Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (42 page)

The only certain way to eliminate this risk going forward is for the Clinton Foundation to forswear new foreign contributions when Senator Clinton becomes Secretary of State.
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Senator Clinton rejected that call and adamantly refused to take reasonable measures proposed by Senator Lugar to achieve true transparency, including provisions to immediately report all gifts of $50,000 or more and all such donations from foreigners at the time they are pledged, and a requirement to review all donations above $50,000 from individual and corporate foreign sources, not just foreign governments.
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“[F]or an administration that had committed itself to full transparency, it’s a disappointing way to start,” the
New York Post
sighed .
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Indeed, the Clintons’ ethical baggage, past, present, and future, is now Barack Obama’s burden.

ADVENTURES IN KAZAKHSTAN

Hillary’s hubby has left no international cash behind. Among his thorniest dalliances is his relationship with mining financier Frank Giustra. The Canadian tycoon flew Clinton in his private corporate jet to meet with Kazakhstan’s authoritarian ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2005. The
New York Times
reported that the trio enjoyed a “sumptuous midnight banquet.” Clinton endorsed Nazarbayet’s lip service to fair elections, despite official State Department condemnations of his repressive tactics. Giustra won lucrative agreements with the country’s state-owned uranium agency. And the Clinton Foundation’s coffers swelled after the deal—“turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said”—was sealed.

After showering more than $130 million on Clinton’s charity, the
Times
reported, Giustra secured “a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.”
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insists her husband’s interests pose no inherent conflict for her. But Giustra’s reach is global. How could there not be the appearance of a conflict of interest in any policy decision the State Department might make in the countries where Giustra operates or plans to operate?

Stanley Brand, a former counsel for House Democrats, told the
Washington Post
there was only one ethical exit strategy for the Clintons: “There’s only one way, which is draconian, which is to void the bequest.... I don’t how else you remedy it.”
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But in a well-worn pattern, the Clintons rejected the simplest and cleanest solution and refused to put their country’s interests above their own.

PAYING AND PLAYING AT HOME

Mrs. Clinton’s dealings with donors on American soil do not inspire confidence, either. An Associated Press investigation found at least six cases where Hillary Clinton, while serving in the U.S. Senate, intervened in government issues that directly affected companies and others that later contributed to her husband’s foundation through the Clinton Global Initiative.
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The beneficiaries of Mrs. Clinton’s actions included Merck & Co. and Barr Laboratories—companies in the same pharmaceutical industry she demonized in the 1990s:

Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. is . . . a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, company spokeswoman Amy Rose said. Merck joined CGI in 2006, when dues were $15,000, and also was a member in 2007 and in 2008, when membership dues rose to $20,000. As part of its commitment to CGI, Merck sponsors public health initiatives around the world, Rose said. Merck joined CGI on its own initiative, she said.

Sen. Clinton wrote a November 2005 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt urging approval of the human papillomavirus vaccine. Merck applied in December 2005 for approval of its HPV vaccine, Gardasil, and the vaccine was approved for use in females ages 9 to 26. Merck is still seeking approval for use in older women, Rose said.

Rose said Merck’s participation in the Clinton Global Initiative was unrelated to Sen. Clinton’s letter. Merck didn’t communicate with Clinton or her office about its HPV vaccine and was unaware of her letter before it was sent, Rose said.

Another letter involved an issue important to Barr Laboratories. Sens. Clinton and Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote to Leavitt in August 2005 urging that “science, not politics” guide the agency and “that a decision be brought swiftly on Plan B’s application.” Leavitt’s office described the Clinton letter as pertaining to Barr’s application for Plan B, the emergency contraceptive also called the morning-after pill.

Barr Laboratories gave $10,001 to $25,000 to Clinton Foundation, the charity’s donor list shows. Barr joined the Clinton Global Initiative in April 2007, spokeswoman Carol Cox said. Cox didn’t comment on Clinton’s letter.
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In Hillary’s own backyard, upstate New York developer Robert Congel donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation in the fall of 2004—just a few weeks after Mrs. Clinton helped pass legislation allowing Congel to use tax-exempt bonds to fund the construction of his company’s massive entertainment and shopping complex in Syracuse. Senator Clinton also paved the path for Congel—literally—by securing $5 million for the complex’s roadway construction. The set-aside passed in August 2005.
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Congel and the Clintons denied any connection between the charitable donation and legislative benefits, of course. Congel, who typically donated to Republican politicians and was a top donor for George W. Bush, explained that he had given to the Clinton Foundation out of patriotic zeal: “I have a huge interest in our country, and I thought Clinton was a great president,” he told the
Times
. “I think he’s a dedicated, dedicated American, and I’m a dedicated, dedicated American.”
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Dedicated, it seems obvious, to showering his affections on a president whose wife just happened to represent his best business interests in legislation coincidentally pending before the Senate.

One of Mrs. Clinton’s pork projects that didn’t fly: a $1 million earmark for billionaire and cable TV executive Alan Gerry’s Woodstock museum. Clinton and fellow New York senator Charles Schumer heralded federal funding for the hippie shrine in the summer of 2007. Gerry and his family contributed nearly $30,000 to Senator Clinton and Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee within days of the earmark surviving a legislative hurdle—including maximum contributions from Gerry and his wife to Hillary Clinton and $20,000 from the Gerrys and two of their kids to the DSCC.
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Like developer and fellow New Yorker Robert Congel, Gerry had given gobs of money to both parties. Like Congel, he denied he was seeking favors and played the civic card. The family donations—nearly half a million dollars since 1998 to both parties—were “something we think a good citizen should do.”
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But other good citizens balked at spending federal tax dollars on hippie tourism. Clinton and Schumer ran into a fiscal accountability backlash when they tried to attach the pet project to a super-sized health and education spending bill.
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Not too groovy.

THE BOTTOM OF HILLARY’ S BARREL

The Clintons have always had a knack for attracting the dregs of society to their donor rolls—and an even greater talent for avoiding the kind of sustained media scrutiny that would ensue were they Republicans. Imagine the Beltway outrage that would have erupted had Hillary donor Mauricio Celis been a deep-pocketed supporter of GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

Celis is a Mexican-born con artist who was convicted of fourteen counts of falsely representing himself as an attorney. A prominent Democratic Party donor and Hillary supporter, Celis made a living defrauding clients and was ordered to pay restitution estimated at about $1.35 million to victims.
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Before the law caught up to the fake lawyer who owned no law license in the United States and dubiously claimed to hold one in Mexico, Celis lived life in the fast lane—flying a private jet, driving a Ferrari, frequenting strip clubs, “handing out fat checks to Democratic candidates, hosting fundraisers and serving on the board of Catholic Charities of Corpus Christi.”
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From 2003 to 2008, he wrote checks totaling more than $110,000 to Democrat candidates and causes, including a maximum contribution to Hillary Clinton covering her primary campaign and huge chunks to the DSCC and DNC. The
Washington Post
reported that he raised $100,000 for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign in 2007, pitching in $28,500 of his own money. In May 2009, his sentence of one year in jail was reduced to ten years’ probation because of the “appearance of bias” by the original sentencing judge. He was ordered to pay $1 million in restitution.

Celis’s fakery was exposed in September 2007 when police arrested him in his bathrobe outside a Corpus Christi convenience store. He had tried to escape from police by flashing a county sheriff’s department badge at officers on the scene. The disturbing incident was just one of several offense reports in which Celis allegedly tried to impersonate law enforcement.
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That’s the tame stuff. In January 2008, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott raided Celis’s offices after determining that Celis was engaged in suspect cross-border activity following large cash withdrawals.
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The attorney general’s office released details of its affidavit, which concluded that Celis had “committed the felony offense of money laundering” and was “rumored to be associated with questionable criminal element (sic) possibly related to drug trafficking.”
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Celis faces three more trials on charges of money laundering, theft, and impersonating a peace officer—in addition to a possible indictment on charges of aggravated perjury and misrepresentation before a judge .
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Several recipients have returned Celis’s stained cash, but Hillary Clinton’s office refused to comment.
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Mrs. Clinton was just as tight-lipped over the sordid case of Rehman Jinnah. A prized rainmaker for the Democrat Party, Jinnah was wanted in Pakistan on corruption charges and wanted in the United States on tax and bankruptcy fraud. Yet, the Democrats still took money from him
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—$30,000 of which went into Mrs. Clinton’s coffers and another $50,000 or so that went to California Senator Barbara Boxer .
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The feds indicted him in 2006; he pulled a Marc Rich and fled soon after, but returned to the United States to plead guilty to funneling illegal contributions to the two senators’ campaign war chests.

The practice of bundling—rounding up many small, individual contributions to donate in one lump sum—has long been a recipe for trouble at Camp Clinton. In October 2007, the
Los Angeles Times
traced about 150 donations of between $500 and $2,000 each from dishwashers, street vendors, and other low-wage workers in New York City Chinatown. Of the contributions examined, one-third of the donors could not be found, and a $1,000 donor denied giving a contribution, according to the report .
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The
New York Post
also had trouble tracking down mystery Hillary donors in October 2007:

A search of Chinatown donors yesterday by
The Post
found several bogus addresses and some contributions that raised eyebrows.

Shin K. Cheng is listed twice in federal records for giving $1,000 donations to Clinton’s campaign on April 17.

But the address recorded on campaign reports is a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, hemorrhoids and skin disease.

No one at the address knew of a Shin K. Cheng.

Another donation came from a Shih Kan Chang on Canal Street. But the address listed is a shop that sells knock-off watches and other pirated goods. The sales clerk there did not know the donor.

Hsiao Yen Wang, a cook in Chinatown, is listed as giving Clinton $1,000 on April 13. Contacted yesterday, she told The
Post
she had written a check.

But it was on behalf of a man named David Guo, president of the Fujian American Cuisine Council, and Wang told The
Post
that Guo had repaid her for the $1,000 contribution.

Such “straw donations” are strictly prohibited by federal law.

In addition, yesterday’s search by The
Post
also turned up several $1,000 donations from Chinatown that were made by cooks, dishwashers, a cashier and a college student .
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The jaded
Washington Post
put it ever so mildly: “This appears to be another instance in which a Clinton campaign’s zeal for campaign cash overwhelms its judgment.”
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What judgment?

Shaking down employees was the route tireless Democrat donor and Hillary fundraiser Norman Hsu took, too. The Hong Kong native raised money like a madman for Clinton and mostly Democrat recipients at every level of government, totaling more than $1.2 million in recent years. Former President Bill Clinton referred to the prodigious fund-raiser at a gala dinner as “our friend Norman Hsu.”
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And Barack Obama was the fourth largest recipient of Hsu-raised funds.
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(See chart.)

Candidates (including candidate PACs) who received campaign donations from Norman Hsu or his associates