Where there’s corruption, there’s the Clinton Foundation

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Bill Clinton is unsurpassed at spotting and exploiting corrupt entities. This ability forms the subtext of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer’s expose of the Clinton Foundation.

If there is a corrupt government with which to engage in mutual backscratching, Bill Clinton will find it. Before long, a Clinton Foundation supporter will have obtained concessions from the government; Clinton will have obtained lucrative speaking fees generated by both the supporter (who will have made additional contributions) and the government; and the corrupt government will have obtained Bill Clinton’s public seal of approval plus (between 2009 and 2013) a friend at the head of the State Department.

It’s no surprise, then, that FIFA — the corrupt world soccer governing body just indicted by the Justice Department — has ties with the Clinton Foundation. The Daily Beast reports:

The Clinton global charity has received between $50,000 and $100,000 from soccer’s governing body and has partnered with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association [FIFA] on several occasions, according to donor listings on the foundation’s website.

That’s not all:

The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee [which is organizing the 2022 World Cup], partnering with the State of Qatar, “committed to utilizing its research and development for sustainable infrastructure at the 2022 FIFA World Cup to improve food security in Qatar, the Middle East, and other arid and water-stressed regions throughout the world,” according to the Clinton Foundation website.

The cost of the two-year project is not listed on the Clinton Foundation website, but the Qatar 2022 committee gave the foundation between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2014. . . .

Why these contributions? Clinton had headed the U.S. bid for the 2022 World Cup. According to the Washington Post, he “spent two years traveling the world, campaigning with the likes of Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Spike Lee, trying to convince FIFA officials to bring the World Cup stateside.”

Unfortunately, Clinton’s efforts failed. FIFA awarded the World Cup to Qatar.

Like Eric Holder, who also pitched the U.S. bid, Clinton did not take his failure well. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Bill Clinton looked anything but happy as he strode into the Savoy Baur en Ville hotel in Zurich in December 2010. The receptionists could tell he was irritated, but had no idea just how angry he was.

After closing the door to his suite, he reached for an ornament on a table and threw it at a wall mirror in a fit of rage, shattering the glass. . . .

‘Clinton was fuming,’ said one well-placed source. ‘He felt humiliated and felt the decision did not make sense.’

The contributions to the Clinton Foundation described above were, it seems clear, an attempt to make things right with the Clintons. Unfortunately for FIFA, there was no “Eric Holder Foundation” to which to contribute.

This case doesn’t fit the classic Clinton Foundation paradigm. Usually the Clintons are at the heart of the corruption. This time, Bill Clinton was an outsider, undone by the corruption of others and ultimately settling for “chump change” as a consolation prize.

Nonetheless, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, as a reader wrote to me, that the FIFA-Clinton story represents the grand convergence of the most corrupt sports organization on earth with the most corrupt American political family ever.

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