Nail in the Coffin: Huffington Post Calls for End to Clinton Foundation: ‘Just Shut it Down’
The Huffington Post, one of the world’s most trafficked news sites, featured a headline on Sunday calling for the closure of the embattled Clinton Foundation. The left-wing outlet’s front page banner linked to a New York Times article, which highlights, among other things, that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s billion dollar nonprofit has “accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues.”
The Huffington Post is just the latest outlet to acknowledge that the explosive research, found first in Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s New York Times bestselling book Clinton Cash, has inspired a massive movement of journalists and political figures — on the left, right, and center — calling on the Clintons to dismantle their problematic nonprofit.
The Times piece shines the spotlight on “a deal involving the sale of American uranium holdings to a Russian state-owned enterprise” — another revelation first revealed inClinton Cash — “… which involved major Clinton charitable backers from Canada …” as “another example of the foundation intersecting with Mrs. Clinton’s official role in the Obama administration.”
For weeks, the Democratic presidential candidate has been bombarded with questions about the apparent global nexus of influence peddling involving top aids to Clinton offering preferential treatment to million-dollar Clinton Foundation donors when she was the head of the State Department.
In a staggering sign of vulnerability, Bill Clinton told a room full of the foundation’s staff on Thursday that he will resign from the Clinton Foundation board if Hillary Clinton wins the White House in November. The former president also pledged to stop giving paid speeches, regardless of the outcome of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.
Still, even after the former president’s announcement, other Clinton Foundation projects – The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP) – said they would continue to collect donations no matter what happens in November.
Bill Clinton’s announcement followed former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor and longtime Clinton ally Ed Rendell’s remarks that the foundation should shutdown if Hillary Clinton became president.
“I definitely think if she wins the presidency, they have to disband it. I know it’ll be hard for President (Bill) Clinton because he cares very deeply about what the foundation has done,” Rendell told the New York Daily News. “It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem.”
On Tuesday, the Boston Globe, which endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, called for the “shut down” of the Clinton Foundation, should Hillary win.
“Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort,” the Globe’s editorial board wrote.
“The new pledge is a stunning tacit admission of wrongdoing,” Schweizer wrote on Thursday, adding that “it comes too little too late and raises the obvious question: If it would be wrong for Hillary’s foundation to accept foreign cash as president, why wasn’t it wrong for Hillary’s foundation to accept foreign cash from oligarchs and countries who had business pending on her desk as Sec. of State?”
Schweizer continued: “Moreover, if, as has been confirmed by numerous mainstream media organizations, Hillary Clinton violated her ethics pledge with the Obama administration to disclose all Clinton Foundation donations, why should the American people believe she would now honor a new pledge to forgo bagging cash from foreign oligarchs and countries?”
That’s a question that the Clinton’s may not have an answer to, according to those in the government corruption watchdog community.
“It is very difficult to see how the organization called the Clinton Foundation can continue to exist during a Clinton presidency without that posing all sorts of consequences,” John Wonderlich, the interim executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, told the Times. “What they announced only addresses the most egregious potential conflicts.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for commenting. Your comments are needed for helping to improve the discussion.