Top criminal defense lawyers in Washington say Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton could face scrutiny, amid mounting disclosures about the tangled finances of her family’s foundation.
The new book “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer, an investigative reporter affiliated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, has unleashed a torrent of conflict-of-interest allegations relating to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s own conduct during her tenure, from 2009 to 2013, as secretary of state.
Caleb Burns, a partner at the Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLC, who has long experience handling financial and public integrity cases. “The question’s going to be whether or not she took any official action in exchange for those donations. If she did, I think there is going to be a high, high likelihood of additional scrutiny, either from Capitol Hill or from the Department of Justice itself.”
Burns likened the known fact setting in the Clinton controversies to that which led to the federal indictment, earlier this month, of Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, who stands accused of performing favors for a well-connected Democratic donor in exchange for pricey gifts. Menendez has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing.
“If the facts suggest that there was a linkage between what Secretary Clinton did in her official capacity and the money that was coming into the Clinton Foundation,” Burns said, “this would fall under 18 U.S.C. 201 as a potential bribery violation.”
That statute provides that a bribe has occurred, among other circumstances, whenever “a public official directly or indirectly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally for or because of any official act performed or to be performed by such official.”
C. Boyden Gray, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, told Fox News that Clinton is “not protected by the fact that her husband may have taken money … spouses’ interests are attributed to each other and that is no excuse or defense.”
In the tangle of cases brought to light by the book “Clinton Cash,” no one associated with the Clinton Foundation has been formally accused of wrongdoing.
The Clintons, at any rate, are veterans of this terrain. In addition to her husband becoming the first president to be impeached – and ultimately acquitted – in over a century, in 1996 Hillary Clinton became the First Lady to testify before a grand jury.
An unbroken pattern of overtly corrupt behavior trading half-million-dollar speaking fees and multi-million-dollar payoffs to the Clintons’ foundation in return for billion-dollar mining concessions and corporate takeovers were staged in the jungle of Third World governance.
As Schweizer reports, America’s favorite power couple made millions from Kazakhstan dictator Nazarbayev.
In 2005 Bill came to the homeland of Borat with Canadian penny-stock speculator Frank Giustra. Giustra’s shell company UrAsia Energy, a paper entity with no track record, beat out bigger competition to scupper Kazakhstan”s uranium mining concession.
Bill endorsed Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe, a human rights organization founded by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, despite Nazarbeayev’s execrable human rights record. Senator Hillary Clinton lifted her previous objection to Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the organization.
Schweizer reports in the months that followed, Giustra gave the Clinton Foundation $31.3 million.
At the time of Clinton’s visit, Kazakhstan was on the verge of a national election. Days after Clinton departed, the opposition party’s campaign headquarters were ravaged by fire in an arson attack. On October 12 heavily armed policy temporarily arrested the opposition party’s leader….In December 2005 Nazarbayev won reelection with more than 90 percent of the vote. Bill sent him a note of congratulations.
Bill Clinton does his act in front of any gangster who will pay him–including two in Lagos, Nigeria for $700,000 each, in return for evident favors to unspeakably corrupt Nigerian “businessmen”.
Will the American people have the moral fibre to extirpate corruption on the Clinton scale?
Source: Fox News