Clinton Foundation to refile taxes after errors emerge

No one cares...... these fake or completely overblown "scandals" do no but help Hillary Clinton and her efforts to become President.

 

They were hiding it from the public for a time. The foundation made public statements while Clinton was Secretary of State stating they did not accept foreign donations to avoid a conflict of interest.

They lied in those statements and they lied on their tax returns.

Excuse me. They made errors in their public statements and in their tax returns.

 

They have lied in one way or another for 25 years. They have an incredible ability to lie just enough to make most people just not care.

 

I trust the Elect Hillary campaign will come up a better slogan than this.

 

From what we've seen from them in the past, I expect sloppy. How many scandals -- manufactured or otherwise -- could have been avoided if only they were better at the cover-up?

 

Both need to stop.

 

NYT Reporter: Clinton Officials Lied About a Meeting Taking Place, Unaware of Photo Evidence

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This just shows how out of touch the right is.

This isn't the type of scandal you need in order to convince people to not vote for Hilary. Back to the drawing board... And do better next time.

 

It's unfortunate the Federalist article is such a hack job. Given the obvious bias in the article, I have a hard time trusting their research. I don't really want to have to follow their links and check their work. The 2012 return is 67 pages long. The $18m that went to salary and benefits is hard to contextualize without knowing how many employees they have (wikipedia says 350, which would mean the average pay is ~$50k). But, they do list the salaries for their officers, and they're paid relatively modest amounts compared to for-profit corollaries, though certainly well enough to be comfortable. As for the bulk that is reported as "Other Expenses" -- it looks like it is actually itemized in an attached schedule. I know the journalist saw the schedule because travel isn't listed on page 1. The $25m in travel over 5 years, btw, may not be unreasonable given that it's an organization focused on GLOBAL problems. As for the percentage spent on programs, I have no clue as to whether that's a fair way to judge a foundation like this one. The journalist makes the assumption that it is, like those 350 people working there aren't doing anything worthwhile at all. Seems facile.

I did try to find a charity-grading evaluation of the Clinton Foundation, but I haven't found anyone with a grade for them. So, I'm not going to look at it any further. Maybe the Clintons are up to no good, but this article is a piece of crap a, and it wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to figure out how it was being disingenuous.

 

Someone should start a thread about Jeb funneling $2B in Florida state workers’ pension money to the financial firms of his elder brother’s major donors.

 

Seriously? Why is this an issue anymore? Money is speech right? Doesn't matter where it comes from. right?

The Koch's are going to spend a billion dollars buying congress. Hilliary has amassed a huge war chest. Nobody questioned Romney about where his money came from.

it's all speech now right? You can thank Citizens United.

 

I am surprised it is that low to be honest.

You guys are fools. Do you realize that nearly every major corporation in America donates to the Clinton Foundation? There's pages and pages and pages of fortune 500 companies on their website.

Of course the odds are that any company that gets nominated for a major award is a major company and probably donated to the foundation.

The Clinton foundation is massive. Just massive. I bet the same percentage of corporations who donated to the Clinton Foundation won the award BEFORE Clinton even took office.

 

I love how all of the "money is speech" people are coming out of the woodwords to find direct evidence of money for favors. How do you think Washington DC is run? LOL. Welcome to the real world.

There's plenty of reasons to vote against Hillary. That she happens to be part of the political establishment and uses entrenched tricks isn't a particularily good one.

 

Anyone who's been to CGI or at the very least watched it knows that this is no error lol

The real sad thing about this is that most people don't know how this works. If the king of thailand, for example, decided to give the CF or CGI a large chunk of change out of his personal account or through a private company he owns, that wouldn't have to be classified under foreign government contributions if done "correctly".

 

YAWN.

 

Why audit them? To collect $0 in additional tax because they misreported something and are now correcting it? Misreporting happens rather frequently (speaking as a CPA), and we usually don't worry too much if it doesn't affect taxes.

I will say though, that this is unusual for something of this size. It doesn't mean it was intentional, or that the Clintons are even responsible for the error, but it is suspicious.

 

noted neocon writing in NYMag:

--
The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency
By Jonathan Chait

The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse. All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.

The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:

The New York Times has a report about the State Department’s decision to approve the sale of Uranium mines to a Russian company that donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, and that a Russian investment bank promoting the deal paid Bill $500,000 for a speech in Moscow.

The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton has received $26 million in speaking fees from entities that also donated to the Clinton Global Initiative.
The Washington Examiner reports, “Twenty-two of the 37 corporations nominated for a prestigious State Department award — and six of the eight ultimate winners — while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton family foundation.”

And Reuters reports, “Hillary Clinton's family's charities are refiling at least five annual tax returns after a Reuters review found errors in how they reported donations from governments, and said they may audit other Clinton Foundation returns in case of other errors.”

The Clinton campaign is batting down the darkest and most conspiratorial interpretation of these stories, and where this all leads remains to be seen. But the most positive interpretation is not exactly good.


When you are a power couple consisting of a former president and a current secretary of State and likely presidential candidate, you have the ability to raise a lot of money for charitable purposes that can do a lot of good. But some of the potential sources of donations will be looking to get something in return for their money other than moral satisfaction or the chance to hobnob with celebrities. Some of them want preferential treatment from the State Department, and others want access to a potential future Clinton administration. To run a private operation where Bill Clinton will deliver a speech for a (huge) fee and a charity that raises money from some of the same clients is a difficult situation to navigate. To overlay that fraught situation onto Hillary’s ongoing and likely future government service makes it all much harder.

And yet the Clintons paid little to no attention to this problem. Nicholas Confessore described their operation as “a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.” Indeed, as Ryan Lizza reported in 2012, Bill Clinton seemed to see the nexus between his role and his wife’s as a positive rather than a negative:

Regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal feelings about Obama, it didn’t take him long to see the advantages of an Obama Presidency. More than anyone, he pushed Hillary to take the job of Secretary of State. “President Clinton was a big supporter of the idea,” an intimate of the Clintons told me. “He advocated very strongly for it and arguably was the tie-breaking reason she took the job.”

For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the Administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors. “Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,” the Clinton associate continued. “It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.”

The Obama administration wanted Hillary Clinton to use official government email. She didn’t. The Obama administration also demanded that the Clinton Foundation disclose all its donors while she served as Secretary of State. It didn’t comply with that request, either.

The Clintons’ charitable initiatives were a kind of quasi-government run by themselves, which was staffed by their own loyalists and made up the rules as it went along. Their experience running the actual government, with its formal accountability and disclosure, went reasonably well. Their experience running their own privatized mini-state has been a fiasco.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/04/disastrous-clinton-post-presidency.html