Hillary’s Doom?

There are two big stories out today that in a rational world would sink Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Fortunately for her, the Democratic Party is not a rational organization. Increasingly the description of Democrats as a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party seems more and more accurate.

The Daily Caller reports today that the Clinton Foundation received $100 million—serious Dr. Evil money—from an obscure foreign mining conglomerate long thought to be operating on the dark side of the “blood diamond” trade:

A little known Swedish-Canadian oil and mining conglomerate human rights groups have repeatedly charged produces “blood minerals” is among the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors, thanks to a $100 million pledge in 2007, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found. . .

When the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group gave its $100 million commitment to the “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative,” the company had long been cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships in the war-torn African countries of Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia.

There’s a lot more in the Daily Caller story, including a possible link to the Marc Rich pardon from President Clinton in 2001.

Meanwhile, don’t miss Philip Bump’s Washington Post story today on the latest about the “massive scale” of Bill and Hillary’s paid speechmaking, which Bump rightly describes as an “industry”:

Last week, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released her most recent personal financial disclosure, detailing ways in which she and her husband earned money in 2015. Most of their income came from book royalties and giving paid speeches. Bill Clinton, for example, gave a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in March 2015, being paid $325,000 for his time.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that $325,000 is more than most people make in a year. The median income for a family of four in 2014 was $53,657 — what Clinton made about a sixth of the way into that one speech.

And that was one of 22 speeches Bill Clinton gave last year. The NAM speech was the most lucrative, but Bill earned more than $5 million combined from those 20 days of work. Since the Clintons left the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been paid more than $150 million from speeches alone.

There’s a wonderful little “tracker” embedded in the story that shows how much money you’d have made just in the time it took to read halfway into the article if you were giving a Clinton speech. It would make a great TV ad by the Trump campaign, or an independent super PAC. You can also see from this chart that the Clintons’ speechmaking actually intensified int he run-up to the 2016 election (Hillary’s amounts in blue):

Hillary Speeches copy

Looks like a case of pre-emptive bribery to me.

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