Hillary and Bill Clinton didn't just go off to write their memoirs after Bill left the White House. Rather, they set up an organization called the Clinton Foundation, headed by Bill and later their daughter Chelsea, which is a money-vac, sucking up huge donations denominated in millions of dollars (and paying themselves magnificent salaries along the way) from major domestic entities and individuals as well as foreign leaders and governments (many of them unsavory repressive regimes like Kuwait, Oman and Qatar).
In classic Clinton fashion, they have skirted close to the edge legally. Clinton reportedly promised the Obama administration, when she was being considered for the Secretary of State post, that the Clinton Foundation would not accept any donations from foreign governments during her tenure unless those governments had already given money to the foundation prior to her appointment. That was already a pretty loose standard for avoiding any appearance of undue foreign influence over diplomatic policy, but even that low standard was violated when, in 2010, the foundation accepted a $500,000 gift from the government of Algeria, which, it must be noted, was at that moment embroiled in lobbying the US to cut it some slack in terms of any condemnation for its human rights abuses (a determination that is made annually -- you guessed it! -- by the State Department).
Clinton and the foundation admitted, when this donation was exposed, that it had been "a mistake" to take that money, but then excused themselves saying that the money had just been a donation for Haitian earthquake relief, and that it had all been "passed through" to Haitian relief efforts. But that begs the question of why a government like Algeria's could not have given those funds directly to relief organizations, like the Red Crescent or the Red Cross of the UN. It beggars belief to hear it claimed that Algeria felt that the best way to offer relief to suffering Haitians would be to give half a million bucks to the Clintons.
It is also a virtual certainty that negotiations over and instructions concerning the terms of that donation would have been among the conversations automatically stored on Clinton's email server.
We'll probably never know what corruption Clinton was involved in as Secretary of State though, because she deleted some 30,000 emails, saying they were reviewed by not a State Department lawyer but rather by her private attorney. Right there we almost certainly have the commission of a whole bushel of crimes involving destruction of evidence, since a private attorney is hired to determine what is and is not a matter of private or government business, but rather is hired to protect the interests of his or her client. If those emails were properly wiped by an IT expert, there is no way to recover them. That may effectively protect Clinton from prosecution, but it should not protect her from political attack and political damage.
Sanders should be putting her on trial in the campaign, demanding that she explain why she left it to her private attorney instead of the a State Department legal office to decide which of her emails (if any!) to delete. Let the voters be the jury. He should do this if for no other reason than because we can be sure, if he doesn't, and if she wins the nomination in July, whoever wins the Republican nomination will be doing the same thing he should have done every day of the general election campaign.
The same goes for the transcripts of all those richly-compensated speeches Hillary Clinton gave to some of the nation's largest, most reprehensible and most crooked banks. If, as she says, there is nothing embarrassing that she said in those speeches, she should have no qualms about releasing the transcripts. If she won't release them, it's obvious that they are hugely embarrassing. At best, they are probably examples of the most fawning sucking up to power and wealth. At worst, they are promises to protect these companies which criminally wrecked the US and global economy in the first decade of this century, from any serious regulations and enforcement actions that might prevent them from doing the same thing again.
Clinton, by the way, also lied about the availability of transcripts of those speeches she delivered. When the issue first came up, she said she would release them if she could determine who controlled access to them, and if those parties would agree. Only later did it come out that the making of transcripts of her talks was stipulated by her agent, at her request, because she wanted them available for when she someday wrote her memoir. Now that it's clear that she owns the copyright to her talks, and has full control over whether to release them (and no doubt has copies of her own anyhow, given her plans for later use of them), she is saying she'll only do so if all candidates release theirs. And isn't referring to just her Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, but to all the remaining Republican candidates too.
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