Vincent J. Curtis
18 Oct 2016
The headline yesterday morning on the Fox News Website
screamed, “TAKE THE MONEY! Staff kept
Hillary in the dark over raking in foreign funds.” Of course they did.
That is why the tangled web of Clinton charities was
organized and run as it was: to rake in money for the Clintons, sow confusion,
and give them deniability. The WikiLeaks
dump has given us and inside look at the Foundation.
Chelsea Clinton must never had had the birds and the bees
talk with her parents. She, apparently,
had always assumed that they were on the up and up. So when she was appointed to a board of one
of the Clinton Foundation charities, she was shocked to discover the unethical
practices that were employed for raising money.
The money raisers were hustling access and influence in return for cash,
and were blatantly throwing around the Clinton name to get it. Chelsea was told that one of her father’s
staffers had “called Members of the House and Members of Parliament, ‘on behalf
of President Clinton’ for Teneo clients.”
She was alarmed all the conflicts of interest and outside incomes. She was worried at the potential effect these
practices could have on her father’s good name (!), and believed he would be
horrified if he knew.
Therefore, she called for a governance review to try to
clean up the practices. It was Chelsea’s
efforts in this regard that led Doug Band to complain to John Podesta about the
problems Chelsea was causing at the Foundation, saying that she was an entitled
and power-hungry young woman, to intimate that she was responsible for a
suicide attempt of a financial officer, to call her “a spoiled brat” and an
irrational ingrate “who runs to daddy to change a decision or inject herself
into the process.” Band said that “she
was acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues
to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn’t found her way
and has a lack of focus in her life.” Band
went so far as to suggest that Chelsea was the cause of Bruce Lindsay’s stroke.
To understand how the Foundation worked, B.C. (before
Chelsea), you need follow the careers of Doug Band and Declan Kelly who, with
Paul Keary, formed Teneo Corporation; and look at how Teneo Corporation
operates. Justin Cooper (of server fame)
was an early Teneo official.
Podesta took over as temporary CEO of the Clinton Foundation
in late 2011, and found an organization (if something so labyrinthine could be
called organized) run by Bill’s old cronies and with a $2 billion pot of
money. Chelsea was appointed to the
board of one of the tentacles and began to apply what she had learned at
McKinsey & Co. Consulting. She was
the one who insisted on a governance review by the New York law firm Simpson
Thacher, and in particular by lawyer Victoria Bjorklund. This move was seen as
a vote of no-confidence in Doug Band.
After conducting the governance review, Simpson Thacher
found that many people at the Foundation were unaware of the foundation’s
policies related to conflicts of interest and outside employment. The employees of the Foundation themselves
told Simpson Thacher that the Foundation needed more Board and management
oversight, more strategic and budgetary planning, and had to address potential
conflicts of interest.
Simpson Thacher recommended that the Board hold more
frequent meetings, to add directors who knew what they were doing, to establish
an audit committee, to appoint a Board Chair (!) to work with the CEO, and to
involve the Board in strategic planning and to review the effectiveness of
existing programs and initiatives. They
further recommended that the Foundation hire a full time COO based in New York,
hold regular staff meetings and management training, and have management work
with the Board on strategic and budgetary planning. All these were deficiencies that existed in
the Foundation, B.C.
Simpson Thacher took the Foundation to task over conflicts
of interest and the failure to train in, and enforce, conflict of interest
guidelines.
As a result of these recommendations, Doug Band, Declan
Kelly, Paul Keary moved full time to Teneo, and Justin Cooper joined them. Other personal moved from the Foundation to
Bill Clinton’s personal (and taxpayer paid) staff full time.
Most people who worked at the Foundation, including Chelsea,
can be forgiven if they thought the whole operation was on the up and up. They
couldn’t see that the confusion and mismanagement of the various interconnected
charities under the Clinton umbrella was deliberate, for it concealed how the
money was siphoned off and where it went.
It didn’t occur to them that the Foundation administrative overhead was
so large that little was left for actual charitable work, but it did create a lot
of happy people who spoke highly of the Foundation’s “work”. Bubba deliberately chose not to look into the
inner workings of the Foundation. Bubba
had hired hustlers who knew how to raise money, and so long as he was living in
style he didn’t want to know the details.
In the middle of all this the name of Cheryl Mills keeps
popping up. John Podesta kept her fully
informed of the upheaval at the Foundation in 2011 and 2012. In the midst of the governance review, Mills
sent Podesta, Band, and Justin Cooper a draft “Infrastructure Model” for the
Foundation. It outlined proposed
structures for handling Bill Clinton’s personal, political, and foundational
business, and these, if adopted, would have moved Band and Cooper out of line
authority, and proposed that they be hired as consultants, on an as-needed
basis, instead. At the time, Mills was
employed by the State Department and worked directly for Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, served as an advisor
to Teneo from July 2011, until he resigned on January 1st, 2012, and
became a client instead. The proven
money raisers, thus, weren’t left out in the cold.
Another name that pops up is Huma Abedin, who moved over to
Teneo when it became viable.
The Clinton Foundation began as an organization to pay for
Bill’s legal bills during the Lewinsky scandal.
Then it morphed into a fund-raising vessel for his presidential
library. Then began the Clinton Global
Initiative. Bill used, or hired,
big-money fund-raisers to keep this going, and Hillary used many of them for fundraising
for her 2008 campaign. The fund-raising
hustlers figured out just how much money could be had by selling the Clinton
name and access to the Clintons, and the main ones carried this knowledge over
to Teneo. Bubba didn’t want to know how
it was done, just that it kept him living in style. Bubba didn’t care if the hustlers did well
for themselves, or not, or precisely how.
If Hillary thinks she is innocent of wrong-doing, it is
because she willfully remained ignorant of the wrong-doing done in her name and
for the financial benefit of her family.
Nevertheless, her closest aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, as well
as daughter Chelsea, kept her fully informed of the needs of the Foundation
during her tenure as Secretary of State.
It would have been a conflict of interest for her to support Foundation
business; she just did the things Mills and Abedin said she needed to do in
certain areas. She didn’t need to be
told that these things were for to the benefit of the Foundation. She simply provided a quo and trusted her
aides that a quid existed somewhere.
Hence, as shown in the book Clinton
Cash, Russian oligarchs got control of twenty percent of America’s uranium
production and the Clinton Foundation got $135 million from a Canadian
donor. There is no visible quid pro quo
in this transaction, but the laws of physics require that there must be.
A magician has a number of assistants who help make his
magic act work; and if you pay attention to the magician, as you are supposed
to, you only see magical things, you can’t see how the trick actually works. The Clinton Foundation supported Bill and
Hillary with many magical assistants.
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