Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Clinton Foundation scandals will be good fodder for Trump

Clinton Foundation scandals will be good fodder for Trump

Here is a pocket guide to where Trump might attack.
As Donald Trump gears up for his all-out war on Hillary and Bill Clinton, the presumptive Republican nominee on Wednesday is planning to draw ammunition from the controversies that have dogged the family, and particularly its Clinton Foundation, for years.
"I will be making a big speech tomorrow to discuss the failed policies and bad judgment of Crooked Hillary Clinton," Trump tweeted Tuesday, teasing out an address scheduled for Trump SoHo in New York, a day after Clinton laced into his economic and business acumen.
Trump initially planned to deliver a speech, originally scheduled for June 13 in New Hampshire, "discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons." But after the Orlando attack, Trump instead refocused that address on national security.
Now, he'll be back on the attack — helped by four decades' worth of statements, association, innuendo and scandal. And the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which has been embroiled in political controversy from its inception in 1997, is going to be at the top of Trump's target list.
Before Clinton even formally announced her campaign last spring, conservative author Peter Schweizer was writing Clinton Cash, digging into the foundation's financial dealings and connections. Less than a month into her run, questions resurfaced about a series of issues related to the foundation, from troublesome tax returns to myriad donations from countries with less than stellar human rights records. And while the media frenzy has subsided somewhat in 2016, Trump's early line of attack suggests that as organization Bill Clinton describes as one that has "done a lot of good things" is about to be dragged back into a turbulent political season.
In a sneak preview of the coming battle royale, Trump declared that "Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund," during a speech June 7 at his Westchester County golf club. On Tuesday, Trump's rapid-response effort kicked into high gear, firing off multiple tweets, posts and emails seeking to undercut Clinton's argument that he would be disastrous for the economy while promoting his own policies. And he accused the former first couple of "laundering" money and making "hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts."
There's sure to be more. Here is a pocket guide to where Trump might attack:
Tuesday's warning
As Clinton finished up her speech laying into Trump's economic policies, the Republican's burgeoning rapid-response unit sent forth an avalanche of emails, tweets and social media posts critiquing both the candidate and former president for a series of misdeeds, ranging from instances of alleged personal impropriety to broad responsibility for the state of the American economy.
In the first of nine emails sent out directly before, during and minutes after the former secretary of state spoke to supporters in Columbus, Ohio, Trump's campaign pointed out that Mark Zandi, an economist who Clinton pointed out in her address advised McCain, had donated to the Democratic candidate and had his policies praised by the current administration.
Another email sought to link Tuesday's news that Boeing had reached an agreement with Iran's largest airline as a consequence of the Iranian nuclear deal, stating, "Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, would not have been allowed to enter into these negotiations with Boeing without Clinton’s disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal."
Trump's campaign later attacked Clinton's "lack of poise under pressure" in response to her argument that he lacks the proper temperament to be president, referring to a forthcoming book by a former Secret Service agent who wrote that what he "saw in the 1990s sickened me."
A later email alleged that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton "laundered money" to her husband through organization Laureate Education while he was still an honorary chairman for the educational for-profit organization.
The White House ethics agreement
Foundation officials disclosed in February 2015 that one donation made during Clinton’s time at Foggy Bottom violated the ethics agreement the foundation had signed with the Obama administration.
The agreement was reached in 2008, before Clinton was nominated as secretary of state, as the incoming White House expressed concern about countries using the foundation to leverage political favor from the State Department. The memo did not ban donations from foreign countries with a stake in U.S. interests, with one exception. The agreement blocked donations to the Clinton Global Initiative, which hosts the fancy annual Clinton Foundation event starring the former president and other world leaders.
In the one instance acknowledged as a violation more than a year ago, foundation officials said they should have submitted a $500,000 donation in 2010 from the Algerian government for its Haiti earthquake relief fund to the State Department for approval.
“This donation was disclosed publicly on the Clinton Foundation website, however, the State Department should have also been formally informed. This was a one-time, specific donation to help Haiti and Algeria had not donated to the Clinton Foundation before and has not since,” a spokesman told POLITICO at the time.
Should Hillary Clinton be elected president, "[t]here'll clearly be some changes in what the Clinton Foundation does and how we do it, and we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it," Bill Clinton told Bloomberg TV on June 14, echoing what the campaign has said.
The donations that ‘slipped through the cracks’
The day after Trump promised to unleash on the foundation, Clinton and her surrogates began a two-day media blitz. During the first day of that press tour, they answered multiple questions about disclosure surrounding their donors, remarking that the organization went above and beyond requirements in an effort to be transparent.
"We had absolutely overwhelming disclosure,” she told CNN's Anderson Cooper. “Were there, you know, one or two instances that slipped through the cracks? Yes. But was the overwhelming amount of anything that anybody gave the foundation disclosed? Absolutely.”
The time a donor got on a sensitive intelligence board
Rajiv K. Fernando, a Democratic donor and Chicago securities trader who contributed to the Clinton Foundation, was placed on the International Security Advisory Board in 2011 despite lacking the qualifications of his colleagues. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member said, according to a June 10 ABC News report. ABC's report detailed emails its journalists obtained from Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act.
“The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to ‘protect the name’ of the Secretary, ‘stall’ the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later,” ABC reported.
The emails provided to ABC, according to the report, showed a State Department official unable to immediately answer why Fernando was on the panel.
Emails released by the State Department as part of the court-ordered schedule do not explicitly show Clinton being involved in Fernando’s placement. In one email from 2010 provided to ABC with the subject line “ISAB,” shorthand for the organization, chief of staff Cheryl Mills wrote, “The secretary had two other names she wanted looked at.”

The case of the errant tax returns


The speaking fees, part I


The speaking fees, part II


The Russian uranium deal


The UBS deal


The foreign donations



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-clinton-foundation-scandals-attacks-224178#ixzz4CMTWCLKh 
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