By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--May 11, 2015
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I'm going to warn you right up front. Nothing in this post will come as a shock to any of you. If you're on this site, you're "politically aware," so you already know all of it. Oh, and it's not because you've read it before, either. Nor is it it because you've perused the facts of the Clinton Foundation's donations, digested the numbers, and come to a logical conclusion.
No, if you've been paying attention to politics over the course of the last 25 years, you know everything you're about to read because by now you know exactly who - and what - the Clintons are.
The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that the government funding totals omitted from their tax returns cannot be found on their website either, despite the foundation's acting chief executive officer earlier suggesting they were available there. The foreign government funding received by the globe-spanning charities of Hillary Clinton's family has received particular scrutiny in recent weeks as Clinton seeks to become the Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election. The foundation's acknowledgement means precise totals for government grants to the charity for the last three years of Clinton's four-year tenure as secretary of state have still not been publicly disclosed. All U.S. charities have to separately disclose each year how much they get in government funding, both domestic and foreign.
Shortly before taking office in 2009, Clinton promised the Obama administration heightened transparency concerning donors to her family's charities to avoid accusations of conflicts of interests when she became the nation's most senior diplomat. In recent months, the charities have said they did not comply with some parts of the agreement.As we learned in February from CNN, the Clinton Foundation was quick to violate this agreement. Now, proving the extent to which those violations occurred (as well as multiple allegations of influence peddling) will hinge on an examination of the foreign government donor list, as well as the dates and amounts of the grants. ...Which is exactly what Reuters is saying the Clintons refuse to reveal. Despite claims made by Maura Pally, the foundation's acting chief executive officer, the foundation has not released donations made specifically by foreign governments.
"Those same grants have always been properly listed and broken out and available for anyone to see on our audited financial statements, posted on our website," she wrote in a statement on the foundation's website. The audited financial statements, however, do not break out government grants separately, foundation officials told Reuters. Instead, they combine them with an unspecified amount of funds from private grant-making organizations, in keeping with generally accepted accounting principles, the foundation officials said. The revenue tables in the statements do not make explicit that any revenue at all comes from governments.We know, you're floored by this news. Reuters appears to think this is some kind of revelation. If you know anything about how Bill and Hillary operate, it shouldn't be. Sadly, the only surprising thing about the Clintons' "one rule for us, another for everyone else" approach to government is that media outlets are still willing to act surprised when they see it in action.
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