Tuesday, September 20, 2016

But Yeah, Hillary's the Crooked One

Opinion | thepilot.com

In September of 2013, the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi, publicly announced that her office was considering investigating the activities of Hillary Clinton.
A similar probe had already been commenced in New York. Bondi at the time had personally solicited campaign contributions from Clinton.
Six days after the AG’s office announced that they were “reviewing the allegations” against Clinton, the Clinton Family foundation wrote a check for $25,000 to the AG’s campaign, after which Bondi’s office announced that they’d decided not to pursue action against Clinton after all.
Pressed about the matter, Clinton claimed she never even spoke with the AG, a claim which was quickly revealed not to be true by Bondi’s own spokesperson.
The payments came to light only after the IRS levied a paltry $2,500 fine against the foundation because it had violated IRS rules about charities making political donations. It had also, according to a story in The Washington Post, “failed to disclose the large gift to the Internal Revenue Service, instead reporting that the donation was given to an unrelated group with a similar name — effectively obscuring the contribution.”
Just goes to show how corrupt and untrustworthy Hillary Clinton is, doesn’t it? Even though there’s no specific evidence of a quid pro quo, you have to admit it certainly raises questions about her integrity and her fitness for office.
And that ridiculous $2,500 fine? The entitled Hillary Clinton gets away with things the rest of us would go to jail for.
It’s an outrage that this story hasn’t been given front page status in every major newspaper and been the top story on every network. There really should be some Congressional hearings on the shady dealings of Hillary Rodham Clinton. ...
Oh, wait. Did I say Clinton? Sorry, my bad. The family foundation that donated 25 large to the campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was actually the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
The probe being conducted in New York that Bondi said she’d been considering imitating was one into the fraudulent Trump University — you know, the scam where Trump, the Russian-backed presidential candidate with well-documented ties to the New York and Jersey mobs, the Russian Mafia, and the Hong Kong Triads, has an upcoming court date on a racketeering claim.
But everyone knows it’s Clinton that’s the crooked one.
Certainly, however, only some kind of liberal bigot would think there was any impropriety in a prosecutor who’s publicly said she’s considering a formal investigation receiving a large check from the potential target of that investigation six days after said announcement, then deciding “Nah, it’s not worth going after the guy.”
We know there’s nothing improper about it because both Bondi and Trump said so.
Oh, and Trump also gave $35,000 to Texas AG Greg Abbott, who’d already dropped a probe of Trump U after they shut down the operation in Texas and got out of town with the loot. Surely that was just a coincidence, too.
But, you know, Hillary’s the crooked one. After all, her foundation took contributions from, and then had meetings with, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was working to aid poor people with so-called “micro-loans” in Bangladesh.
The Hillary group also met with the head of charitable giving for the cosmetics firm Estee Lauder, who was partnering with the State Department and USAID to fight AIDS, gender-based violence in Africa, and sexual slavery in Cambodia
Then there’s Wall Street mogul Stephen Schwarzman, whose Blackstone Group donated millions to “three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast” and who got — well, the AP so-called “expose” on the Foundation that I’m quoting in this paragraph isn’t really clear about what he got. It says he was “one of several attendees” at a breakfast meeting with Clinton, that his wife “sat at Clinton’s table” at the Kennedy Center honors and later introduced Schwarzman, and that the State department was “working on a visa issue” for him.
Nothing in the story says what the “issue” was or what, if anything, Schwarzman got.
Those are the top three examples the AP pulled from all the others to suggest some sort of evil-doing on Clinton’s part. Some pretty shady characters, there to be sure, and some deep skullduggery going on, what with fighting AIDS and sexual slavery overseas and introducing people at the Kennedy Center and all.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump pays off a couple of attorneys general to get them to leave his Trump U scam alone after bragging that politicians do what he says because he gives them money.
He knows the system is broken because he helped break it. And you expect him to be less corrupt if he’s elected?