The State Department as Protection Racket

Paul wrote yesterday about the Huma Abedin emails discovered by Judicial Watch that show a pattern of corruption, whereby donors to the Clinton Foundation, the Clintons’ personal slush fund, got access to Secretary of State Clinton for help with their problems or priorities. Today the Associated Press follows up with a systematic and devastating analysis of Hillary’s calendar at the State Department:

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

I would say, it indicates the complete lack of ethics that she would display if she were president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

So it wasn’t absolutely impossible to get a meeting with the Secretary of State if you didn’t contribute to her slush fund, but it was extremely unlikely.

[T]he frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.

Evidently, a great many rich and powerful people around the world had the “perception” that the way to get on her calendar was to contribute to her personal foundation. It seems pretty obvious that this wasn’t just perception, it was reality. The truth is even worse than the numbers above suggest, since the AP left foreign governments out of its calculations:

Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP’s calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.

A given meeting may or may not have legitimately been part of Hillary’s duties, and her priorities in dealing with foreign governments may well have been influenced by their contributions to Bill and Hillary, Inc. Given everything else we know, in all probability her priorities were so influenced, and, in any case, it is obvious that a number of foreign governments believed they could buy favor with the Clintons by contributing to their foundation.

Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into a protection racket. The extent to which, in recent years, that characterization could fairly be applied to the federal government as a whole is a topic for another day. Whatever you think of the corruption we have seen under the Obama administration, the Clintons promise to take it to a whole new level should the voters be foolish enough to re-install them in the White House.

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