In small town America, politics has never been a great way to get rich, but it has been a great way to avoid poverty. Get yourself elected mayor and you get to hand out jobs and contracts to people who will make sure you are kept in a lifestyle you feel you deserve. That could me cash under the table or maybe gifts like merchandise or jewelry. The mayor signs off on your government contract and you give him a Cadillac and a Rolex for his birthday.
This sort of corruption is harder today because it is hard to hide large amounts of cash. Even cash leaves a paper trail. Mayor Jones has to figure out how to explain that deposit in his checking account to the tax man. Similarly, that cash came from somewhere and that has to be explained. People are going to notice that the mayor is living well beyond his means. If the people noticing are in law enforcement, then the mayor has trouble.
The way around this is to use cutouts. The mayor has power so he trades that for cash, in the form of investment opportunities, business deals and jobs for friends and family. The rich guy hires the mayor’s kid into a high paying no-show job and the mayor signs off on the government contract for the rich guy. Alternatively, the mayor gets in on a business deal that pays off handsomely. He then does a good turn for the guy who hooked him up in the deal.
To make this look clean the mayor will rely on a trusted friend to work the deals so the mayor is not seen in the same room as any of the players. That way, he just looks like a blind investor. Even if the deal itself turns sour and the authorities start snooping around, the mayor can show he has clean hands and maybe even claim to be a victim. This is an age old way to monetize political power without taking bags of cash.
This pattern is familiar to public integrity investigators. Whenever they start looking at a public official, they immediately start looking at the target’s finances. The same is true of espionage. Even spies driven by ideology charge a fee for their work and that money has to show up somewhere. Since almost all government corruption is about money, the best way to figure it all out is focus on the money. Figure out the money and the rest usually comes into focus.
That is what has always struck me about the Clinton e-mail scandal. These are grubby, vulgar people. That is clear by the types of scandals we see with them. In Arkansas, Bill was raping women and Hillary was running real estate frauds. His corruption was all about sex and her corruption was about money. Politics for them has always been small time, even when they were in the big time. Sex and money are why they got in the game.
In Washington, the two big scandals were sex and money. Bill was raping interns again and Hillary was selling national secrets for campaign cash. People forget about the Chinese money, the satellite deal and missile technology scandal. They even had that sap Al Gore out shaking down Buddhist monks for cash. On their way out the door they tried stealing the White House furniture.
This e-mail scandal looks a lot like an influence peddling scandal. Hillary had something valuable, which was access to national security information. In order to monetize it, she needed some way to hide the money and someway to conceal the theft of intelligence. The former was handled by the “charity” they created and the phony-baloney speeches Bill was giving to foreign entities. No one wanted to hear that old hillbilly speak, but they wanted access so they gave generously to the foundation.
The hard part of it was how to pilfer and disseminate the intelligence without getting jammed up on espionage and treason charges. That is where this bathroom server comes in. Eventually, government people would be sending sensitive information to this system. Letting multiple people have access to her e-mail means the chain of custody for this information is now broken. Sloppy handling becomes a way to camouflage what was happening.
Loyal soldiers like Sid Blumenthal and Huma Abedin were probably the cutouts in these schemes. Maybe they knew, maybe they just thought they were getting to play cloak and dagger for the boss. They would pass on intel to those people hiring Bill for speeches. Alternatively, Blumenthal appears to have been selling himself as a connected guy to foreign interests. He could grease the wheels for their business in front of the Department of State.
When you take a step back and look at how the Clinton Crime Family has done business over the decades, this looks just like another money caper. Instead of selling favorable government rulings on business deals, they were selling access in exchange for contributions to this phony charity. The Clintons get to live like royalty, without having to worry about the tax man wondering where they got the cash. This is why RICO laws were created.
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Saw this three years ago when one of my old firm’s business partners pressured us to join the CGI. So had to attend two of the NY meetings in NY as part of the vetting. Absolute Star Wars bar of hangers on, people looking for influence, some genuine NGO do gooders and the three Clintons like spiders at the center of the web. But three things were clear. Lot of activity, but not much delivery. Most people looking for influence and inside tracks. And the financials were tough for our accountants to unwind, as much of what should have been admin expense (and there is a lot of overhead) was pushed down to the project level. Conclusion on the last is that for the Clintons, one of the primary roles of the Foundation is to support their lifestyle. We declined to plunk down the 250k entry fee they were looking for.
The whole non-profit sector has become a racket now. Ball players and actors set up charities so they can put their friends and relatives on the payroll. The famous person then uses their image to raise money for the charity, which does nothing but fund the lifestyle of those friends and relatives.
Most of these “charities” are simply money laundering operations.
I do hope some of you can appreciate the irony of this article from the perspective of a German (or European). I have yet to hear an American describe their country with a sentence that didn’t include at least three or four positive adjectives. Then when I ask them to describe their government or government officials, they turn around use words that would make a prostitute blush. It’s mind boggling. You just have to love and admire Americas for their dysfunctional patriotism. I don’t think there is a government on earth that is so loved and yet so hated by it’s own citizens. And no, that’s not an insult. You make all of us over here crazy trying to figure you out. But that’s what seems to make America unique.
@Karl – An old line in right-wing American circles is “I love my country, but I hate my government.” I don’t think it is possible to be an American and not harbor a healthy suspicion of the government. Even our liberals think the government is corrupt and up to no good.
“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.” — the most admirable H.L. Mencken
I believe you are confusing America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, with her government (the leadership’s character of which, as Mencken and Churchill supposed, we well understand & for whose services we are still negotiating the price.)
In our minds, America and its government are completely separate concepts; unfortunately, we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to keep the second from polluting the first. 🙂
I am British and i despise my so called government,i despise our real government the EU even more.Roll on the 23rd of June.
The kind-of amazing thing to me is the silence of basically everyone on the speaker fee racket. Its just an obvious obvious way to throw cash at powerful people: if Bill were handed a stack of 50 grand in a plastic bag it looks like a crime, but give him 10 times that to him for 45 minutes plus a couple of plane rides and no one bats an eye.
Hillary is it AIPAC, she is safe.
I find it almost incomprehensible that Hillary et al. are such INCOMPETENT criminals. Even the old Prohibition gangsters knew that they had to keep two sets of books: one to show the auditors (and FBI) and one with the real figures.
Hillary et al failed to set up a .gov email account to handle innocuous & ordinary SecState traffic, and to serve as a FOIA target should the need arise. Had she/they had that material to produce in response to Judicial Watch lawsuits and various FOIA requests, the Blumenthal, etc., correspondence might never have come to light.
You’d think that with their decades of experience in shady enterprises that they would have learned to be more crafty with this stuff.
Dumb and dumber, they are.
It’s hubris, plain and simple.
She didn’t want anyone reading her emails via FOIA requests, plus she wanted easy access to classified materials for the selling, and she figured that she was a big enough swinging dick to get away with it (and she might be right).
These people all think they are on another plane of existence, totally beyond our mere mortal ability to comprehend, thus their lack of shit giving about covering their tracks. Nobody would dare question them, and if someone did dare, they can explain it way with a simple lie and some hand waving.
Hilldebeast is the textbook definition of hubris.
If it weren’t considered a war crime, there’d be a picture of her in the dictionary next to the word.
Colo, my understanding is that Hillary did indeed have a proper .gov email address at the State Dept., and she used it regularly. She used her personal email address to run her influence peddling racket, and to communicate with trusted associates both inside and outside the State Dept.
BB: if you have some information that supports that she used a .gov email address, please share. I can find nothing that indicates that Hillary, herself, had a .gov email address. Her staff, yes. They would receive messages that she would then request they print out or forward to someone, etc. Latest info suggests that she/staff resisted State personnel desiring to give her a .gov address when her own was misbehaving.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/email-scandal-hillary-clinton-aides-state-department/2016/01/18/id/709906/
What I can’t quite get my head around is the extent of the complicity in all this. Suppose you’re some high-ranking, heck, some mid-level official in the State Department and you soon find out that the new Sec. of State keeps her emails in a server in her closet at home. Wouldn’t you, at that point, alert counter-intelligence people in the FBI and CIA? Nope, apparently you don’t. And you certainly don’t if you handle national security stuff for the WH.
So, why not? Is it because you just keep your head down and don’t make waves? Is it because you assume that this has all been approved, cleared and secured? Or do you just not care?
Supposedly, there are people in our government, in the FBI and CIA, whose business is counter-intelligence, and I’m supposed to believe that somehow they never found out about this until after Clinton left State? That the Russians, and the Chinese and the Iranians knew, but not our own people?
If I thought Clinton was smart and a patriot and that our government was competent, you might be able to persuade me that this was some kind of sting to get access to our enemies electronic espionage capabilities.
But I don’t think that. But I don think a lot of people knew about what was going on. I’d only like to know whether their silence was obtained through bribes, or threats, or a judicious combination.
That should be “…I do think a lot of people knew….” I miss the old system where I could fix my many mistakes.
In the kindest most gentlest way possible, I tell you that you are dangerously naive as to the ways of the world. Fleas have more concern for the dog, than those you mention have for America.
Not only that, but those who cross the Clintons have an odd way of ending up taking dirt naps; starting most obviously with Vince Foster.
Many people at State knew that Hillary had her own internet domain, and email address associated with that; they obviously did because they received work emails from that address all the time. But, how would they know that Internet domain was not hosted on a federally-maintained server? My guess is, most people didn’t think much of it because they probably assumed it was being hosted on some sort of secure server under proper supervision. Heck, if the Secretary of State is doing it, it must be above-board, right? Bureaucrats aren’t known for their technical savvy, and they tend to do what they are told, and don’t question their superiors. So, it doesn’t surprise me that nobody at the State Dept. questioned what was going on. And I’d also guess that Hillary was smart enough not to send emails from her private domain to anyone outside the State Dept. that she didn’t trust. Combine all that with general incompetence on the FBI’s part, and it doesn’t seem that surprising to me that Hillary got away with this for four years.
Drudge has a link up about ole Bill goin’ off on Obama’s economy. Speculating that it is in response to Barry ok’g dropping the hammer on Hillary.
Can’t you see Hillary O’Hara, lying in the dirt after rooting out that sweet potato, gnawing at it, and then declaiming: As God is my witness …
I see the Clinton’s as more in the Tobacco Road style of rootin’
My question is “is Barry O running interference for the Hildebeast and the Slickster?” if so, why? What’s in it for him. My impression was there is no love lost between the Gambinos and the Colombos..err the Clintons and the O’Bamas.
The thinking is that though he hates the Clintons with a passion, Obama will have to veto any indictment that Comey wants to bring in order to preserve his legacy. If Hilary is forced out the Republican candidate, whoever it is, will almost definitely win and once in office reverse Obamacare, the Iran deal, etc. it’s all about our Dear Leader.
Bill Simmons had a couple of former mid-level Obama administration operatives on his podcast last week. He asked them what they thought of Hillary. They both said they thought Hillary was an outstanding Secretary of State, and that Obama got along surprisingly well with her and relied heavily on her opinions and insights in meetings. The first part told me that the clowns inside that administration are fucking delusional regarding the kind of job Hillary did; the second part I found rather surprising as it was my understanding that Obama and Clinton despised each other. Maybe Obama and Clinton were both really good at putting their personal feelings aside in the workplace, but both operatives were convinced that the two really did get along well. This is a long way of saying that anyone who assumes that Obama is going to throw Hillary under the bus might be in for a big surprise.
I don’t know Simmons and I didn’t listen to the podcast, but my my gut reaction is to question the credibility of these operatives. Hilary was an outstanding Secretary of State? That sounds like the party line to me. Obama hates Clinton? Obama loves Clinton? Both could be lies. We never get the truth from either of them. They lie so much they wouldn’t know how to tell the plain truth. If Obama vetoes an indictment, it will probably be because Hilary sold him her soul, meaning he will have power over her for the rest of her life.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/20/bolton-fbi-will-explode-if-hillary-not-indicted-over-email-scandal-due-to-politics/
The investigation appears to be going on two tracks: a) national sec and b) influence peddling and corruption of the foundation, according to C. Herridge of FoxNews who has done great work covering this and the Benghazi stories.
I hope they both wind up in prison for the rest of their miserable lives.
Maybe someone in the intelligence community will grab Sid and give him a taste of 440v up the ass (for a start). See what he has to say once the juice is turned off. Feels like it’s Ceausescu time for Bill and Hill; unless Bill croaks before John Law comes knockin’
“Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet”