You may recall that Hillary Clinton criticized Bernie Sanders for not raising money for the state parties while she did.
Not so much. It was money laundering:
In the days before Hillary Clinton launched an unprecedented big-money fundraising vehicle with state parties last summer, she vowed “to rebuild our party from the ground up,” proclaiming “when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen."But it gets even better: It turns out that The Clinton Foundation set up a dummy corporation in Canada to conceal its finances:
But less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by that effort has stayed in the state parties’ coffers, according to a POLITICO analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission filings.
The venture, the Hillary Victory Fund, is a so-called joint fundraising committee comprised of Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 32 state party committees. The setup allows Clinton to solicit checks of $350,000 or more from her super-rich supporters at extravagant fundraisers including a dinner at George Clooney’s house and a concert at Radio City Music Hall featuring Katy Perry and Elton John.
The victory fund has transferred $3.8 million to the state parties, but almost all of that cash ($3.3 million, or 88 percent) was quickly transferred to the DNC, usually within a day or two, by the Clinton staffer who controls the committee, POLITICO’s analysis of the FEC records found.
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But it is perhaps more notable that the arrangement has prompted concerns among some participating state party officials and their allies. They grumble privately that Clinton is merely using them to subsidize her own operation, while her allies overstate her support for their parties and knock Sanders for not doing enough to help the party.
“It’s a one-sided benefit,” said an official with one participating state party. The official, like those with several other state parties, declined to talk about the arrangement on the record for fear of drawing the ire of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
In fact, the DNC, which has pushed back aggressively on charges that it is boosting Clinton at the expense of other Democrats, has advised state party officials on how to answer media inquiries about the arrangement, multiple sources familiar with the interactions told POLITICO.
“The DNC has given us some guidance on what they’re saying, but it’s not clear what we should be saying,” said the official. “I don’t think anyone wants to get crosswise with the national party because we do need their resources. But everyone who entered into these agreements was doing it because they were asked to, not because there are immediately clear benefits.”
Some fundraisers who work for state parties predict that the arrangement could actually hurt participating state parties. They worry that participating states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds and lack competitive Senate races could see very little return investment from the DNC or Clinton’s campaign, and are essentially acting as money laundering conduits for them. And for party committees in contested states, there’s another risk: They might find themselves unable to accept cash from rich donors whose checks to the victory fund counted toward their $10,000 donation limit to the state party in question — even if that party never got to spend the cash because it was transferred to the DNC.
Aides to former President Bill Clinton helped start a Canadian charity that effectively shielded the identities of donors who gave more than $33 million that went to his foundation, despite a pledge of transparency when Hillary Rodham Clinton became secretary of state.BTW, one of the things that this appears to have covered up is donations associated with a rather smelly deal involving Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency, taking over a large Canadian uranium concern.
The nonprofit, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada), operates in parallel to a Clinton Foundation project called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is expressly covered by an agreement Mrs. Clinton signed to make all donors public while she led the State Department. However, the foundation maintains that the Canadian partnership is not bound by that agreement and that under Canadian law contributors’ names cannot be made public.
The foundation cited that restriction last weekend in explaining why it did not disclose $2.35 million in donations from the chairman of Uranium One, the subject of an article in The New York Times last week. The article examined how company executives and shareholders had sold a majority stake in the company — and with it a significant portion of American uranium reserves — to an arm of the Russian government in a deal that required the approval of the United States government.
“This is hardly an effort on our part to avoid transparency,” said Maura Pally, acting chief executive of the Clinton Foundation.
Instead, the foundation said that the partnership was created by the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra to allow Canadian donors to get a tax benefit for supporting his work with Mr. Clinton — a benefit that came with the price of respecting Canada’s privacy laws. On Wednesday, the partnership issued a statement citing a legal opinion that “charitable donors have an expectation and right of privacy.”
However, interviews with tax lawyers and officials in Canada cast doubt on assertions that the partnership was necessary to confer a tax benefit; an examination shows that for many donors it was not needed, and in any event, since 2010, Canadians could have donated to the foundation directly and received the same tax break. Also, it is not at all clear that privacy laws prohibit the partnership from disclosing its donors, the tax lawyers and officials in Canada said.
The partnership, established in 2007, effectively shielded the identities of its donors — and the amount they gave — by allowing them to bundle their money together in the offshoot Canadian partnership before it was passed along to Clinton Foundation programs. The foundation, in turn, names only the partnership as the source of those funds.
In addition to donations to the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton got paid a lot to give a talk to Russia bankers as well.
OK, so they are money laundering. I get it. You could do this in Delaware, or Nevada, or Wyoming, or Panama, or the Seychelles, or the Bahamas, but Canada? Laundering money through Canada?
Seriously?
That is just perverse, or as Eric Oram said so famously, "Seriously, I don't even like working here. They are so weird."
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