for past donations, and assess substantial penalties and interest. Here, we could be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars of pain for the Clintons, and equivalent gain for U.S. taxpayers.
Related: Time to Declare the Clinton Foundation the Biggest Charity Fraud Ever
After all, the large collection of ACLJ-sourced documents is likely to fill in contours explaining why so many donors flocked to fund Clinton charities when Hillary served at the State Department and ran for president — then shunned her immediately after she lost to Donald Trump in November 2016.
Making criminal cases against the Clintons just got easier. Before the ACLJ bombshell news emerged that the public will finally see missing emails, many questioned Hillary Clinton’s decision to transact 100 percent of State Department business from March 2009 through Feb. 1, 2013, over home-brewed, unsecured servers and unvetted electronic devices.
Hillary Clinton’s original statement (see page 2) concerning her information management approach while secretary of state was as follows:
On Dec. 5, 2014, 30,490 printed copies of work-related emails sent and received by Secretary Clinton from March 18, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2013, were provided to the [State Department]. This totaled roughly 55,000 pages. About 90 percent of these emails were already in the department’s record-keeping system because they were sent or received by “state.gov” accounts.
Yet a legal analysis prepared by Cause of Action on Aug. 24, 2015, suggested, on the basis of facts then known, that Hillary Clinton’s actions opened her up to potential prosecution for federal crimes, including “mishandling classified information,” “destruction of federal records,” and “obstruction of justice.”
In August 2015, it appears Clinton had protection from then-President Barack Obama’s administration, so aggressive FBI investigations were not mounted, and no indictments resulted.
But as the November 2016 presidential election neared, another mammoth cache of information concerning the slow-motion FBI investigation, begun July 10, 2015, into Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents, found its way to the FBI online vault. As of now, there are 21 separate parts in the document dump, running to thousands of pages.
Information scattered through the above set of filings and page 18 of this additional filing on the FBI vault shows that the FBI determined by February 2016 that more than 2,115 emails of the 30,490 Hillary Clinton surrendered in December 2015 contained information deemed classified.
What the FBI may not have known previously is the vast extent to which Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and others interacted through their “charities” with State Department personnel to advance personal interests and those of donors as and after Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
By the time the American public assesses all 30,000 emails, and supporting attachments sourced by ACLJ, Democrats nationally and in New York will rue the day they ever invested political power in the Clintons.
Let that sink in as we remember true heroes who allow us all to celebrate American greatness this Memorial Day.
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, article image: Presidential Primary, Manchester, NH, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Ted Eytan)
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