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Transparency, Clinton Style
The Barack Obama administration has, by all accounts, been a travesty when it comes to transparency – a point on which both liberal and conservative watchdog groups agree. At least, however, when Obama assumed office, people had reason to believe that he might possibly have meant it when he promised with a straight face that he would lead the “most transparent administration ever.”
Imagine, then, the horror show we are in for if Hillary Clinton is elected President. Before Clinton was even elected President she openly declared that she had violated Federal law and Obama administration regulations by hosting her own email server during her tenure as Secretary of State and then summarily deleting tens of thousands of emails of her own choosing. As emails have slowly leaked out from other sources that clearly indicate that at least some portion of these deleted emails were substantive and confidential discussions (not, as Hillary hilariously claimed, emails about her “yoga schedule”), Hillary has not even had the decency to appear even marginally embarrassed.
Now comes the latest series of revelations in the slow rolling Clinton Foundation transparency disaster. Recall that it has already been exposed that the Clintons set up a Canadian counterpart to the Clinton Foundation for the express purpose of shielding donor identities in violation of the ethics agreement that Hillary signed for the Obama administration. Recall that the Clinton Foundation has been caught on numerous previous occasions not disclosing its own donors on its website. Last night the foundation revealed yet again that it had failed to disclose foreign donors (and further shed light on the staggering speaking fees the Clintons have been charging over the years):
The Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups.
The disclosure came as the foundation faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.
The money was paid as fees for speeches by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Foundation officials said the funds were tallied internally as “revenue” rather than donations, which is why they had not been included in the public listings of its contributors published as part of the 2008 agreement.
* * *
According to the new information, the Clintons have delivered 97 speeches to benefit the charity since 2002. Colleges and universities sponsored more than two dozen of these speeches, along with U.S. and overseas corporations and at least one foreign government, Thailand.
The payments were disclosed late Thursday on the organization’s Web site, with speech payments listed in ranges rather than specific amounts. In total, the payments ranged between $12 million and $26.4 million.
The paid appearances included speeches by former president Bill Clinton to the Nigerian ThisDay newspaper group for at least $500,000 and to the Beijing Huaduo Enterprise Consulting Company Ltd., an investment holding company that specializes in the natural gas market, for at least $250,000. Citibank paid at least $250,000 for a speech by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I suppose this raises some fairly interesting questions on its own merits – such as, “How does a Nigerian newspaper group have a spare $500K laying around to pay Bill Clinton to give a speech they could just as easily have seen on television” ?
But more importantly, it illustrates a larger point that I hope the American public fully understands. The Clintons are openly opposed, as a philosophical matter, to transparency. They don’t even have the decency to pay lip service to it. They are of the strong belief that everything connected to their life – including the public service aspects of it – are private and that they are under no obligation to share any of it.
The way the Clintons operate with respect to information is that they will absolutely control the flow of it to the press, and they will make no bones about it or offer any apologies. If you want information about the Clintons that is in any way damaging to either Bill or Hillary or sheds any sort of negative light on them, you will have to dig it up yourself, while they are busy obstructing and opposing you at every turn (and, if they can manage it, having the IRS audit you). And if they are caught having hidden information that they had previously claimed to have fully disclosed, they will shrug and dare you to try to make the American people care.
This is your world if Hillary is elected, press. This is how things operate when Clintons are in office, voters of America. If you have any interest at all in actually knowing what your government is doing, the Clintons want you to know that you should consider voting for someone else.
The post Transparency, Clinton Style appeared first on RedState.
Source: http://www.redstate.com/2015/05/22/transparency-clinton-style/
