Tag Archives: clinton-foundation

Here’s an Interesting Little Nugget From the FBI Records Release No One Is Talking About

by AlyssaU7785 Posted on October 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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The FBI released on Monday the fourth and last batch of interview summaries related to its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private home email server during her time as secretary of state. The files to date have summarized Clinton’s July 4 weekend interview with agents, the technical details behind the server, and some complicated aspects of the relationship between the State Department and the FBI.

But they also included another interesting nugget.

In a summary from May 25, 2016, one of the US Secret Service agents assigned to protect former President Bill Clinton told FBI investigators that he was also “asked to do network assessments and troubleshoot IT issues at the Clinton Foundation” in addition to his full-time job of protecting the former president. His apparent “information technology (IT) skills” were tapped to assist “in a case related to the theft of information on the Clinton Foundation information systems.” The agent also told the FBI that after being contacted by longtime Clinton aide Justin Cooper, he helped another Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano, research a security issue with the Clinton’s home email server.

The US Secret Service is tasked with protecting the president, former presidents, and a handful of other high-ranking US politicians, along with foreign dignitaries who visit the United States. The agency, among the nation’s oldest federal law enforcement organizations, also investigates threats against those it protects and investigates crimes related to financial fraud. It’s unclear whether the work the agent described would violate any department regulations. The Secret Service did not respond to questions about the matter. The Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation also did not respond to any questions.

Cooper and Pagliano have both been embroiled in the private email server controversy from the very beginning. They helped the Clintons set up the email server in the first place, according to Politico Magazine, and Pagliano maintained the home email server as someone who worked for Hillary Clinton both at the State Department and privately. In 2015 he invoked his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination during one of the lawsuits related to records about the server, and was one of five people who were given limited immunity deals from the FBI as part of its investigation into the case.

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Here’s an Interesting Little Nugget From the FBI Records Release No One Is Talking About

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

by CaseyYZQswynlze Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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When it comes to charity, Dylan Matthews is pretty hardnosed. To earn his approval, a charity better focus on truly important problems and be damn good at it. So how about the Clinton Foundation? After starting out as a skeptic, he says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the Clinton Foundation is a real charitable enterprise that did enormous good.” In particular, he praises the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which helped lower the cost of HIV drugs and saved untold lives. But there’s a catch:

And—perhaps uncomfortably for liberals and conservatives alike — it is exactly the kind of unsavory-seeming glad-handing and melding of business and politics for which Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken years of criticism that led to its greatest success….The deals made required buy-in from developing governments. The person tasked with getting that buy-in was a former US president with existing relationships with many of those people. Bill Clinton essentially used his chumminess with foreign politicians and pharmaceutical executives, the kind of thing about the Clinton Global Initiative that earns suspicious news coverage, to enlist their help in a scheme to expand access to HIV/AIDS drugs.

I don’t get it. Why should this make anyone feel uncomfortable? Lots of people have star power, but very few have star power with both rich people and foreign leaders. Bill Clinton is one of those few, so he chose a project that (a) could save a lot of lives, (b) required buy-in from both rich people and foreign leaders, and (c) was right at the cusp where an extra push could really make a difference.

I can’t even imagine why anyone would consider this unsavory, unless they’ve lived in a cave all their lives and don’t understand that glad-handing and chumminess are essential parts of how human societies operate. Matthews may be right that many people feel uneasy about this, but I can’t figure out why. It sounds like Clinton chose to do something that his particular mix of experience and character traits made him uncommonly good at. That’s pretty smart.

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

by MilagrosRayner Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Liz Spayd, the New York Times public editor, writes today about charges of “false equivalence.” She basically blows it off:

As we enter the final sprint of an extraordinary presidential campaign, the use of this term is accelerating, and it typically is used to attack news outlets accused of unfairly equating a minor failing of Hillary Clinton’s to a major failing of Donald Trump’s.

….The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates….I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates.

Spayd is getting plenty of flak for this on social media, and I think it’s partially deserved. There’s no question that charges of false equivalence are often partisan, but her job should be to figure out if they’re correct anyway. She doesn’t even really try to do that.

At the same time, Spayd also makes a valuable point that gets too little attention. Some of the Times’ reporting on the Clinton Foundation has been important, she says:

On the other hand, some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did. That’s not good journalism. But I suspect the explanation lies less with making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records than with journalists losing perspective on a line of reporting they’re heavily invested in.

Yep. I frequently read stories that should have been spiked because they don’t really say much of anything. The problem is that after spending days or weeks reporting something, no reporter wants to leave empty-handed. So they write something, even if it’s little more than narrative or innuendo. Editors should be more aggressive about killing stuff like this.

There’s an additional point that Spayd doesn’t make: some stories naturally lend themselves to continual coverage, while others don’t. The Clinton email story is an obvious example of the former. Donald Trump’s tax returns are an example of the latter. These are probably equally important stories, but the email story gets dozens of front-page hits simply because new information drips out steadily. Trump’s tax returns get only one or two because there’s nothing new to report once Trump has made it clear he has no plans to release them.

So editors need to ask themselves if a story is getting overcovered solely because of the nature of the information drip, rather than because of its intrinsic importance. I may be partisan, as Spayd says, but I’d say that both the email story and the Clinton Foundation story have been overcovered for this reason. I don’t quite know what the answer is—the whole point of news is to report stuff that’s new, after all—but at the very least political editors should probably retain more perspective about how much attention to give to individual drips in long-running stories.

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

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Is the Clinton Foundation Corrupt? There’s a Way to Find Out For Anyone Who’s Seriously Interested.

by VenettaBastyan Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Did corporations and foreign governments make donations to the Clinton Foundation as a way of cozying up to Hillary Clinton? Cherry picking the few occasions when they did so within a few months of some action by Hillary won’t tell us anything. There’s too little signal and too much noise. But there’s a way to attack this question. Since 2000, Hillary Clinton has had five phases in her career:

2001-06: Senator from New York
2007-08: Candidate for president with good chance of winning.
2009-12: Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
2013-14: Retired, giving speeches, no one knew what she would do next.
2015-16: Candidate for president with excellent chance of winning.

So here’s what someone needs to do: Take a look at donations to the Clinton Foundation and see if they seem to align with these career phases. For example, you’d expect foreign governments to be uninterested in gaining favors from Hillary while she was a New York senator, but very interested while she was Secretary of State. Conversely, you might expect, say, the financial industry to be generous while she was a New York senator but not so much while she was Secretary of State. During the periods when she was running for president, you’d expect activity to pick up from everybody, and during 2013-14 you’d expect interest to decline across the board.

You can probably think of other trends you’d expect to see if donations to the Clinton Foundation were widely viewed as a way of getting better access to Hillary. So what you need to do is write down these expectations first, and then crunch the data to see if the evidence supports your hypothesis.

This would be a lot of work. But if you really, truly think the Foundation was basically just a way of buying access to Hillary Clinton, this is a way of getting past anecdotes and looking for real trends. Is anyone willing to do this?

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Is the Clinton Foundation Corrupt? There’s a Way to Find Out For Anyone Who’s Seriously Interested.

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