How quickly things change in just a year. It wasn’t 12 months ago that Democrat Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite to be the next American commander-in-chief, with former President Bill Clinton ready to move back into the White House as First Husband.
Both Clintons presided over a supposedly nonprofit “humanitarian” foundation bearing their name that stank to high heaven of financial shenanigans, accounting irregularities and functions as a kickback operation and slush fund. It enabled the Clintons to jet around the world and rub shoulders with billionaires, statesmen, diplomats and political operators as the prospect of Hillary jumping into the U.S. leadership role would have put the nation’s former First Family back in the spot they had coveted since moving out of the Pennsylvania Avenue digs in 2001 (and purloining furniture, china and rugs along the way).
After the press got word of the foundations shady dealings they dug in with both hands. After the questions wore on and on for the Clintons, even from the normally Clinton-friendly media, Bill Clinton himself made noises about the possibility of tapering the functioning of the Clinton Foundation or at least turning away contributions from foreign donors if Hillary actually took office. There was even talk of the Clintons’ distancing themselves from the Foundation, but at no point was there ever a serious prospect that it would be shut down entirely, even if Hillary was victorious at the polls.
However, now that the unexpected has come to pass and she lost the election, only two months have gone by and the Clintons have announced that the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) — a major component of the Clinton Foundation — will be shuttering.
The CGI was centered around an annual conference that took place in different cities every year. It allowed wealthy donors to network with corporations and nonprofits and featured events in Rio, Hong Kong, New York and other international destinations.
Some of the major donors to the CGI specifically were mining magnate Frank Giustra, Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk and sports team owner Tom Golisano. But now that the political prospects for both Clintons appear to be nonexistent, word is out that donations to the Clinton Foundation as a whole are down by as much as 70 percent. The governments of Australia and Germany have stopped donating to it. It’s quite possible that the Clinton Foundation itself could be unwound, although a more realistic possibility is that it may simply be downsized to a much smaller fraction of its former size.
In an interview with Alex Marlow of satellite radio network SiriusXM, Peter Schweizer, author of the bestselling book-turned-movie Clinton Cash, gave credit to Breitbart News and other websites for running many of his reports about the Clinton Foundation. “I cannot imagine how many stories — it’s got to be north of a hundred stories on Clinton corruption — played an essential role… The Clintons have essentially made it so obvious that there’s a connection between this so-called charitable activity, CGI, and their political fortune,” said Schweizer.
He went on to say, “They didn’t even wait until the election was a distant memory to say, you know what, we’re going to wrap this up. They ended it immediately.”
“I think it’s just further confirmation to what we always believed, which is that their charitable activities really were directly linked to their political power, and now that that political power is gone, really honestly for the first time in 25 years — think about that — 25 years the Clintons have been on the national political stage. They’re gone, and they’re essentially saying, ‘Look, there’s no need or purpose behind doing this charitable work, so we’re just going to shut it down,'” said Schweizer.
Schweizer also mentioned WikiLeaks’ contribution to the action: “Because let’s face it, what we talked about has been confirmed by the Podesta emails, it’s been confirmed by these events: if they can’t sell access to political power, they just don’t have a product, in the form of their form of philanthropy, that people want to donate to.”
Schweizer also weighed in on the possibility of Chelsea Clinton attempting to run as the next generation of a Clinton political dynasty, but had his doubts about her viability as it was Chelsea who had called for extensive audits of the family’s Foundation in the first place.
“Does Chelsea now have to bring the next generation forth, so they can continue with this political apparatus? There’s a lot of talk of that, that Chelsea’s going to run for Congress, potentially in two years… Bill and Hillary were fine with what was going on; the aides around them were fine. It was really Chelsea who was pushing this reform agenda. So I give her credit for that.”
But Schweizer doubted the weight of Chelsea’s political “presence,” despite her pseudo-celebrity appearances in gossip columns and puffy magazine pieces. “You’ve still got to show you’ve got the chops to actually get things done for your district in Congress… you [have to] have a certain innate strength and an ability to perform. I don’t think the celebrity [factor] is going to be enough,” Schweizer advised. “She’s going to have to prove that.”
On the other hand, Chelsea could count on the Clinton’s built-in financial network, which, according to Schweizer, is worth “a lot of money.” Schweizer reminded people that “Hillary Clinton did not win in November, but remember… they raised a lot of money for that race. Their ability to raise a lot of money for Chelsea I don’t think should be underestimated.”
When Schweizer was asked if he thought Hillary Clinton could run for president again in 2020, he said he doubted she would due to her advanced age and weakness in the 2016 race. He also suggested that Democrats bear the Clintons a grudge over the poor electoral results of last year.
“We know they had the election wired against Bernie Sanders. We know they’ve got a lot of allies. But there’s a lot of bubbling resentment among the Democratic grassroots that the Clintons need to go. They had their turn; they had their chance. A lot of Democrats are convinced that if they just had a different candidate, they could have beat Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s true, but I think there’s a lot of that thought out there.”
As opposed to the Bush family, Schweizer believes that the Clintons are going to go “kicking and screaming [and] fade into history.”
Schweizer added that he’s a Trump fan, declaring, “I love the Trump message of ‘drain the swamp.’ I think there’s some very serious things that he’s looking at that could get bipartisan support, to work to drain the swamp. If for no other reason, think about this: Donald Trump is the first candidate, I would have to say, going back more than 30 years, if not longer, who is not really beholden to the money class in Washington, D.C. The lobbyists, the PACs — they didn’t give him money, so he doesn’t feel like he owes them anything.”
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
