BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON left the White House in 2000, “broke” by their own account. By the time Hillary launched her campaign for the presidency in 2016, they were together worth $100 million, though neither had a real job other than her government position as secretary of state or his as an official of the Clinton Foundation, which they created in 1997 and which became the ex-president’s chief vehicle when he left the White House. The Clinton Foundation is a $2-billion tax-exempt 501c3 that has thrived on donations from individuals, corporate enterprises, and foreign governments, many seeking favors from Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Such paid favors to foreigners is forbidden by law, which the foundation helped the Clintons to circumvent. In fact, the majority of the private individuals and companies who were granted access to Secretary of State Clinton were donors to the Clinton Foundation or lined the Clintons’ pockets by giving them astronomical fees—hundreds of thousands of dollars—for a single speech or meeting. This added up to millions in income annually and explains how they were able to enter the ranks of the nation’s richest Americans in such a short time. The vast majority of the Clinton Foundation’s expenditures are not in the form of charitable grants. The standard for 501c3 fund-granting institutions is about 75 percent of overall expenditures for charitable donations; the figure for the Clinton Foundation is 10–15 percent. The rest is allocated to salaries, travel, administrative costs, and activities that could be political or not.
Hillary Clinton was quite aware of the impropriety of the operations of the Clinton Foundation. She was so determined to prevent others from looking at its relationships and internal functions that she took the momentous step of hiding her official correspondence from the public by putting them on a private nongovernment, nonsecure server. This enabled her to circumvent the stipulations of the Freedom of Information Act requiring transparency of government officials. In taking this step, she knowingly violated multiple provisions of the Espionage Act and exposed hundreds of thousands of e-mails, including many that contained classified and top-secret information about the government she swore to serve and protect, to America’s enemies around the world.
This risk seemed necessary to her because she was also aware that the lines that she, her husband, and the Clinton staff regularly crossed to serve their political and personal aggrandizement agendas exposed them to prosecution under multiple laws other than the Espionage Act. These illegalities and problematic conflicts of interest were visible in the activities of Huma Abedin, Hillary’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department. Abedin was employed simultaneously by the foundation and the Teneo Group, a global business advisory firm and investment bank whose mission was to make the Clintons rich.
One of the hacked documents released by WikiLeaks was a memo from Teneo’s CEO, Doug Band. The memo was written to John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, a 501c3 brain trust for the Democratic Party and subsequently chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In the memo, Band explains:
We have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals [for Bill Clinton]. In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family—for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like. Neither Justin nor I are separately compensated for these activities (e.g., we do not receive a fee for, or percentage of, the more than $50 million in for-profit activity we have personally helped to secure for President Clinton to date or the $66 million in future contracts, should he choose to continue with those engagements).1
Band’s concern about the selling of influence by the Clintons and himself—in other words, the graft involved in the complex relationship between Secretary of State Clinton, her husband, the Clinton Foundation, and Teneo—was voiced in a second e-mail, dated November 12, 2011, and addressed to Clinton and her attorney, Cheryl Mills, along with Huma Abedin: “I’m starting to worry that if this story gets out we’re screwed.”2
The question is, why didn’t it get out, and why weren’t they screwed? Why did it take a WikiLeaks hack of internal e-mails and memos to uncover this corruption at the highest levels of government and involving a secretary of state who shaped America’s foreign policy? It’s not as though Bill Clinton was a secret agent or the Clinton Foundation and its enabler, Teneo, institutions that were cloaked in secrecy. Why did Republicans conduct no investigations into the operations of the Clinton Foundation in the six years they controlled both houses of Congress, when such an investigation would have changed the whole tenor of the 2016 presidential election, affecting the shape of things for years to come?
One answer is that influence peddling, as Donald Trump complained throughout the election, is a way of life in Washington, and the fallout from such an inquiry could spread far beyond the Clintons. But a far more important reason is the familiar Republican failure of nerve, an unwillingness if the stakes seem high enough—if national security is involved, for example—to poke the hornets’ nest.
Consider the case of Hillary Clinton’s right-hand aide, Huma Abedin. Abedin was hired by Hillary from a previous job working for an organization run by the Muslim World League, the creator of al-Qaeda. Her boss, Abdullah Omar Nasseef, was Secretary General of the league, and is wanted by authorities in connection with the 9/11 attacks. Abedin’s mother and brother are leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, as was her late father.3 She herself was a board member of the Muslim Students Association, a Muslim Brotherhood front group. During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the Obama administration threw its support to the Brotherhood, helping them come to power in Egypt and opposing the al-Sisi regime that subsequently overthrew them. A reasonable question would be, did Huma Abedin, Hillary’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department, influence America’s tilt toward the Brotherhood during these turbulent events that affected America’s policy and eroded America’s power in the Middle East? Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and four other House Republicans actually signed a letter to the Inspector General asking a series of questions to that effect, suggesting an inquiry was in order.
Note that only 5 Republicans out of more than 200 Republican House members were even willing to ask such questions. The reason became quickly obvious, as the letter was denounced by liberal media as a “witch-hunt,” and the signers were attacked by fellow Republicans, including Speaker of the House John Boehner, who said: “I don’t know Huma, but from everything that I do know of her she has a sterling character. And I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.”4 Abedin’s collusion in the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and violations of the Espionage Act do not indicate a “sterling character” and seem potentially far more dangerous than asking questions. There were no accusations in the letter, only suggested inquiries, and reasonable ones at that. The five Republicans who thought these inquiries might be important for the nation’s security and untold victims of future violence in the Middle East were sent to the congressional woodshed, where they were isolated by the Republican leadership.
Republicans need to ask themselves whether they are serious about the fate of their nation and whether they are willing to stand up and do something about it. Hundreds of thousands of people, including Americans, died in the Middle East because of the failure of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry policies supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, and millions became refugees. The stakes in these battles are high, and the casualties have already come home.