Guess Who Paid for Hillary’s ‘Private’ Server? Look in the Mirror!

September 01, 2016

Guess Who Paid for Hillary's 'Private' Server? Look in the Mirror!

Great news, America. Your tax dollars were used to supplement the salaries for Clinton Foundation staff.

Bill Clinton's staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family's foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife's private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

This is the Clintons in a nutshell: use a private server to escape FOIA and Congressional subpoenas, and make the taxpayers pay for it.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their non-profit foundation, Hillary Clinton's State Department and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple's aides . . .

The program supplemented the income of Clinton's staff, while providing them with coveted federal government benefits, alleviating the need for the Clinton Foundation or other Clinton-linked entities to foot the bill for such benefits. Similarly, Clinton aides got the GSA to pay for computer technology used partly by the foundation.

An analysis of the records provided by GSA, combined with Clinton Foundation tax returns, found that at least 13 of the 22 staffers who have been paid by GSA to work for Clinton's personal office also worked for the Clinton Foundation.

Not many people object to the federal General Services Administration's covering the costs of a former president's pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel — because most of the time these are fairly minor expenses. For example, each president gets $96,600 per year for staffing that they can divide as they see fit; they could have one staffer making the full amount or three making about $32,000 per year, etcetera. Politico's report notes George H. W. Bush has four people on his taxpayer-funded staff, while Bill Clinton has 10. In other words, the GSA funding was used to boost salaries of Clinton staffers making money from other sources — i.e., the Foundation.

I know this will stun you, but foreign governments and individuals will still be able to give to the Clinton Foundation in a Hillary Clinton presidency — even with the "reforms" the Clintons promised.

While Bill Clinton's proposal would stop a foreign-registered entity from transferring largely untraceable money as CGEP did, there's nothing in his proposal to stop a foreign government or individual from giving millions of dollars to a U.S.-registered foundation, which could then transfer that cash on to the Clinton Foundation.

"We know from the campaign finance world that determining whether foreign funds are behind a donation from a U.S.-based organization that does not disclose its donors is almost impossible," said Larry Noble, the general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan watchdog.

Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the non-partisan watchdog Public Citizen, echoed Noble's concerns.

"It just isn't going to sit well with the public if it starts becoming exposed that a 501c [non-profit entity] is making huge contributions and then later we can figure out that 501c has actually been set up by Saudi Arabia," he said.

Heck, if you're Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Algeria, just give money to an individual — either via cash, overseas account, or — and ask the individual to give the donation on your behalf. As I wrote yesterday:

Accepting only contributions from U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and U.S.-based independent foundations? Why should anyone assume there's not a single U.S. citizen who's willing to make donations to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of a foreign country in exchange for favors down the road? You'll recall that one of the allegations troubling Paul Manafort was that he had worked on behalf of a Ukrainian political party, steering its money into U.S. lobbying firms without disclosing it.

Foundations are traditionally created by people who are past the point in their careers where they seek to set public policy. You can't have a foundation that's free to take as much money as it can from anyone AND still have a direct say in what laws get passed and what regulations get enacted.

Trump Arrives at the Common-Sense Position He Once Derided

Donald Trump, last night:

According to federal data, there are at least 2 million criminal aliens now inside the country. We will begin moving them out day one, in joint operations with local, state and federal law enforcement.

Beyond the 2 million, there are a vast number of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled or evaded justice. But their days on the run will soon be over. They go out, and they go out fast.

Moving forward, we will issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever, and they will be placed into immediate removal proceedings. We will terminate the Obama Administration's deadly non-enforcement policies that allow thousands of criminal aliens to freely roam our streets.

"Any crime whatsoever" presumably includes drunk driving.

Back when the Gang of Eight immigration bill was under consideration, Mickey Kaus noticed the bill barred only "habitual drunk drivers" — meaning anyone convicted of three or more times of driving under the influence or driving while intoxicated would not qualify for a path to citizenship. So the first two convictions are free?

It's hard to get a precise figure on the number of people killed by drunk-driving illegal immigrants, but we're probably looking at a number between 3,000 and 4,000 per year.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, which obtains state-by-state data from the federal government Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database — found that 20 percent of fatal crashes involved an unlicensed driver. From 2010-2014, there was an average of 32,887 road deaths per year, which would mean 6,577 were caused by unlicensed drivers. Those drivers include citizens with suspended or revoked licenses, and those who never had licenses. But if half are illegal immigrants, it would be in line with Rosenberg's estimates.

And of course, these are just the fatalities; the number of non-fatal accidents involving drunk-driving illegal immigrants is presumably much higher.

The philosophy of focusing deportation efforts on dangerous criminals who threaten their fellow citizens the most, makes a lot of sense. This also happens to be the policy of just about all of Trump's rivals during the primary, a position that was regularly derided as "amnesty," "open borders," and "globalist" from Trump's fan base. In a debate, Trump dismissed Cruz and Rubio as being for "amnesty."

You can argue that deporting criminals first has been the mainstream Republican position for a decade. Rudy Giuliani back in 2007, who was then a supporter of a path to citizenship:

As the mayor of New York City, I wanted to get the Immigration Service to get rid of the drug dealers who are coming out of jail. It makes no sense--after they have been in jail for selling drugs--we now have to keep them in the US. They couldn't do it because they had other people lined up to throw out. They had like a professor who over-stayed his visa. I had a drug dealer who had maybe killed people. A person who comes here illegally and commits a crime should be thrown out of the country.

That seemed like common sense then, and it seems like common sense now. Imagine an America with 9 million illegal immigrants instead of 11 million, with the missing 2 million representing the vast majority of violent offenders, gang members, drug dealers, drunk drivers, et cetera. Is there any doubt that the country would feel safer? More confident about the government's ability to do its job? More optimistic about the future? More trusting of other people in general? In an environment like that, don't you think the discussion about what to do with non-violent illegal immigrants would be quite different in its tone and tenor than the debate today?

Whatever you want to do with those remaining 9 million, why wouldn't we want to get to that point as quickly as possible?

'Make Mexico Great Again Also' . . . Shouldn't That Be, 'Too'?

What separates enforcement-first conservatism from alt-right nationalism? Oh, I think sentiments like these from Mark Kirkorian are a really good example. I'm sure Mark has been called anti-Mexican or anti-Latino at many times in his career for his views and the work of the Center for Immigration Studies. He's nothing of the sort, of course:

But perhaps the most encouraging part (other than the long-overdue critique of legal immigration) was the end to Mexico-bashing. Both in his successful visit with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto earlier in the day and in the prefatory comments of the Phoenix speech, Trump stressed that being pro-America doesn't mean you're anti-Mexico. You couldn't really see it on TV, but Sessions and Giuliani were even wearing "Make Mexico Great Again Also" hats.

This is important for two reasons. Morally, it's just the right thing to do. A true patriot loves his country without hating anyone else's; even Japan and Germany, against which we fought a pitiless war, were not sown with salt after our victory, but rebuilt and befriended. It is especially important that a nationalist campaign stress this point, so as to lead its supporters away from the temptation of chauvinism.

The second reason is specific to our neighbor to the south. Mexico is the most important country in the world to us, after Canada. Nothing that happens in Ukraine or Syria or Burma or Swaziland is remotely as important to us as what happens in Mexico. As Trump said at the Mexico City press conference, "A strong, prosperous, and vibrant Mexico is in the best interest of the United States." I would go further; the continued development of Mexico into a first-world industrial democracy should be one of the top two goals of U.S. foreign policy, second only to the avoidance of nuclear war.

ADDENDA: If you're exasperated with the way politics is infiltrating your enjoyment of the sports world, you'll probably enjoy yesterday's Three Martini Lunch podcast. Careful, there's a lot of both the genuine Stephen A. Smith and my impression of him.