A Tsunami of Graft: Bill Clinton Heroically Raised Money for the Tsunami Vicitms, By First Securing a $500,000 Payment For his "Charity"

Motherf***ers.

There is a special place in hell for this clan of grifters.

Deborah Sontag reports:

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity's color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening's net proceeds -- enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

Happy Hearts' former executive director believes the transaction was a "quid pro quo," which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.

"The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium," said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues.

A longer digest at Business Insider-- which notes it is "extremely rare" for one charity to pay money to another so-called "charity."

It also notes the charity that was supposedly getting the benefit of Clinton's star power raised less money the year he got his "award" than it did the previous year.

Meanwhile, the New York Times' resident Goof Nicholas Kristof claimed that we shouldn't blame the Clintons for the "charity" greed -- we should blame the campaign finance system.

One problem with this absurdity. Okay, two problems. Obviously, this is the go-to spin whenever a Democrat is found to be dirty -- it's the fault of the system, not of the person.

But Jim Geraghty points out a a problem so glaringly obvious you may have missed it -- The Clinton "charity" is not about financing any campaigns, at least not admittedly, and if we ever discover this "charity" is in fact about financing Hillary Clinton's campaign, it will be a serious criminal breach demanding of serious jail time.

This "Charity" is about personal enrichment -- and what the fuck does that have to do with campaign finance?

posted by Ace at 03:43 PM

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