Armageddon (8 page)

Open Secrets
reported that “Morgan Stanley's role in the Clinton orbit” goes beyond Nides, noting that “two prominent alumni of
former President Bill Clinton's administration . . . serve on Morgan Stanley's board of directors: Erskine Bowles (its lead director) and Laura Tyson.” Bowles served as Bill's Chief of Staff and Tyson was the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors.
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Doubtless, Hillary expected to coast into the presidential race touting TPP as a major achievement of her tenure at the State Department. But enter Bernie Sanders, an inveterate opponent of the deal. Facing a challenge from the Left, she flipped and flopped and condemned TPP. Suddenly, it was not just short of the gold standard. It also fell short of her standards. Now, she told PBS, “I'm worried about currency manipulation not being part of the agreement . . . We've lost American jobs to the manipulations that countries, particularly in Asia, have engaged in.”
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(This from a former secretary of state who uttered not a peep when President Obama refused—several times—to certify China as a currency manipulator and invoke sanctions for doing so.) And, Hillary complained, drug companies may have gotten too much in TPP: “Pharmaceutical companies may have gotten more benefits and patients and consumers got fewer,” she commented.
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But if businesses got too much, Hillary got a piece of it in her campaign contributions.
The Hill
reported that “Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has received more campaign cash from drug companies than any candidate in either party, even as she proudly declares the industry is one of her biggest enemies. Clinton accepted $164,315 in the first six months of the campaign from drug companies, far more than the rest of the 2016 field . . .”
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What would she do as president with TPP? Oh, that's easy. She'll make a few minor changes and declare it fixed. It will be the gold standard again.

Her positions on guns have oscillated back and forth with incredible speed and frequency. When she ran for the Senate from antigun
New York State, she backed a national registry for guns.
*
But when she ran for president and was seeking votes in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan—gun country—she was so pro-gun that Obama quipped that she seemed to want to be “Annie Oakley.”
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When Obama was quoted as saying that rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion,” she countered with a strong defense of guns. Suddenly, she was Hillary the Hunter and opposed a national registry for firearms.

She even brought her father into it. “You know,” she said, “my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl. Some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It's part of culture. It's part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it's an important part of who they are, not because they are bitter.” Hillary said that blanket federal rules weren't the answer.
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In the 2008 presidential contest, Hillary distinguished herself as an opponent of illegal immigration, tangling with the rest of the Democratic field on the issue of driver's licenses for the undocumented. She said, “As president, I will not support driver's licenses for undocumented people and will press for comprehensive immigration reform that deals with all of the issues around illegal immigration, including border security and fixing our broken system.”
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But in 2016, she flip-flopped. Her spokesman told the
Huffington Post
that “Hillary supports state policies to provide driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.”
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As hundreds of thousands of children from Central America illegally sought to enter the United States over the porous Mexican border in the spring of 2014, Hillary wanted to send them back:
“They should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are,” Clinton said. “There are concerns about whether all of them should be sent back, but I think all of them who can be should be reunited with their families. We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn't mean the child gets to stay,” Hillary declared. “So we don't want to send a message that is contrary to our laws, or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”
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But when the time actually came to start deporting the children, Hillary changed her position once again. Her campaign spokesperson said, “Hillary Clinton has real concerns about these reports [of deportations], especially as families are coming together during this holiday season.” The campaign statement added, “She believes it is critical that everyone has a full and fair hearing, and that our country provides refuge to those that need it. And we should be guided by a spirit of humanity and generosity as we approach these issues.”
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These are just a selection of Hillary Clinton flip-flops. On virtually every major issue, she has taken one side and then the other, always shading her position so as to give herself maximum political advantage.

If Hillary is elected, she will take her place along with Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon as one of the most corrupt presidents in our history.

Corruption with Hillary is a way of life. She justifies her corruption by a personal narrative that suggests that she eschewed big bucks on Wall Street as a major corporate lawyer to serve the public in Arkansas. The narrative is, of course, fanciful. She failed the Washington, DC, bar exam, foreclosing most of the lucrative opportunities, and was glad to go to Arkansas, the only bar she had passed.

From the very beginning of her public life, she has always been corrupt. It started in small ways.

In 1978, Hillary invested $1,000 in cattle futures contracts. The all time best investment ever made, Hillary walked away with $100,000 the very next year. Having no experience in the futures markets, Hillary was guided in her investment by James Blair, a friend who was outside counsel to Tyson Foods. The editor of the
Journal of Futures Markets
said in April 1994 that Hillary's gains in the cattle futures market were “like buying ice skates one day and entering the Olympics a day later.”
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Two economists from the University of North Florida and Auburn University calculated the odds of such winnings without outside fixing as 1 in 31 trillion.
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Blair and Tyson Foods were well compensated for their efforts on Hillary's behalf. Not only did Governor Clinton waive environmental standards to help Tyson's chicken industry in Arkansas, but as the
Wall Street Journal
reported, the firm also got special treatment in Washington after Clinton became president. The
Journal
wrote in 1994, “Over the past year, an Agriculture Department blitz against unsanitary slaughterhouse practices has bypassed Tyson's 66 plants altogether. The department also has sided with the Tyson-dominated Arkansas Poultry Federation in a court fight over a California labeling law. And while it has imposed a ‘zero tolerance' fecal-matter policy on meatpackers, it has yet to do the same for poultry, despite high rates of salmonella and other bacteria on chicken and turkey.”
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Hillary's next close call with the law came when her husband fired the staff of the White House Travel Office shortly after taking office as president. The Travel Office, in charge of arranging presidential travel and lodgings, was staffed by career people and the Clintons wanted to put patronage employees in there instead.

Hillary was particularly anxious to steer travel business to her good friend Harry Thomason, who had produced many of the ads and videos during Bill's 1992 run for the presidency.
The Washington Post
describes how Harry “had contacted the Clintons on behalf of a Cincinnati-based aviation consulting firm in which he had a minority interest, seeking a piece of the White House travel business. Within six weeks, [White House] officials had launched an investigation into alleged financial mismanagement of the travel office, ultimately firing seven employees—who were later cleared of wrong doing.”
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To cover their tracks and justify the dismissals, the Clinton people charged that Billy Dale, the head of the office, was guilty of misconduct.

After it turned out that Dale was not guilty of any impropriety, the special prosecutor interviewed Hillary to ask if she was the one who ordered the firing of Dale and his staff. Hillary lied (under oath) and said no. A memo surfaced from a top Clinton aide named Watkins contradicting Hillary's sworn testimony saying that the First Lady had ordered the firings and that “there would be hell to pay if we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes.”
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The Watkins memo dramatically differed from Hillary's sworn statement that she did not order the dismissals. Why was she not indicted for perjury? Because the special prosecutor could not prove that she was in the chain of command, and her statement that the staff must be fired was merely an opinion, not an order. She was, after all, First Lady, not the president. Whew! A close one.

Jim McDougal, the head of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association, had been convicted of fraud and ordered to stop doing real estate deals with his bank's money. So he turned to Hillary's law partner Web Hubbell and arranged for Seth Ward, Web's father-in-law, to be a straw purchaser on a deal called both Castle Grande and
IDC (Industrial Development Commission), putting the loan and sale in his name. And he hired Hillary to do the legal work for this illegal deal.

The special prosecutor subpoenaed the law firm's billing records to determine if Hillary worked on the deal, but they had disappeared. When they finally surfaced two years later, they showed that she had, in fact, worked for 60 hours on IDC. But called before a grand jury, she denied doing any work for the “Castle Grande” project. Nobody asked her about an IDC deal.

Subsequently, Barbara Walters asked her about her denial of working on Castle Grande. She explained that she knew the project as “IDC” and did not know it was also called “Castle Grande.” Nonsense. Everyone knew both names. Hillary lied again saying, “The billing records show I did not do work for Castle Grande. I did work for something called IDC, which was not related to Castle Grande.”
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Another lie. It was not only related, it was a synonym.

The Clintons have their own language. The Clinton Library has no books. The Clinton Foundation makes no grants. Or at least very few.

The
New York Post
reported on April 26, 2015, that “the Clinton Foundation's finances are so messy that the nation's most influential charity watchdog put it on its ‘watch list' of problematic nonprofits last month.”
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In 2013, the foundation took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges but gave only $9 million in grants for direct aid. The watchdog reported that the foundation spent most of its money on “administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, and payouts going to family friends.”
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The
New York Post
reported, “On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on ‘conferences, conventions and meetings'; $8 million on fundraising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel.”
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While
the foundation does not pay any of the three Clintons directly, it does pay for their first class airfare. Some of the “administrative cost” finances more than 2,000 employees, including aid workers and health professionals around the world. But still, the Charity watchdog finds that its expenditures fall short of the 75% spent-on-foundation-mission that is the basic standard in the field.

Charity Navigator, an NGO, put the foundation on its watch list, which warns potential donors about investing in problematic charities. So the Clinton Foundation now joins the Rev. Al Sharpton's troubled National Action Network on the watch list. “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director.
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Responding to the negative Charity Navigator ratings, the Clinton Foundation made four years of tax returns available and a public memo describing its operations. The Navigator rescinded its watch list designation but still refused to rate the Clinton Foundation citing its “atypical business model” and noting that it could not be “accurately captured” by the group's rating methodology.
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Because the Clinton Foundation does not primarily exist to give out grants to do its work but rather directly employees the aid workers, the Navigator could not easily distinguish those employed to furnish aid to mankind from those only serving the Clintons. Was this the deliberate goal the Clintons had in organizing their foundation that way?

In July 2013, Eric Braverman, a friend of Chelsea Clinton from when they both worked at McKinsey & Company, took over as CEO of the Clinton Foundation. He took home nearly $275,000 in salary, benefits, and a housing allowance from the nonprofit for just five month's work in 2013, tax filings show. Less than a year later, his salary increased to $395,000, according to a report in Politico.
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Nine other executives received salaries over $100,000 in 2013, tax filings show. Recently, the foundation brought in former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to help straighten out the mess. The former president of the University of Michigan and University of Miami is widely respected for her integrity but might be hobbled by health problems, having suffered a recent stroke.