Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’sBreitbart News Daily to talk about the latest Clinton scandal updates.
Marlow pointed to the story about hundreds of Clinton Foundation donors rewarded with seats on advisory boards by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and The Wall Street Journal’s suspicions of a pay-for-play arrangement between Bill Clinton and the perfume industry.
“It continues to confirm what people know, which is, whatever the Clintons ostensibly seem to get involved in, that there is always money that flows to them,” said Schweizer.
He said Clinton charities always seem to conceal rivers of money flowing in the opposite direction:
This was the great charity, the Clinton Foundation, that they have trumpeted as having solved so many of the world’s problems – which, of course, people dispute. But the problem is, every time you look at these programs, these philanthropic programs, you find that the donors, or the recipients of the money, are somehow giving money to Bill and Hillary Clinton. They’re always sort of getting their cut.
Now we did have, last night, sort of the monumental event – Bill Clinton effectively closing down the Clinton Global Initiative. He gave a speech last night, sort of a weepy-eyed speech, proclaiming that he had fundamentally changed philanthropy for the better. But I think when you look at sort of what he describes as their accomplishments, there’s a lot wanting, and you realize how much it really is embedded with the corruption that is so rampant with the Clintons.
Marlow noted that Bill Clinton’s birthday party, held the previous weekend, was attended by people who donated up to $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation for tickets. “Despite all the controversy, they keep trying to enrich the Foundation. Is this because they think they might lose, because they can’t help themselves?” he asked.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the Clintons, a couple of years ago, started a campaign to build an endowment for the Clinton Foundation, which I think is somewhere on the order of $350 million,” Schweizer said. “So even if they stopped raising money tomorrow, they still have an endowment that will allow the Foundation, in some form, to continue to operate.”
“This is the problem. It is transactional. Everything they do is transactional,” he explained:
Bill Clinton tried to insist last night that people gave him, and gave Hillary, money simply out of the kindness of their hearts; they wanted nothing else in return.
But you know, this is what’s happening in America, I think, with the political races, but also I think with new media, which Breitbart plays such an important role, is people don’t buy that anymore. They challenge the assumptions; they challenge the claims of our political figures, and that’s a good thing.
I think the Clintons have suffered as a result of the new media and people asking all these questions about how they operate, and where the money is actually going.
When Marlow observed that Chelsea Clinton would still be part of the Foundation, despite Bill and Hillary Clinton’s much-touted promises to back away from operations if Clinton wins the presidency, Schweizer agreed that was a “hugely suspicious” detail:
I mean, look; here’s the bottom line: the Clintons are promising that they’re going to do a bunch of things if Hillary wins, to disconnect themselves from the Clinton Foundation. But we’ve been down this route before. I mean, in 2008, when she became secretary of state, they promised a whole host of things they were gonna do, be completely transparent, et cetera. And they didn’t live up to them, so anything that they’re saying, that they’re agreeing they’re going to do if Hillary wins, I think we have to be highly suspect of, because that’s the record. That’s what they did in 2008.
And, of course, the key thing you pointed out is, Chelsea is still going to be there. If you have somebody – if you’re a corporation, or if you’re a foreign oligarch, it may not be Bill Clinton whose wife is secretary of state coming and shaking you down for money – but it will now be the first daughter doing it. I don’t see how that’s much of an improvement, as far as preventing this self-enrichment and corruption from taking place.
When Marlow pointed out that Chelsea Clinton’s name has been on the Foundation since its inception, Schweizer added:
It’s also widely know, it’s been reported, she’s gonna have political ambitions of her own. So if you want to tap into Clinton, Incorporated, you may not get a call from the co-CEO, Bill Clinton, but you’re gonna get a call from the chief marketing officer, Chelsea Clinton. And it’s all the same, when it comes to this pay-to-play and graft.
Schweizer said reports that the Clinton Foundation has spent as little as six percent of its total income on actual charitable endeavors were quite plausible:
If you actually look at the numbers of their filings and 990s, that’s what it indicates. Now, what the Clinton Foundation will say is, “Yes, we take in $200 million, let’s say, and we only take $12 million of that and give it to charitable groups like Doctors Without Borders, and the Red Cross, et cetera.” But what they’ll say is, the remaining 94 percent goes for all these charitable activities that we are doing,
The problem is, when you start drilling down on what, precisely, those charitable activities are, and what they have to show for it, it gets really, really fuzzy and hazy. So you’ll have some charities like Doctors Without Borders will say, “We immunized 100,000 kids last year.” And you can look at that. That’s a very clear metric. Okay, here’s where they did it. They were in sub-Saharan Africa. They had all these doctors.
The Clinton Foundation will say, “We assisted or facilitated in 100,000 kids getting immunizations.” Well, okay, what does that mean? And they don’t really tell you. They don’t really explain to you how it works.
So the number is absolutely correct, that six percent goes to other charities. The other 94 percent is in this stew of marketing, and management, and travel expenses, and sort of all these obscure things, that it’s really hard to dissect what is the end result of that 94 percent being spent.
For the purposes of comparison, Marlow recalled research indicating the Salvation Army spends about 90 percent of its income on verifiable charitable endeavors, while even the notoriously inefficient federal welfare system gets a far higher percentage of its funding to those in need than the Clinton Foundation does.
He recommended using Charity Navigator to evaluate organizations before making donations and observed they no longer attempt to evaluate the Clinton Foundation, after delivering some extremely poor ratings.
“They had an asterisk that basically said we’re not going to evaluate the Clinton Foundation because of its, quote, ‘unique business model,’ whatever that means,” Schweizer recalled. He added:
So they stopped evaluating them. There was a very interesting piece last year in New York magazine – hardly an anti-Clinton publication! – but it described in detail how the Clinton Foundation, this philanthropy/charity, was basically engaged in guerrilla warfare with Charity Navigator, that they were threatening them and undermining them because they didn’t like the marks that Charity Navigator was giving them.
“It’s kind of like Mafia-like tactics in the world of charity and philanthropy,” he marveled. “It’s really quite shocking.”
Schweizer teased a new revelation about the Foundation’s practices:
And the other thing that’s going to be coming out, there’s been some reporting on this already, Alex, but we’ve got a piece that will be dropping shortly on the sort of signature claim of the Clinton Foundation, which is all the great work they’ve done in the HIV/AIDS space.
What we’re finding now is that, actually, Bill Clinton had a full embrace – financial deals, business deals – involving an Indian company that was supposed to be providing so-called ARVs, to help people in the developing world deal with the effects of HIV and AIDS, that this company was actually selling toxic or ineffective drugs.
The Clinton Foundation knew about it, but rather than follow the path of the FDA and the World Health Organization, which banned these drugs, the Clinton Foundation embraced them–pretty shocking commercial ties that Bill Clinton has to this entity.
So we’ll be glad to come back in a few days and talk about that. It really goes to the heart of what their biggest claim of success is, which is work in this area of HIV/AIDS, and even there, you find this rampant cronyism and corruption.
Marlow posited that a Hillary Clinton victory would mean “there is no level of corruption that is unacceptable to the American people,” provided the media choose to ignore it.
“Here’s the thing people don’t realize, that they need to come to grips with: the ethics laws in the United States that deal with conflict of interest and self enrichment, those laws, by and large, do not apply to the President of the United States,” Schweizer warned. “So if you cannot do certain things as a senator or congressman because of ethics laws, those go out the window for the President of the United States.”
“It was kind of done that way because the fear was that political opponents in Congress would use these laws to kind of undermine a president,” he explained. “I disagree. I think the ethics laws need to apply to everyone.”
Schweizer warned:
The point being that the very things the Clintons have had to dance around, to try to avoid ending up in jail – and, by the way, I think they’ve crossed that line several times – but regardless, if she becomes President of the United States, those constraints on her are basically gone. People have to come to grips with that. It really does matter. The person that you’re putting in the White House, whatever your political inclinations are, if they have a history and a pattern of corruption, there is not going to be the legal constraint once they become president that they had when they were, say, secretary of state, or a congressman, or a senator. And that is, I think, very scary indeed.