The latest on the money laundering and commingling scam know as the Clinton Foundation passed the 'stranger than fiction' level a long time ago, but it's rapidly descending into it's own realm.
Mrs. Clinton is refusing to release the names and countries of origin of over 1,100 big money donors, many of whom gave money via the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP)—a Canadian affiliate of the Clinton Foundation established by Frank Giustra, who has donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and whose company received State department approval of a huge uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan tat ended up with control of over 20% of America's uranium mines and stockpiles passing to Russian control. And that also resulted in massive cash contributions to the Clinton Foundation, including donations from the company’s chairman totaling $2.35 million that were previously not disclosed.
What's especially ironic is that this came after the Clinton Foundation signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Obama White House in 2008 promising to disclose its donors as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of state. The MOU specifically mentions the “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative” the former name of the charity as part of the Clinton Foundation covered by the agreement.
Guess what? They never revealed any of those donors, and Mrs. Clinton is refusing to do so now:
Giustra says that’s because Canada’s federal privacy law forbids CGEP, a Canadian-registered charity, from revealing its donors. A memo he provided explaining the legal rationale cites CGEP’s “fiduciary obligations” to its contributors and Canada’s Personal Information Privacy and Electronic Disclosure Act. “We are not allowed to disclose even to the Clinton Foundation the names of our donors,” he says.
On Saturday, responding to the Times story, Maura Pally, the acting CEO of the Clinton Foundation, issued a statement echoing this assertion: “This is hardly an effort on our part to avoid transparency–unlike in the U.S., under Canadian law, all charities are prohibited from disclosing individual donors without prior permission from each donor.”
Except, whoopsie:
Canadian tax and privacy law experts were dubious of this claim. Len Farber, former director of tax policy at Canada's Department of Finance, said he wasn't aware of any tax laws that would prevent the charity from releasing its donors' names. "There's nothing that would preclude them from releasing the names of donors," he said. "It's entirely up to them."
Mark Blumberg, a charity lawyer at Blumberg Segal in Toronto, added that the legislation "does not generally apply to a registered charity unless a charity is conducting commercial activities... such as selling the list to third parties."
CGEP might have a stronger claim if it promised anonymity to donors, says David Fraser, a partner at McInnes Cooper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who runs a blog on Canadian privacy law. He’s more skeptical of the argument that a charity has a fiduciary duty to donors. "They might have a fiduciary duty to the people they're collecting money to help," he said, "but for the donors that doesn't seem to have the ring of truth."
And then, there's this little item:
While Giustra says he can’t reveal any names, he is willing to disclose that CGEP money comes from “mostly Canadian donors.” The charity is registered in Canada, he says, not to hide the identity of its donors but to enable them to receive Canadian tax breaks that can reimburse them for nearly half of what they give.
However, not all CGEP’s big donors are Canadian. The Canada Revenue Agency—Canada’s IRS—requires charities to reveal whether they receive donations of more than $10,000 (Canadian) from people who are not Canadians, employed in the country, or carrying on business there. In both 2009 and 2010, CGEP filings show that it reported receiving such donations to Canadian authorities.
More from Sean Davis at The Federalist:
The donations were routed through the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada), or CGEPartnership, a Canadian charitable organization. That organization then effectively bundled the foreign donations and sent them along to the Clinton Foundation itself, and it did all of this without ever disclosing the individual foreign sources of the income.
If that sounds to you like more of a laundering operation than a charitable organization, that’s because it certainly looks like more of a laundering operation than a charitable organization. In this case, however, rather than taking cash from blatantly illegal activities (as far as we know) and then cleaning it up by running it through legitimate businesses before it ends up at its final destination, the Clinton Foundation mops up cash from wealthy foreigners, bundles it within a larger organization to hide the money’s original source, and then funnels the cash from that legitimate charity right into the Clinton Foundation coffers. [...]
Multiple Canadian tax and privacy law experts contacted by The Federalist, the Washington Post, and BloombergPolitics said there was no such blanket prohibition on public disclosure of charitable donor identities. While Canada does include a ban on the release of donor information in the course of commercial activity, it specifically exempts fundraising from that definition. And because the public disclosure of a donor’s name doesn’t include any transaction or consideration, it’s not considered to be commercial activity.
“Federal law prohibits disclosure related to commercial activity: things like selling, renting, or bartering of a list. Fundraising is not a covered activity under PIPEDA, the federal privacy law,” Adam Aptowitzer, a Canadian charitable organization attorney, told The Federalist.
And the money quote: If you look holistically at the entire scheme’s setup, at the massive flow of foreign cash, at the refusal to disclose donors, at the secret (and now destroyed) private e-mail servers, at the blatantly bogus excuses, at the falsified tax returns, everything about it suddenly makes a lot more sense...In its current form, the Clinton Foundation is a charity in the same way La Cosa Nostra was an Italian soup kitchen.
Especially since after 'expenses' only around - wait for it- only 10% or less of the swag was actually spent on anything that could remotely be called 'charity' per the Clinton Foundation's 2013 tax returns.
The Canadian outlet isn't the only Clinton Foundation 'subsidiary' around either. For instance, there's one in Sweden whose primary purpose is fundraising that was registered in 2010 will Hillary Clinton was still secretary of state.They took in $66M Swedish Krona ($8M US) during Hillary's last year in office.And there's another on in the UK whose primary function is fundraising.
But wait, there's more.
The Clintons have stooped to a new low, drafting their daughter to lie for them in public. Even NPR wouldn't swallow this one:
Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary, sought to tamp down new allegations that rich foreign donors had influenced her mother while she was secretary of state by noting that an international anti-corruption group had endorsed the foundation's disclosure practices.
"What the Clinton foundation has said is that we will be kind of even more transparent," said the former first daughter, now vice chairman of the foundation, at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. "Even though Transparency International and others have said we're among the most transparent foundations, we'll disclose donors on a quarterly basis, not just an annual basis."
The problem with that, though, is Transparency International never cited the Clinton foundation. It did award Hillary Clinton its 2012 TI-USA Integrity Award when Clinton was secretary of state for "recognizing her contributions as secretary of state in raising the importance of transparency and anticorruption as elements of U.S. policy," Claudia Dumas, president of Transparency International, told NPR. (The organization put out a fuller statement Monday.)
"I am very honored to be here and delighted to be supporting the work of Transparency International-USA," Clinton said on March 22, 2012. She added, "Corruption and the lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government."
She never mentioned the Clinton foundation, and Dumas' organization is focused on promoting government transparency.
"We do not do an examination or any ranking of foundations," said Dumas, who noted that Chelsea Clinton may have simply made an innocent mistake.
It had to have been. I mean, have you ever known any of the Clintons to lie?
chelsea's middle name is photoshop.
ReplyDeletei am reminded of something that leno used to do on late, when photoshop first came out.
he would suggest that if two well known celebrities mated, what their off-spring would look like.
the photo that he would show was basically a photoshop of the respective physical features of the two celebrities.
and that is how you get chelsea's face. it is even more apparent when you see the three of them together.