Republicans in Congress have requested three federal agencies to investigate the Clinton Foundation, following disclosures about its activities that suggests a high-level “pay to play” scheme with Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state. The agencies are the FBI, the IRS, and the Federal Trade Commission.
In late July, Commissioner John Koskinen wrote to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that the IRS was on the case. He hasn’t promised a formal investigation; his people will consider whether one is warranted.
The really great news: Koskinen assigned the Clinton Foundation case to the crack investigators in the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division — the division that has been unfairly targeting conservative (and pro-Israel) non-profits since 2010.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Although it will be the Dallas IRS office looking into the Clinton Foundation, rather than the Cincinnati office at the center of the conservative-targeting controversy, that won’t matter. The complicity of the IRS headquarters in the conservative-targeting effort was established early on – and as the Kimberley Strassel article at WSJ indicates (link above), it’s still happening, even though queenpin Lois Lerner has long since resigned. (She left the IRS in 2013.)
Among the many suspect features of the conservative-targeting case was the IRS’s astounding incompetence with its email system, which supposedly resulted in the catastrophic loss, but eventual miraculous recovery, of thousands of emails from Lois Lerner’s IRS account. (This “loss” was remarkably timed, occurring in June of 2011, just when top IRS officials including Holly Paz were being informed of the conservative-targeting effort. See Fox News link in last paragraph.)
Lerner was also found to be using at least two private email accounts to do IRS business, including one under the alias “Toby Miles.” The use of fake names, for private email accounts used in government business, has been common in the upper levels of the Obama administration.
In one sense, all this might seem to make the “Exempt Groups” division a natural for investigating any activities related to Hillary Clinton.
But there’s more. As we pointed out at LU in October 2015, when the Department of Justice decided not to bring any charges against Lois Lerner, the Department of Justice had itself colluded with the IRS in targeting conservative groups, as far back as 2010.
Lois Lerner was undoubtedly a key figure. But rather than pinning everything on her, the more accurate and just approach would have been to have an independent prosecutor indict numerous officials in both the DOJ and the IRS on RICO charges.
This, then, is the pair of agencies – along with the FTC – that will be looking into the questionable coincidences between Clinton Foundation activities and Hillary Clinton’s policy positions as secretary of state, on, among other things, matters of national security and the U.S. economy.
Matt Vespa gives us a taste of those coincidences:
For example, Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama) was against the Columbia [sic] Free Trade Agreement, mostly due to human and labor rights concerns. One energy company, Pacific Rubiales, was at the center of the labor controversy. Its founder Frank Giustra gave millions to the Clinton Foundation, as did Rubiales, and Clinton did a 180-degree turn in her position on the matter. Giustra is now on the Clinton Foundation’s board of directors.
Also, there were arms deals that soared into the billions that went to governments that donated millions to the Foundation.
Sarah Westwood at the Washington Examiner had a bit more:
Blackburn said more information has emerged in the months since, citing details that have surfaced related to Bill Clinton’s contract with a top donor, Laureate Education, and a high-profile uranium deal that raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s impartiality as the nation’s chief diplomat.
Bill Clinton’s position as an “honorary chancellor” for Laureate earned the former president $16.5 million for his services. Laureate donated up to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, and a nonprofit group associated with the company’s leadership later netted $55 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department.
(More here on the Uranium One kerfuffle, which was almost impenetrably hydra-headed.)
Of course, for the full brief on the Clinton Foundation’s suspect dealings, the go-to resource is Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. Breitbart is offering a free webcast of the documentary Clinton Cash through November.
