As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton’s doing it, too. …
“How then do we go through an exercise like this and [Bill Clinton] doesn’t as he is far more conflicted every single day in what he does? Why not apply the structure you set up for him to this situation?” [Douglas] Band wrote…
The Big Dog may come to regret his choice of bagman.
When top Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band wrote the memo, he was a central player at the Clinton Foundation…
In doing so, Band also detailed a circle of enrichment in which he raised money for the Clinton Foundation from top-tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm, Teneo, while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president.
[emphasis added]
With Utah Congress-thing Jason Chaffetz promising years of investigation into our next president, the Washington Post offers us a preview of what he lip-smackingly describes as “a target-rich environment”.
The memo, made public Wednesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, lays out the aggressive strategy behind lining up the consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements for Bill Clinton that added tens of millions of dollars to the family’s fortune, including during the years that Hillary Clinton led the State Department. It describes how Band helped run what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.,” obtaining “in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.” …
Band wrote that Teneo partners had raised in excess of $8 million for the foundation and $3 million in paid speaking fees for Bill Clinton. He said he had secured contracts for the former president that would pay out $66 million over the subsequent nine years if the deals remained in place. …
Another achievement cited by Band: Laureate International Universities, a chain of for-profit international colleges, which donated to the foundation and agreed to pay Bill Clinton $3.5 million a year to serve as honorary chancellor.
[emphasis added]
You may remember that famous FOH Huma Abedin received a waiver to work at Teneo while still a high-level aide to Secretary of State Clinton – after Teneo asked her to help secure a presidential appointment for Teneo client Judith Rodin.
While there’s no evidence that Abedin cooperated with this request, one wonders:
Abedin, a longtime key aide and official staff for a Secretary of State, got a sweet deal in which she could collect two paychecks — one from American taxpayers, and the other from a politically-connected firm that wanted to get White House appointments. It’s absurd to believe that Abedin had value to Teneo as anything other than a conduit to Hillary Clinton and an entrée to the Obama administration. Even if no laws got broken, and that’s still far from clear, the arrangement stinks to high heaven.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/24/more-ethics-issues-for-huma-abedin/
The Band memo can be read here:
http://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000158-048f-da25-a55e-efaf30b60000
And what have the principals to say about all this?
Spokesmen for Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton and the foundation declined to comment.
Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin declined to comment on the memo, calling the material “hacked by the Russian government and weaponized by WikiLeaks.” Caplin declined to authenticate the memo, but he also did not dispute it.
○ The story that shows how the Clintons can actually lose by fladem on Sept. 1th, 2016
○ Hillary + Huma. It’s always the underling who takes the rap. Always by Arthur Gilroy on Aug. 13th, 2015
Doug Band, Teneo and the Clinton Foundation …
○ Clinton’s Pay for Play @State
Solution?
Sure.
They won’t comment; their bought-and-sold media will not cover it any more than they must to be able to put up some kind of “See!!!??? We ain’t “rigged!!!” defense and a winning majority of the U.S. voting public won’t notice a goddamned thing.
Fixness as usual, v. 2016.
AG
I’m seeing lots of quids here. I’m not seeing the pro quos that connect to them.
Nor am I seeing the provenance of the Clinton emails.
Furthermore, Douglas Band was Clinton’s counselor and responsible for Clinton’s being alerted that due diligence required he not engage in slippery deals. Chelsea Clinton apparently had him canned for conflict of interest relative to Teneo. This is his “everybody does it” defense. If everybody does it, was that what he advised the Big Dog? Doug Band has a very obvious axe to grind.
“hacked by the Russian government and weaponized by Wikileaks” is cute campaign phrasing asserting a defense without evidence. What it does do is raising the issue of the provenance of the email. Did Wikileaks get hacked documents or forged ones purporting to be hacked? Or documents that were both hacked and altered (forged)?
The very continued attraction of the emails like most Clinton scandals is that it is very difficult to pin down the there there. What is scandalous, and what is exaggeration? Why does it always descend to little nitpicking things instead the big stuff like Trump saying what his MO is and a string of women coming forward and saying, “Trump is not just bragging.” Why are there always GOP operatives of conservative shock jocks hanging around the Clinton stuff, but the Trump stuff is pretty obvious to anyone who watched his PR anytime for 30 years?
The issue here is not Clinton’s behavior but what is considered legal and normal in the relationships between the economic and political elites.
Gotta way to fix that?
Extremely well reported article on Band from The New Republic in September 2013.
http://newrepublic.com/article/114790/how-doug-band-drove-wedge-through-clinton-dynasty
It goes into rather sickening detail about the “normal” world these people inhabit.
Another with experience in the field of charity management discusses his role. Very interesting. (Marie, some links you might explore.)
More on Band/More on Haiti
“What it does do is raising the issue of the provenance of the email. Did Wikileaks get hacked documents or forged ones purporting to be hacked? Or documents that were both hacked and altered (forged)?”
Impeach the credibility of the evidence or the witness. Absolutely standard procedure in a courtroom in an adversarial legal system like ours.
Impeaching the credibility of a witness usually goes in tandem with a denial of the witness’s testimony.
None of the actors caught out by Podesta’s emails are willing to go on record as denying the substance of their contents.
A matter of principle, perhaps.
Which is appropriate, since these are stolen private messages.
“A matter of principle, perhaps.?”
Or maybe just a matter of simply not wanting to perjure themselves.
My bet…
AG
Forged emails?
Probably not according to experts testing with DKIM normally used to verify sender and stop spam.
I trust you read the entire comment thread challenging the author’s certainty about DKIM as the magic signature verifying that spoofing had not occurred.
Yes, and the counter-arguments.
The ones who claims it is easy to spoof, but don’t appear to have tried despite the reward put up, I think we can put in the unlikely pile. There are arguments in the same thread as to why it would not work.
In the end, what remains from the thread is that yes, there could have been a man-in-middle attack making false emails arrive to Podesta or hillaryclinton.com – in effect Google – could have been hacked. However, in both of these cases, it seems like an awful lot of trouble just to insert a false email or two and have them certified with DKIM.
If someone did a man-in-middle attack don’t you think they would have had more use of that in sending false Clinton campaign emails to stir things up? And if hillaryclinton.com was hacked by the same person or persons hacking podestas account, don’t you think all of those emails would be on wikileaks by now?
That is why I think it is probably not fakes.
It is sad to see folks still struggling. Take a deep breath and admit TINA. If every e-mail were gold-plateded gospel, would it change your vote? Not likely.
No, I don’t think the leaks will change many votes. I think my posts here will change exactly zero votes.
Still, I think it is of value to know if the emails are real or not.
Heh. I don’t see you as still struggling, friend. You are using common sense to judge the veracity between two parties with actual RECORDS they have established for accuracy in their public statements.
I agree that it is of value to determine if all the information in the WikiLeaks emails is real or not. In an honest search for the truth, we should not presume to immediately express near-certainty that everything they have released is true. Nor should we interpret Podesta’s interest in not responding as his concession that the information is all real. That’s not true, and we should be seeking the truth here.
And:
“…it seems like an awful lot of trouble just to insert a false email or two and have them certified with DKIM.”
Well, gosh, Assange has expressed his clear motivation to go to “an awful lot of trouble” to derail Clinton’s candidacy. And he certainly has had the time to go to a lot of trouble.
I openly concede that this does not mean that he has altered these documents. Assuming that he and WikiLeaks did not achieve the Podesta and DNC hacks themselves, we also do not know that the agents who achieved the hacks and delivered the data files to WikiLeaks did not insert false information in the files before sending them to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks expresses desires to create open flows of information so we can know the actions and motivations of world leaders. Yet, they themselves are an extraordinarily closed organization, and their motivations are unclear and their methods are hidden. Their current actions are meant to increase the chance that Donald Trump wins the Presidency. That, at least, is clear.
Emphasis should be put on “just”.
If someone goes through the trouble of conducting a man-in-the-middle attack I would think they would do more then just sent a couple of emails to an adress they would later hack. For example they could send false messages to the media.
Same with hacking hillaryclinton.com, if someone did that and had the intent of hurting the Clinton campaign, why not leak those emails instead of only using it to send fake messages to another account?
So while it could be fakes, it looks unlikely as long as the ways to fake it are through means that gives other, better, sabotage options that has not been used.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ “Bill Clinton, Inc.”
They were more open before 2010, and they look like the activist outfit they proclaim themselves to be.
Last sentence got the wrong temporal form. It was supposed to be “and they looked like the activist etc”. Back in 2010, before cablegate. After that they turtled up and became closed.
I continue to be surprised to learn that Bill Clinton is running for president again. Just a reminder: the candidate is HILLARY Clinton. Not Bill Clinton. Not Chelsea Clinton. Not their cat. Not “the Clintons”.
Here’s a suggestion that I know may seem shocking: Set all the allegations of improprieties against both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the shelf. Now judge which candidate you prefer based on the public positions they have taken on a wide range of issues. Or decide you prefer someone else entirely. Up to you.
In terms of the unctuous Jason Chaffetz and his fellow-travelers, they don’t need documentation to justify an investigation, because they don’t even attempt to justify these investigations. Remember when Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, openly stated that the Benghazi hearings were about damaging Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president?
The bad faith of Chaffetz and his ilk go without saying around here, surely.
But “Bill isn’t running for President” won’t cut it. It was only 5 months ago that Hillary said she “will put [him] in charge of revitalizing the economy”.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/16/news/economy/hillary-bill-clinton-economic-job-growth/
If Mitt Romney’s proposed economic czar was exposed as having earned tens of millions of dollars through influence peddling, I suspect you’d have to something to say about it.
More to the point: Bill’s ill-gotten gains are also her ill-gotten gains. Joint tax return and all.
http://m.hrc.onl/secretary/10-documents/01-health-financial-records/WJC_HRC_2014_Form_1040.pdf
The fact that she’s not as unethical as Donald Trump – as paltry a boast as that is – will not be a useful dodge 12 days from now.
Problem with your claims: there’s no influence peddling here. An employee of Bill Clinton tried to get him work. No influence was offered.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/27/brutal-new-clinton-emails-teneo-remind-us-huma-abedin-circa-20
10/
We’re quoting a report on the Hot Air website now.
OK.
If you’re having difficulty answering the question, I believe the party answer is “Hillary only lets these people think they’re buying influence with her. But after she takes their money, she’ll only do what’s right.”
Independent voters may have more difficulty than you in believing that.
Let me clarify. You’re forwarding the opinion, not a factual finding, from some clown named Jazz Shaw who writes on the Hot Air website, home of Michelle Malkin. Here’s another of the current HOT TAKES from this fellow:
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/27/clinton-promises-not-next-deporter-chief/
“…So now (Clinton)’s letting us know in advance that she won’t be the next “Deporter in Chief.” Thanks for the tip, Madam Secretary. We’ll be watching closely and monitoring the crime rates going forward.”
So, yeah, the value of Jazz Shaw’s opinion is super duper.
Regarding the information in your main diary post here, it’s clear that you’re going to believe what you want to believe. The case isn’t made; no policy decision has shown to have been bought during Hillary’s years in State. Hillary and Bill are not involved in any of these emails. And no one need respond to information supposedly gained from stolen private emails, information which has not been verified by anyone.
But just keep on pushing out that propaganda. It’s your preoccupation right now. Days before the Presidential election, you want to do the bidding of Trump and the Republican Party.
What do you want, exactly? It’s unclear.
What I quoted was a question that anyone not carrying water for Hillary Clinton could reasonably ask.
That you resort to ad hominem sallies against the author, other contributors to the originating web site, and finally myself, suggests that you are unable to answer it.
My concern is with unethical influence peddling in the executive branch. Your concern appears to be making sure Hillary Clinton is elected.
I believe my project to be more progressive than yours.
Trying to help elect Donald Trump with the use of specious evidence which propagandizes against Clinton is not a well-considered progressive project.
WikiLeaks, and you, do not have the factual goods. You have your opinion. In order to claim you have more, you would have to name a policy which actual evidence shows was clearly influenced during Clinton’s time in State.
Dunwoody wants to disparage Clinton. Whether he wants to do that to elect Trump is unknowable and irrelevant. But Dunwoody’s intention is pretty clear and not well hidden behind his protests of being more progressive than thou. The latest from Wikileaks serves his purpose. You’re being lawyerly, I suppose one could say.
The thing about the slow drip feed from Wikileaks is this: what does Assange think is noteworthy in the latest stuff? What’s there that he thinks is finally going to convince all the Clinton apologists to throw her under the bus?
Assange isn’t interested in rooting out corruption. If he were, he’d be spending as much time on Trump as on Clinton. Nope, he’s a believer in the old heighten-the-contradictions bullshit: Elect Trump and hasten the collapse of the rotten system, from the ashes of which will arise the progressive paradise.
You write that the intention of this diary is to “disparage Clinton”. (Presumably Hillary. Such ambiguities are one of the drawbacks of dynastic presidencies.)
I found this choice of words striking in two respects.
1. One might have expected you to write that I wanted to “disparage Bill”. He’s the one I refer to as employing a “bagman”. He’s the one whose name is on the 7-figure paychecks.
In the diary, I don’t actually refer to Hillary doing anything. The only times she comes up are:
The fact that you equate criticism of Bill’s ethics with criticism of her ethics is a nice illustration of my point elsewhere in the comments that there is no separating the two of them. There is no use saying “Bill is not running for President”.
To quote the second most authoritative Hillary expert in the world: “She created this mess and she knows it.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/hillary-clinton-foundation-morocco-wikileaks/505
043/
2. To be lawyerly myself, it would be more accurate to write that I wanted to “disparage Clinton’s conduct”. But close enough for government work, as the saying goes.
What unsettles me is the tacit lèse-majesté framing. Do I stand guilty of disparagement? Have I impugned the dignity of her station as the Leader of the Party? Oh, dear.
People who criticize Democrats from the left are often accused of posturing as “more progressive than thou”. Well, either we are or we aren’t.
If we aren’t, our criticisms ought to be disputable without bringing personalities into it. Or if we are, then your choice of party over progressivism will have to stand or fall on its own merits.
Election Day is in less than two weeks.
You claim that my primary concern is to get Hillary Clinton elected. I proudly claim that this is now my primary concern in Federal elections. Yes, it is. I’m also working on State and local elections as well.
At this moment in time, I believe that my pursuit is more in line with the progressive project. Forwarding anti-Clinton propaganda at this moment not only increases the slim chances of Trump becoming President, it is actively destructive to the chances that the next President and Congress can pursue the most progressive agenda.
This credulous support of unsubstantiated information presented by compromised sources decreases the chance that we will get the voter turnout necessary to, to take one of dozens of examples, make Bernie Sanders the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee. I fail to understand how that serves our shared policy goals.
Alas, I have no confidence that, come November 9, as the President-elect shifts her transition team into high gear, that you will be any more receptive to a frank examination of how she operates. I fear that you will continue to dismiss any valid criticisms of her political ethics as anti-Soviet… I mean, anti-Clinton propaganda.
So I will not wait to post this. I can only hope that you won’t find The Washington Post a compromised source.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bill-clintons-nearly-18-million-job-as-honorary-chance
llor-of-a-for-profit-college/2016/09/05/8496db42-655b-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html
I suppose it must be tiresome for you as a Clinton supporter to be forced to keep insisting that there’s no fire – even as thick black smoke billows around you. I can only encourage you to summon all your reserves of endurance.
You’ve got at least four years of this ahead of you.
That Basket of Deplorables will just keep getting fuller and fuller. This is what we have to look forward to, no doubt….
The Pathologization of Dissent
A line is being drawn in the ideological sand. On one side of it are the decent people, the normal people, in their business wear, with their university degrees, and prescriptions, and debts. On the other side are … well, the deplorables, the ignorant, racist, anti-Semitic, neo-nationalist, populist extremists. This line cuts through both the Left and the Right … supersedes both Left and Right, making bedfellows of supposed adversaries like Obama, Clinton, Kagan, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and their ilk on the Normal team, and a motley crew of Trumpists, Putinists, European populists, Corbynistas, Sandernistas, socialists, anarchists, Wikileakers, anti-Zionists, anti-capitalists, neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matterers, angry Greek pensioners, environmental activists, religious zealots, the Klu Klux Klan, David Graeber, most of the contributors to CounterPunch, and various other “extremist” types, many of whom detest each other, in the Deplorables’ current starting line-up.
I’d ask you not to conflate your earlier post with this one. It makes me very unhappy that Hillary is shown in this story to have personally sent an email which helped created a spot at a private dinner hosted by the State Department for an organization which paid money to her husband. This comes off to me as a more substantial report than the ones with which you started this diary post.
I also trust the source of the story more, because it does not appear to rely on the veracity of WikiLeaks or the Russian government. Based on the date of the reporting and the way it cites its information, I presume this email exchange was gained through previous releases from the State Department and Hillary herself. I also trust the reporting more because it does not spin itself off into wild claims.
I just don’t believe this report disqualifies Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States. I don’t believe the world should be made to suffer through a Donald Trump Presidency because of this report. If news releases of this sort can help prevent/reduce influence peddling in the next Administration, I will be made happy by that.
But you evaded confronting a couple of very important parts of the reporting you shared:
“There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton…
…Clinton’s contract with Laureate was approved by the State Department’s ethics office, in keeping with an Obama administration agreement with Hillary Clinton that gave the agency the right to review her husband’s outside work during her tenure. An ethics official wrote that he saw “no conflict of interest with Laureate or any of their partners,” according to a letter recently released by the conservative group Citizens United, which received it through a public-records request.”
Another fact which should not be evaded is that there is a big black smoke billowing machine which has existed around the Clintons for decades which precedes Whitewater and has continued after Benghazi. It is fairly apparent that this machine has now been gleefully joined by the Russian government. Your plain assumption that there is/will be fire beneath all the historical smoke has not been supported by the outcomes of past investigations of Hillary.
I’d also ask you to refrain making assumptions about me, my character, my morality or my ideology. You don’t know me well at all.
…gleefully joined by the Russian government… Oh my goodness, as Hillary Clinton gasped when it was suggested she might go to jail because of the emails in the first debate. P.S. ‘Oh my goodness’ is ‘oh my god’ for respectable, god-fearing people.
having a little trouble with reality, are we? it doesn’t help to cover up the flaws of our candidate on the basis of patriotism, or whatever
People are eager to hear the Clintons speak (and any other past President, for that matter). They all command high fees for speaking – even W. It’s not like anybody’s trying to get influence with W now.
In terms of board appointments, Clinton knows more important people than almost anybody. They’re paying for contacts.
up until now, in recent years, past presidents remain past. that’s the problem. getting back into office with all this post-presidency activity as baggage
Celebrities have speaking fees. Speaking fees depend on the availability of the celebrity. Bill Clinton is a former President of the United States and thus to some folks’s mind commands a large fee.
They do have the expectation of having hooks. A lot of those speaking clients have contradictory interests as well. Which of those contradictory interests will the Clintons disappoint.
Congress exists as a check and balance to ensure that Presidents have no folks with hooks into them. Unfortunately, the Republican investigators are too inteerested in a political coup to deal with those with political hooks into elected officials.
To parallel, a close study of what happened to Dilma Roussef in Brazil is in order. That’s what the GOP hopes to do with the House.
Again, the failure to investigate the other players under the same system. Personalizing it on the Clintons diverts attention from the ones doing the donating and questioning exactly what their motives are of them directly. Because what you describe is an intent on the part of corporations to commit bribery.
How is it that the Clintons bear the total burden of that corrupt relationship? Because it is a politicization of the way money works in current politics. Only the Clintons must be held accountable now that we are changing the standards before changing the institutions that enforce those standards.
You misunderstood what I wrote about Clinton vs. Trump. I’m not here to defend Clinton’s speaking fees. I’m not here to argue that his scandal is bigger than her scandal. I wrote that you should look at the candidates’ policy proposals in deciding for which one to vote. Or vote for another candidate. Or decide that policy proposals are irrelevant and that the only thing that matters to you is the list of scandals and faux scandals. Just be explicit about why you’re making your choice.
A pretty typical Clinton “scandal”. An employee of Bill Clinton tried to get business for Bill Clinton. That’s what employees are supposed to do! They can’t even come up with anything that might be wrong,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/us/politics/bill-hillary-clinton-foundation-wikileaks.html
So, at a minimum, they thought it would look terrible.
Only because of the flap in the 2000 election about Chinese donations to Gore’s campaign.
And likely more because of the moneymaking ventures than the Clinton Foundation.
Being concerned is a question of due diligence. What information did that concern produce in response? Any idea or were the emails just cherry picked for the concern but not the conclusions?
I’d refocus the Hillary hate on the Vince Foster case. That’s what I going to recommend to Jason Chaffetz.
It’s a WAR out there…lol This is Keystone Kops delicious. And it certainly goes to the question of credibility, imo.
The strange tale of a dating site’s attacks on WikiLeaks founder Assange
bizarro indeed