With Nov. 8 just 62 days off, Bill Clinton must be working overtime to rake in last-minute pay-to-play deals via the family foundation. Why else, after all, would Hillary tell ABC that her hubby shouldn’t have to quit the Clinton Foundation before Election Day?
Even after months of exposés showing how gifts to the foundation bought favors from Hillary’s State Department, the Clintons can’t bear to admit the obvious, and put the brakes on the gravy train.
Seriously: “There are no conflicts of interest” with Bill at the foundation, Hillary insisted. “No decision I ever made” as secretary of state “was influenced by anybody.”
Just ignore the extensive record of her top staff rushing to please big donors — answering demands for meetings, jobs and other perks for donors.
Anyway, even if Bill does step down, the Clintons are leaving vast loopholes to keep the pay-to-play going: Daughter Chelsea, for example, plans to stay on the foundation board even if Hillary becomes president.
Not that the Clintons would ever truly wall off contact with their donors. On taking over as secretary, recall, Hillary vowed the foundation would stop taking foreign cash; it didn’t. And her own ethics vow never even attempted to cover her staff.
Meanwhile, fresh scandals keep surfacing. Last week, McClatchyDC reported that a Clinton Global Initiative official actually sent a key State Department aide a 63-page list of people, groups and companies who’d pledged to donate to CGI.
And on Monday, the Washington Post ran a long story on how for-profit Laureate International Universities gave between $1 million and $5 million and “hired” Bill as a consultant and “honorary chancellor” — at a nifty sum of $18 million over five years. Laureate got to brag of its ties to the Clintons — and a seat at a State dinner on higher education policy.
It’s obvious why the Clintons refuse to make a clean break with the foundation: They simply can’t bear to ever disown their money-sucking operations.