A 'Tale of Two Candidates' Who Couldn't Be More Different : Today, a Look at Hillary Clinton

Listen Up, America -- Listen Up, World -- this presidential campaign is a 'Tale of Two Candidates' who could not be more different. ~~~~~~ First, Hillary Clinton. ~~~~~~ We learned on Friday that the Clinton Foundation will no longer accept corporate and foreign donations if Hillary Clinton becomes President. The Associated Press, and then all the media, reported that former President Bill Clinton announced the plan to staffers Thursday. AP cited participants at the meeting, who said a formal announcement is expected soon. Under the proposed changes, the family's charitable group would only accept donations from US citizens and independent charities. Bill Clinton said the Foundation will continue its work and would refocus its efforts after an overhaul that could take a year. He added that the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual summit that brings together influential world leaders, would hold its final meeting next month in New York City regardless of the election's outcome. Clinton also said he would also step down from the board of the Foundation, according to the report. He was accompanied daughter Chelsea Clinton at the meeting. It was also reported that Bill Clinton told the staff that he and his daughter, Chelsea, did not face any external pressure to make the changes, but wanted to avoid any potential issues or second guessing for Hillary Clinton should she move into the White House. ~~~~~~ Bill Clinton's surprise announcement came amid the growing concerns from both Republicans and Democrats about how the Foundation would operate during a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. The Foundation's funding and work during Clinton's time as Secretary of State has been subject to controversy that has relentlessly dogged her campaign and been highlighted by revelations of some of the 33,000 emails Hillary said she destroyed because they were "personal." Critics have found in these emails -- released in lawsuits to compel their disclosure because of allegations that they were government-related or showed misuse of public trust. Other documents and required annual reports and filings by the Clinton Foundation show its extensive ties to wealthy donors and foreign interests, raising questions about their influence over the Clintons and US public policy. In one email, a longtime Clinton aide asked officials at the State Department to "take care" of a foundation donor. Foreign donations to the foundation were supposed to be restricted when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, requiring approval from an ethics office at the State Department under an agreement with the Obama administration to prohibit, and in some cases curtail, foreign donations to its programs. The many-tentacled charity was established in 1997 as a Little Rock, Arkansas-focused nonprofit organization and expanded rapidly to become a worldwide $2 billion network after Bill Clinton left office in 2001.While Hillary Clinton stepped down from its board after launching her 2016 campaign, her husband and daughter have remained as leaders, raising questions about the ability of the Foundation to continue its work should Clinton win the White House. Some of the group's funding has come from foreign donations and political donors to the Clinton family. Money accepted from countries such as Saudi Arabia drew criticism from both Republicans and Democrats early in Clinton's presidential bid, and questions continue about the level of influence Foundation donors had at the State Department. Bowing to pressure in April 2015, the Foundation announced that it would restrict donations to only six Western nations and disclose its donors more frequently. Scant evidence of this change has been made public by the Foundation. GOP nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly slammed the Clintons for taking money from countries with poor human rights records. Others have raised questions about undue foreign influence while Clinton was the nation's top diplomat as Secretary of State, with Trump and many others alleging donations to the organization were evidence of pay-to-play politics. The Republican National Committe had, on Thursday - before Bill's announcement - criticized the Clinton Foundation for delaying changes to its donation guidelines : "This effort to shield Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation after more than a year of controversy is too little, too late," chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. After all, if everything was above board when Hillary Clinton ran the State Department as the Clintons have said, then why change a thing? But, now that they have admitted there is a problem, the Clinton Foundation should immediately cease accepting foreign donations and return every penny ever taken from other countries, several of which have atrocious human rights records and ties to terrorism." Priebus added that the Clinton Foundation's activities had already raised red flags during Clinton's campaign : "The fact that the Clinton Foundation and its entities continue to accept foreign donations while Hillary Clinton runs for the White House is a massive, ongoing conflict of interest that gets bigger by the day," he said. In the last week, prominent voices have called for the Foundation to be disbanded if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. Former Governor Ed Rendell, a supporter of the Clintons, on Wednesday said the charitable organization should close up shop if Clinton wins. Rendell told the New York Daily News : "It’d be impossible to keep the Foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem.” The Boston Globe, a very left-leaning newspaper, on Tuesday published an editorial board piece calling for disbanding the Clinton Foundation, saying that doing so would remove “a political -- and actual -- distraction.” So, we may accept with a grain of salt Bill Clinton's denial that the changes were brought about by outside pressure, but were motivated by the need to eliminate any concerns if his wife wins the White House. ~~~~~~ Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told "Fox News Sunday" he would indict the Clinton Foundation as a "racketeering enterprise" if he "were back at my old job as US Attorney." Guiliani said : "This in an insider vs. outsider campaign. She is the consummate corrupt Washington insider, and she is thoroughly corrupt with the Clinton Foundation." Giuliani, who has been campaigning for Trump this summer, pointed to the actions of her Foundation as being far more serious than merely unethical : "They took money from money launderers, criminals, dictators, people who abuse women as a matter of government policy. She did favors for the very people who gave money to the Clinton Foundation....In my day that was considered bribery." ~~~~~~ As several people have put it, Bill Clinton's announcement in August simply gives foreign donors about 80 days to donate all they can to the Clinton Foundation before the November 8 election -- to be sure that if Hillary is elected, their donations will have been noted and their requests for special treatment handled by the White House in January. ~~~~~~ But, it is actually a lot worse than even that. In true Clinton form, one lie follows another. We learned on Sunday from LawNewz that the Clinton Foundation announcement about halting foreign donations was merely an extreme stretching of the truth -- a lie -- to make it appear that the Foundation was reacting to public concerns about foreign influence peddling in the White House, but without taking any meaningful steps to actually do so. The website reported that Bill Clinton's original campaign pledge on Thursday "has already been walked back." Reuters said the day after the announcement : "the Foundation admitted that the new guidelines on foreign donations would only apply to a small portion of the Foundation’s activities." LawNewz also reported that the foreign arm of the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, is not subject to the guidelines either and would not shut down if Clinton wins the election. Rather, it reportedly would be spun into a separate ntity in order to continue its work. To refresh our memories, Giustra is a Canadian national billionaire who worked with Bill Clinton to use the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton's State Department to tie up his deal to put US uranium deposits in Russian ownership hands. The news that the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership will continue to take foreign donations and to operate during a Hillary presidency came as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, told CNN that foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation will take time to wind down, responding to criticism that the Foundation said it would separate itself from foreign money only after Clinton wins the election. When CNN tried to get Mook to explain why, if the Foundation now acknowledges the possible problem with foreign influence on Clinton, it did not take this step to separate itself from foreign money when she was Secretary of State or at least now, since she is running for President. Mook avoided the question, finally saying that the Foundation is getting extra scrutiny because it is willing to be so transparent. When pressed again, Mook explained the continued foreign donations by saying that the Foundation is doing important work : "and it takes time when you're in a number of countries around the world to retool, refocus the mission and adapt." ~~~~~~ And, if that isn't enough to convince us that Hillary Clinton is ethically unfit to be President, Newsmax and Bloomberg reported a week ago that the FBI sent to Congress notes on its interview with Hillary Clinton about her use of a private email server, as the State Department confirmed that it will release several thousand work-related messages that Clinton failed to turn over. The two developments on Tuesday all but guaranteed that the controversy over what FBI Director James Comey labeled the “extremely careless” handling of classified information by Clinton and her aides while she was Secretary of State will continue through the 12 weeks remaining before the election. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and an important election analyst who believes Clinton will win, said Tuesday : "Another unflattering episode is always just around the corner. The email matter is a persistent, low-grade fever that won’t kill her candidacy but will weaken public trust in her during the remainder of her public career." In a Bloomberg Politics national poll conducted August 5-8, 58% of likely voters said the handling of e-mails by Hillary Clinton bothered them "a lot." Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Congress “received the FBI July 2 witness interview reports, including that of Secretary Clinton’s interview, along with other materials from the FBI’s closed investigative file.” Newsmax reported that Jason Herring, acting assistant director of the FBI, confirmed in a separate letter to the House Oversight Committee that the documents were being provided on a classified basis, but Schiff predicted “their contents will simply be leaked for political purposes.” Brian Fallon, Hillary's campaign spokesman, said : “This is an extraordinarily rare step that was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI. We believe that if these materials are going to be shared outside the Justice Department, they should be released widely so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan leaks." FBI Director Jim Comey had told Congress there was no evidence that Clinton lied to the FBI. At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner confirmed last Tuesday that State has agreed to provide Judicial Watch “any e-mails sent or received by Secretary Clinton in her official capacity during her tenure as Secretary of State” that weren’t already vetted. Comey said last month the FBI found “several thousand” work-related e-mails that weren’t among about 30,000 communications turned over previously. Clinton had said those were all of her work-related messages. Judicial Watch, which has forced the release through FOIA lawsuits of more than 100 e-mails from Clinton the State Department didn’t previously make public, will now receive the remainder, although the government will redact classified information. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said : "The American people will now see more of the e-mails Hillary Clinton tried to hide from them.” ~~~~~~ And there is more. The FBI and US Justice Department are investigating possible US ties to alleged corruption involving Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine, including the work of Paul Manafort, who resigned from the Trump campaign late last week because he didn't want to be "a distraction." But, the investigation of the work in the Ukraine by political operative Tony Podesta has received very little mainstream media attention. Why is Manafort being covered extensively? Because he is a Trump campaign senior official. Why is Podesta not being widely covered? Could it be because Tony Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, chairman of the campaign to elect Hillary Clinton. The probe is looking at the work of the Podesta Group, a lobbying and public relations company headed by Tony Podesta. The FBI declined to comment, CNN reported. The Podesta Group has hired an independent legal firm to investigate whether it had been misled by the Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a not-for-profit group linked to the ousted Ukrainian government, a spokeswoman for the group said in a statement. The US Justice Department, asked to comment on the report, said it remained "committed to helping recover stolen assets on behalf of the people of Ukraine. But, nobody in the mainstream media seems anxious to tie Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman to the Ukraine corruption invesitgation. ~~~~~~ There is also news from TheHill's Julian Hattem, who reported on Friday that House Republicans are "doubling down" in their effort to bring perjury charges against Hillary Clinton over her testimony last year to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. TheHill says : "GOP lawmakers have claimed that Hillary Clinton broke the law by lying under oath about her private email setup during her appearance last October." Next month, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee plan to make the issue central in a hearing with senior officials from the FBI, a committee aide told The Hill on Thursday. Legally, the GOP faces an uphill legal battle, but politically, raising the perjury allegations will keep the issue of Clinton’s truthfulness in the public eye throughout the fall as she battles Republican nominee Donald Trump for the White House. Polls have consistently shown that voters have doubts about Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness. But, proving that someone committed perjury is difficult : the person must be proven to have knowingly told a falsehood under oath. Convincing lawyers at the Department of Justice to take the case would also be difficult, because prosecutors would have to prove that what the former Secretary of State said during the hearing was directly at odds with the truth. And, we might add, recalling DOJ's refusal to take the clear case related to Hillary's use of a secret unsecured email server as Secretary of State, it seems highly unlikely that it would consider pursuing Hillary for perjury. Politically, however, the charge that Hillary Clinton lied to Congress may have legs. Even New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, now the NH Democratic candidate for the Senate, in the last week three times sidestepped questions from CNN about whether she believed Clinton was honest before her campaign released a statement underlying her trust in Hillary. The GOP heads of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees outlined the potential case against Clinton in a joint letter this week to Washington’s US Attorney. The letter of Representatives Bob Goodlatte and Jason Chaffetz indicated instances during which the former Secretary of State “appear[ed] to implicate” two criminal laws barring perjury and false statements : “The evidence collected by the [FBI] during its investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony." Goodlatte and Chaffetz, in their letter, wrote that the FBI discovered classification markings on three of the emails in Clinton’s inbox, seemingly disproving her assertion that “nothing was marked classified at the time I sent or received it.” But, in a letter to Congress this week, the FBI’s congressional liaison noted that those markings were incomplete, might have been made in error and were buried in a chain of emails. FBI congressional liaison Jason Herring said the fact that Clinton received messages with those partial markings “is not clear evidence of knowledge or intent.” The GOP chairmen also raised the matter of Clinton’s claim before Congress that her attorneys “went through every single email” while deciding which emails belonged in a federal storehouse and which could be deleted. FBI Director Comey later said that, in fact, her attorneys “did not individually read the content of all of her emails” but instead looked at “header information” and “search terms” to separate the roughly 30,000 emails that Clinton claimed were work-related from the similarly sized batch of messages that she said were personal. Comey said that the FBI discovered “several thousand” allegedly personal emails that were actually related to her official duties. Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told TheHill : “’Went through’ and ‘read’ are two different things. There’s some ambiguity there. Consequently, there’s some uncertainty about whether the fact she was asserting -- ‘went through’ -- is false, since it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘read every email.’” But, it is beyond doubt that Clinton has repeatedly made statements about her email system during the last year and a half that were later proven false by the FBI. She has been forced to alter her claims that there was no classified information in the messages she sent and received. A total of 113 emails contained information that was classified at the time the messages were sent, Comey said last month. Hillary also insisted that all of the work-related emails were given to the State Department for safekeeping, though in fact thousands were marked as personal and deleted. The FBI has every right to launch a preliminary investigation into allegations that she lied to Congress based on the recommendation of the GOP chairmen, noted Gillers. But unless they can dig up concrete proof that Clinton knew she was lying under oath, the probe might end there. Tyler Doyle, a partner at the Houston-based law firm Smyser Kaplan & Veselka, told TheHill : “If the case were just, ‘Did Hillary Clinton tell things to Congress that turned out not to be true?’ I think the answer there is, yes. Can it be said with certainty, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she willfully made such a statement? That’s tougher.” ~~~~~~ In addition, Judicial Watch released on Monday many more of Hillary Clinton’s email exchanges, some of which the group says show high-dollar Clinton Foundation donors receiving special access to the former Secretary of State. In 2009, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin coordinated with Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain, which was requested by the crown prince. “Cp of Bahrain in tomorrow to Friday[.] Asking to see her[.] Good friend of ours[,]” Band wrote to Abedin on June 23 of that year, a Tuesday. Abedin replied several hours later that the crown prince had attempted to arrange the meeting through “normal channels,” but that Clinton “said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel.” Two days later, Abedin reached out to Band and said : “Offering Bahrain cp 10 tomorrow for meeting woith [sic] hrc[.] If u see him, let him know[.] We have reached out thru official channels[.]” Salman in 2005 established a scholarship program for the Clinton Global Initiative, committing more than $32 million by 2010, according to the Clinton Foundation website. ~~~~~~ And, finally there is Our Girl Hillary trying to blame General Colin Powell, of all people, for her email scandal. On Monday, Powell made his first public statement following press reports indicating that Hillary Clinton told the FBI that he had suggested she use a private server for her email. Powell issued a denial immediately after the news broke, saying he had "no recollection" of any such conversation. On Saturday night, Powell told People Magazine Clinton was trying to blame him for the email scandal : "Her people have been trying to pin it on me," Powell, 79, told PEOPLE Saturday night at the Apollo in the Hamptons 2016 Night of Legends fête in East Hampton, New York. Powell said : "The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did," Powell added. When asked why does Hillary would believe this to be the case? General Powell answered : "Why do you think? It doesn't bother me. But it's okay; I'm free." The FBI and the DOJ decided not to pursue criminal charges against Hillary after a three-and-a-half-hour FBI interview, which was when the she disclosed her alleged conversation with Powell. The alleged conversation first came to light in journalist Joe Conason's upcoming Bill Clinton biography, "Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton," in which he details a dinner party held by Clinton and attended by Powell, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice. Conason wrote : "Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nation's next top diplomat. Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer....[Powell] confirmed a decision she had made months earlier -- to keep her personal account and use it for most messages." It's impossible to escape the conclusion that Hillary Clinton lied to the FBI by blaming Powell for her email scandal. She certainly gave a "false statement" to investigators, no matter how she remembers it. Former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, who was present at the dinner, said on Monday that she recalls no such conversation as Hillary Clinton described. Another interesting point being reported that confirms General Powell's denialis that he advised Clinton to use an AOL email address for her routine communications -- not set up a private server in her home. Clinton came up with that one all by herself. The media blackout on this revelation is nefariously deliberate. A candidate for President lied to federal investigators and the mainstream media shrugs it off. The FBI should open another investigation into this and other possible falsehoods Clinton told during her interview. ~~~~~The State Department made the most shocking announcement of all on Monday when it rpeorted that the FBI has uncovered nearly 15,000 previously undisclosed emailed documents sent directly to or from Hillary Clinton. The admission to almost 50% more than the 30,000 work-related documents Clinton's lawyers turned over to the State Department in 2014 was tweeted out by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton before a court hearing where State Department officials announced the discovery. The State Department says it doesn't yet now what portion of the new batch of emails is related to Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. Hillary had claimed she deleted only personal emails before returning over 55,000 pages of her work-related messages to the State Department last year. TheHill reports State Department lawyers told District Judge James Boasberg on Monday the new documents were found during the FBI's now-closed probe into Clinton's use of a personal email server during her stint at State. The State Department promised the judge it will release the approximate 14,900 new documents, and that it's "prioritizing" appraisal of them, TheHill reports. But what remains unclear is whether the data will be released before the presidential election -- an uncertainty that's been slammed by Judicial Watch as an attempt by the State Department to slow-walk the process in deference to the Democratic presidential nominee. Fitton suggested as much in his Monday tweet, wondering "when will State release them?" According to TheHill, the State Department is figuring out whether any of the new communications -- which the FBI turned over to State following the close of its own investigation -- are of a personal nature or duplicates of previously-released Clinton emails. That process will be completed within a month. It is also reviewing whether the pages are subject to federal records laws — and that assessment has a more direct impact on their public availability. The next court hearing on the case is September 22. That should give Hillary the time needed to zwip up another whopper about how she managed to 'forget' 14,900 emails.~~~~~~ Dear readers, there you have it. Hillary Clinton wants to be President and believes she is trustworthy, even though she has been part of the Clinton Foundation foreign donors pay-to-pay scheme while holding an office of public trust as Secretary of State and whose husband cannot even be trusted to keep his word for a few days when he says it will be different if Hillary is elected; who broke both the spirit and the letter of the law about handling classified materials as a government official by using a secret unsecured email server, lied to the American public about her actions, and then tried to blame General Powell for her illegal act; who has a campaign manager whose brother's lobbying and public affairs firm is being investigated as part of a Ukraine corruption scandal; and, who has lied to Congress under oath but perhaps choosing her words carefully enough to avoid perjury charges. We haven't bothered to rehash other Hillary crimes and misdemeanors, the most important of which is surely Benghazi and her refusal to protect American diplomats who were assassinated on her watch because of her inaction, whose families she then lied to about what really happened, and later accused them of lying when they pointed out her own lies. I cannot on any basis justify Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, let alone her assuming office. Tomorrow, it's Donald Trump's turn in the 'Tale of Two Candidates.'