Clinton Foundation: Corruption

Am I surprised that Bill and Hillary Clinton's foundation would be a sleazy, corrupt mess?

Not at all.

Am I surprised that the Leftist rag New York Times broke the story?

A little.

From the New York Times:

Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.

The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become 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.

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation — and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty — would survive its founder.

Now those efforts are taking on new urgency. In the coming weeks, the foundation, long Mr. Clinton’s domain since its formation in 2001, will become the nerve center of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s increasingly busy public life.

This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. Amid speculation about her 2016 plans, Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The deficits are stunning.

Wynton Hall, Breitbart, writes:

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a blistering investigative report revealing the Clinton Foundation as a nonprofit rife with crony capitalist conflicts of interest and multi-million dollar deficits despite raking in at least $492 million from 1997 to 2007.

In 2007 and 2008, the Clinton Foundation, which is soon to be renamed the “Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation,” ran a $40 million deficit. Last year, it ran a deficit of over $8 million despite the Foundation and two subsidiaries generating $214 million in revenues.

...The nexus between Clinton Foundation donors, foreign governments, and corporate interests has long been a concern to government watchdog groups. As of 2008, the Clinton Foundation raised at least $46 million from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, Oman, and other foreign governments—the very governments Secretary of State Hillary Clinton eventually negotiated with. Wealthy foreign investors, like Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid and Indian politician Amar Singh gave at least $1 million each.

Previous news accounts have chronicled how Clinton Foundation donors have profited. In 2004, New York developer Robert Congel donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Shortly thereafter, Sen. Hillary Clinton reportedly helped the developer bag millions in federal assistance for his mall project. Congel and Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson denied any crony pay-to-play connection.

The New York Times says the cronyism and conflicts have reached critical mass.

Why would a Leftist propaganda machine like the Times expose the corruption of the Clinton Foundation?

It's better for it to come out now when people are focusing on enjoying the final weeks of summer vacation and not paying attention.

When Hillary starts campaigning in earnest, she'll brush it off as old news.

She'll be able to say, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

The Norman Hsu scandal didn't matter in 2008.

If Hillary can avoid accountability on Benghazi, and the deaths of four Americans, the Leftists aren't going to care about cronyism and multimillion dollar deficits.

The Clintons are corrupt. So what else is new?