Nixon: By today's standards, I'm not a crook ... FB Posting
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There is no doubt in my mind, if Nixon were alive today, he'd be muttering: "I got screwed."He would be listening and watching all the scandal-ridden turbulence surrounding the Clintons, and he would just be shaking his head.
Add to all the previous e-mail and private server revelations, this week it was reported Hillary Clinton allegedly (I use that loosely) used her Secretary of State governmental position to get donors to donate to the Clinton Foundation. It certainly appears that favors were granted in the expectation of something in return. In the case of the Clinton Foundation, it looks like huge donations were given to gain access to Hillary Clinton and/or the State Department.
Before anyone says, "Hey, that's what politicians do all the time;" that's true. The problem comes in when one gets something in return for a gift, donation, etc. It's also illegal for any charity to act in the interests of private business or individuals. On a personal level, I spent a majority of my professional career as an executive director of non-profit, charitable agencies. If I did anything close to what is being alleged the Clintons have done, I'd be writing this post from some corrections facility at this time.
Let's take a look at what these new revelations found:
- At least half of 154 non-governmental individuals who got access to Hillary Clinton (as Secretary of State) donated to the Clinton Foundation.
- The executive at the foundation left approximately 150 telephone messages over a 2 year period for Cheryl Mills, a senior aid to Hillary Clinton.
- Hillary Clinton finally met with Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain but only after it was found he contributed $32M to the Clinton Global Initiative. In fact, Bahrain also donated between $50-$100K to the Clinton Foundation.
- Hillary Clinton met with the head of Slim-Fast in 2009, He reportedly gave up to $10M to the foundation.
This is just a small sampling of the money donated to stay in good standing with the Clintons via their foundation.
But to add insult to injury and to show Hillary Clinton's first impulse is to reach for a lie, this week (and on many previous occasions), she said Colin Powell, former Secretary of State under Bush 1, did what she did regarding her e-mails and private server. In other words, she threw the general under her bus. But Powell managed to crawl out and basically say: She's full of crap. That's my language not his. He was more diplomatic. As Rich Lowry of National Review pointed out: "...no one forced her and her husband to run their foundation as a vast pay-to-play scheme whose inner workings must be shielded from public view. That her responsibility and no one else's---certainly not Colin Powell."
It appears that the State Department was for sale while Hillary Clinton headed that department. If that's the case, we can only imagine what she would do as president. And that would have left Richard Nixon shaking his head while downing yet another glass of Chateau Lafite Rothschild.
