Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Not News, Clinton Foundation is Sleezy

The news is that the New York Times wrote a story on it.

Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions
Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.
The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.
And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.~snip~
The Telegraph does a better job of translating the NYT's newspeak into plainer language.

 The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for Bill and Hillary

Anybody who's lived in Arkansas for any time knows that the kind of "good old boy" politics that the Clintons practice was finely honed during Bills time as governor.
What's really interesting is the appropriation of the foundation as a base of operations for Hillary.
In the coming months, as Mrs. Clinton mulls a 2016 presidential bid, the foundation could also serve as a base for her to home in on issues and to build up a stable of trusted staff members who could form the core of a political campaign.
Mrs. Clinton’s staff at the foundation’s headquarters includes Maura Pally, a veteran aide who advised her 2008 presidential campaign and worked at the State Department, and Madhuri Kommareddi, a former policy aide to President Obama.
Dennis Cheng, Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment drive, which some of the Clintons’ donors already describe as a dry run for 2016.
And Mrs. Clinton’s personal staff of roughly seven people — including Huma Abedin, wife of the New York mayoral candidate Anthony D. Weiner — will soon relocate from a cramped Washington office to the foundation’s headquarters. They will work on organizing Mrs. Clinton’s packed schedule of paid speeches to trade groups and awards ceremonies and assist in the research and writing of Mrs. Clinton’s memoir about her time at the State Department, to be published by Simon & Schuster next summer.
That right there begs the question that, seeing as how the Clinton Foundation is listed as a 501(c)930 organization, if Hillary runs in 2015 for president will the Foundation get the same scrutiny as Tea Party aligned organizations do?

2 comments:

Third News said...

Totally missed that Hillary Clinton has a memoir in the works and about her time at the State Department? Is it about her office decor?

systolic said...

Could be, I can't think of a thing she accomplished as sec. of state.