What a Coincidence: Swiss Bank's Donations to Clinton Foundation Increased Tenfold After Hillary Intervened On Their Behalf in a Tax Dispute

There's just no "smoking gun" at all here, so long as you ignore all those guns on the floor, from which smoke is trickling.

Donations to the Clinton Foundation by Swiss bank UBS increased tenfold after Hillary Clinton intervened to settle a dispute with the IRS early in her tenure as secretary of state, according to a published report.

According to the Wall Street Journal, total donations by UBS to the foundation grew from less than $60,000 at the end of 2008 to approximately $600,000 by the end of 2014. The Journal reports that the bank also lent $32 million through entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs it launched in association with the foundation, while paying former President Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of corporate question-and-answer sessions with UBS Chief Executive Bob McCann.

Though there is no evidence of wrongdoing,

What?

The media, and people generally, misuse the word "evidence," conflating it with the word "proof."

There may not be any firm proof of wrongdoing -- but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.

But they're The Experts, you know. And they're Master Wordsmiths and such. Words are their stock in trade and words, allegedly, mean something to them.

....

The UBS case is unusual in that it shows a top U.S. diplomat intervening on behalf of a major overseas bank in a situation where federal prosecutors and the Justice Department had been the lead entity.

UBS' legal battles with the U.S. government date from 2007, when a whistleblower told the Justice Department that UBS had helped thousands of Americans open secret accounts to avoid U.S. taxes. In 2009, the bank paid a $780 million fine and turned over the names of 250 account holders to U.S. authorities as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement.

The Justice Department sought the names of 52,000 Americans who had secret accounts with the Swiss bank. But then Hillary intervened, and this ask was scaled back to 4,500, less than one-tenth the original demand.

And then the money flowing in increased by a factor of ten.

Meanwhile, there is a two-month gap in the emails Hillary provided that cannot be explained, except, of course, by the glaringly obvious way that everyone understands is actually what happened.

The emails embarrassed Hillary, so she erased them.

But there's "no evidence" of this, you understand, except for the fact that she was supposed to turn them over, and instead, erased them.

Among the hundreds of emails released by the State Department from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private account, there is a conspicuous two-month gap. So far, there are no emails between Clinton and her State Department staff during May and June 2012, a period of escalating violence in Libya leading up to the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that left four Americans dead.

A State Department spokesman told The Daily Beast that for the year 2012, only those emails related to the security of the consulate or to the U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya were made public and turned over to a House committee investigating the fatal Benghazi assault. But if that's true, then neither Clinton nor her staff communicated via email about the escalating dangers in Libya during those two crucial months. There were three attacks during that two-month period, including one that targeted the consulate...

Emails from that two-month period have also drawn outside interest for an entirely different reason. In the spring of 2012, a senior Clinton aide obtained a special exemption that allowed her to work both as a staff member to the secretary and in a private capacity for Clinton and her husband’s foundation.

Understandably, the State Department hasn't turned over any emails about the employment status of that aide, Huma Abedin, to the Benghazi Committee, which asked only for Libya-related material. Less understandable is Foggy Bottom's continued rebuffing of journalists' requests to obtain those messages under the Freedom of Information Act. The Associated Press has sued to obtain emails from Clinton’s account about Abedin.

It's all perfectly understandable: She's a criminal, and she routinely destroys records of her criminality.

Can anyone really blame Bill Clinton for his allegedly blonde, allegedly busty mistress?

[Author Ronald Kessler] reports some very scandalous stories in the book, including allegations of former President Clinton carrying out liaisons with another women when his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is not around.

"He has a blonde, busty mistress, and she’s been code named Energizer by agents. This is unofficially, but that is what they call her...She comes in to the Chappaqua [NY] home whenever Hillary leaves. The details coordinate to make sure they don’t cross paths. She, unlike Hillary, is very nice to the agents. She’ll bring cookies."

...

And the agents assigned to Hillary’s detail, says Kessler, don't usually look forward to the assignment.

"Hillary Clinton pretends to be this champion of the little people -- she's gonna help the middle class, she’s compassionate. But the reality behind the scenes is she treats her agents and others less powerful than she is with contempt. In fact she's so abusive to her agents that behind assigned to her detail is considered a form of punishment," he said. "That tells you something about her character."

But there's no evidence of that.

posted by Ace at 02:11 PM

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