It’s incredible! All of these strange “coincidences” between companies that had issues with the U.S. State Dept. when Hillary was running Foggy Bottom, and just around the same time those same companies gave money to the Clinton family foundation.
The latest example involve the giant Swiss Bank UBS. In a story published by the Wall Street Journal we learned that soon after she was sworn in as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton met with the Swiss foreign minister in Geneva to discuss an Internal Revenue Service suit against UBS AG. Taking a break from the targeting of tea party groups, the IRS was trying to get the identities of Americans with secret Swiss bank accounts.
This put UBS between a rock and a hard place. If UBS lost the law suit but refused to turn of the names they would be breaking U.S laws, but if they turned over the names they would be violating Swiss bank secrecy laws.
Even though negotiating this kind of deal wasn’t usually done by the State Dept. (of course having personal email servers is also not done by the State Dept.), Ms. Clinton had hammered out a tentative settlement with the bank: UBS would give up information on 4,450 accounts, or roughly 8.5 percent of the accounts sought by the IRS. The Democratic Party-controlled Congress was upset at the deal, as Hillary settled for such a small percentage of potential tax violators.
Now here comes the amazing coincidence part. Before 2008 UBS had donated a total of $60K to the Clinton Foundation After the agreement , UBS’s contributions to the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased ten-fold to over $600K over the next six years, but that’s not all:
The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.
Now the Journal made sure to say that they could find no evidence of any link between Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Bubba. The entire thing might be one very unfortunate “coincidence,” if you believe in coincidences. I don’t.
Cross-posted at The Lid.
