Robin Hood in Reverse: The Clinton Foundation under Fed Scrutiny

Clarice Feldman

This week, the Daily Caller News Foundation's star reporter Richard Pollock revealed that 

Multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official. 

The investigation centers on New York City where the Clinton Foundation has its main offices, according to the former official who has direct knowledge of the activities.

Prosecutorial support will come from various U.S. Attorneys offices -- a major departure from other centralized FBI investigations.

Such an investigation is long overdue and the American experiment in representative democracy may well depend on its success. It appears to have been underway for some time as FBI director James Comey earlier declined to comment on whether the investigation into Clinton's emails also involved an investigation into the foundation. 

Heading up the investigation is U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District, who is known for his aggressive and successful prosecutions.

We've long been aware that foundation is a "slush fund" that pays out far more in salaries and expenses to its officers and employees than it does for charitable ends.

But the present focus is on the coordination of the foundation and Hillary as Secretary of State to benefit her friends and contributors.

The story is of interest, however, not just because Hillary is the Democratic presidential nominee. The story of the foundation, so well documented by Charles Ortel over the past year, illustrates the corruption of the political process and the out-of-control operations of massive funds by this tax-exempt foundation.

The Clinton foundation has collected over $2 billion in the 15 years it has been in existence. More than 1,000 of these contributions are reported to come from foreigners and their names and contribution figures are not being disclosed. 

Last week [mid-April] we learned "the New York Times examined Bill Clinton's relationship with a Canadian mining financier, Frank Giustra, who has donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and sits on its board. Clinton, the story suggests, helped Giustra's company secure a lucrative uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan and in return received 'a flow of cash' to the Clinton Foundation, including previously undisclosed donations from the company's chairman totaling $2.35 million."

Peter Schweitzer, author of Clinton Cash,revealed even more about Giustra and the Foundation:

The same Canadian company, renamed Uranium One, bought uranium concessions in the United States; The Russian government came calling and sought to buy that Canadian company for a price that would mean big profits for the Canadian investors; For the Russians to buy that Canadian company, it would require the approval of the Obama administration, including Hillary's State Department, because uranium is a strategically important commodity; Nine shareholders in Uranium One just happened to provide more than $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation in the run-up to State Department approval; Some of the donations, including those from the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Teler, were kept secret, even though the Clintons promised to disclose all donations; Hillary's State Department approved the deal; The Russian government now owns 20 percent of U.S. uranium assets.

In short, here was what you might call a radioactive scandal. It included secret donations, the Russian government, foreign financiers, more than $145 million, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

It is widely believed that the main reason Hillary did not use the government email system and why she shredded thousands of her email records was to hide the pay-to-play scheme she headed as Secretary of State. This is made clear in the latest revealed Hillary email cache. 

Charles Ortel has for some time now been analyzing the publicly available records of the foundation and arguing that it is engaged in massive fraud with many violations of legal, tax and standard accounting procedures:

State, federal, and foreign laws bar public charities from being run for private gain in interstate commerce -- which means, by using the mail, telephones or the internet. The Clinton Foundation's complex operations (it is not just one entity but a web of them) do not comply with this requirement. Nor does the Clinton Foundation ever seem to have submitted its financial records to an independent, properly certified audit by a qualified accounting firm.

Overall I consider the Clinton Foundation to be a charity fraud network. I base this conclusion on my review of extensive data about its operations including the activities of the Clinton family and their friends in Haiti, a nation that has suffered many disasters, both natural and manmade.

What possesses powerful, wealthy, and educated persons to prey on the most desperately poor humans on earth as they posture as "philanthropists"? And why has there been no government oversight?

Expect an increased flow of detailed disclosures centering upon Exhibits 1 through 40 through this website, and continued reaction to breaking developments via my twitter account (@CharlesOrtel).

Haiti, a Case in Point

On the foundation website, it was announced that: 

"In 2008, President Bill Clinton issued a call to action to address the pressing challenges Haiti faced in the aftermath of four devastating hurricanes, resulting in the formation of the Haiti Action Network. In response to the January 2010 earthquake, the network intensified their efforts toward long-term development in Haiti by addressing issues such as agriculture, cultural preservation, education, energy, enterprise development, health, and shelter, as well as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH).

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) members have made more than 100 Commitments to Action focused on Haiti, which will be valued at $500 million when fully funded and implemented. Now in its eighth year, the Haiti Action Network has a significant focus on creating sustainable jobs and encouraging investment in the country."

Instead of this high-minded sounding claim, the example of Haiti is an exemplar of the total failure of the foundation to use its power and money to help Haitians

The National Review's Dinesh D'Souza detailed the scope of the corruption and the disastrous results of the Clintons' Haitian relief project, in which millions of dollars for Haitian relief were funneled from the foundation and the U. S. Treasury ostensibly for Haitian relief but in actuality for their friends who failed to deliver the promised relief projects.

The extent of the corruption of the Clintons and their foundation in the case of Haiti is truly mind-boggling. I urge you to read it all and see why D'Souza concludes, "The Clintons seem to believe in Haitian reconstruction and Haitian investment as long as these projects match their own private economic interests. They have steered the rebuilding of Haiti in a way that provides maximum benefit to themselves.'

Here are just a few examples D'Souza details: With no competitive bidding an outfit owned by Warren Buffet's company was awarded money to build "hurricane-proof trailers" and, instead built such shoddy, unsafe trailers they had to be abandoned. Without requiring InnoVida, headed by a Clinton donor, to provide the required financial statement, $10 million of U.S. funds were loaned to them to build housing.

The company, however, defaulted on the loan and never built any houses. An investigation revealed that Osorio had diverted company funds to pay for his Miami Beach mansion, his Maserati, and his Colorado ski chalet. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in 2013, and is currently serving a twelve-year prison term on fraud charges related to the loan.

USAID funds were directed to other Clinton cronies to build schools in Haiti. None were built; the funds went to "an Earth Day celebration and tree-building activity".

Millions went from the U.S. Treasury funds to provide cell phones to Haitians to another crony who used them to create a lucrative near monopoly on phone service and another grant of $45 million went to him to build a hotel, which employs few Haitians and is largely unoccupied.

And then there is Hillary's brother, Hugh, who profited from a "finder's fee" from a company awarded one of the two gold-mining permits granted by the Haitian government.

Ortel has detailed his findings to various news outlets, and has categorized the foundation as "Robin Hood in reverse": 

The Clintons are out there holding themselves out as if they are charitable philanthropists, and in reality... I argue they are really Robin Hood in reverse. They are stealing from the poor to reward the rich, and I find that reprehensible behavior."

How much money has the Clinton Foundation raised globally? Ortel says it's a "$100 billion criminal conspiracy" and goes on to say, "I think it is a disgrace. To put that number into perspective, depending on how you look at the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, that was either $40 billion to $60 billion. This is $100 billion, and maybe more."

How much Clinton Foundation money actually makes it to charitable causes? Ortel says, "It's impossible to tell from the filings. You are supposed to tell from the filings, and it's impossible to tell. One of the biggest expenses in the recent period in the Clinton Foundation is for pharmaceuticals for supposedly fighting HIV Aids. If this were a well-run charity, you would provide a detailed breakdown of what pharmaceuticals by type and at what price. There is none of that disclosure. You don't know if that pharmaceutical number is completely made up or not. You have no way of telling, and the auditors have never done their work. This is why I say this is a text book case study in global charity fraud. It needs to be exposed as such."

How did this so-called charity get so far off track? Ortel explains, "When you look at any foundation, and the Clinton Foundation in particular, you have to check and see what its authorized tax exempt purposes are. Because this entity raises money from the public continuously... they have to be very specific. Their authorized tax exempt purpose, stated in their application dated 23 December 2007, was just supposed to be Presidential archival research facility in Little Rock. They never have been authorized as far as I can tell from the public filings... they have never been authorized to fight HIV Aids, fight climate change, convene meetings in New York and set up these various initiatives. None of them has been validly authorized, which means they have been raising money with materially false and misleading public filings. They have been doing it using the mail, using the Internet and using telephones, all of which is a federal crime.

This abuse of the charity and Hillary's government position is exactly the sort of thing Peggy Noonan described this week.

She was talking about the detachment of the world's elites from their countrymen when she wrote about open borders, "From what I've seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they're aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage." But she could as well have been talking about how the Clintons manage under the guise of humanitarian concerns to further and further beset those below them on the ladder: "The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called "humanist," "compassionate," and "hero of human rights."

I do not know where the present FBI investigation into the workings of the Clinton Foundation will lead or even when or if the prosecutors will act (a prior probe into the foundation was quashed earlier this year, according to CNN) but it does seem to me that whether you call this "crony capitalism", "corporate welfare" or "fascism", we must fight it or end up like Argentina or even Haiti.

© 2011 AmericanThinker