The Clintons’ Criminal Board of Trustees
By Matthew Vadum
At least four board members of the highly efficient cash-for-favors trading platform known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation have either been charged with or convicted of serious crimes, including bribery and fraud, according to an eagerly awaited blockbuster of a book.
The book is Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by acclaimed best-selling author Peter Schweizer. Although it only became available for sale to the public on May 5, on Sunday it was already the 15th best-selling book on Amazon.com. The New York Times calls the meticulously documented opus “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy,” and reports that it “asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.”
Hillary Clinton, of course, is the increasingly radical now 67-year-old presidential candidate who in 2008 somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of what for years before had seemed to pundits far and wide like an “inevitable” victory. She is the unceasingly devious, condescending plutocrat who at the launch of her 2016 campaign told the American people, “Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion.”
The former first lady is also the individual who botched the U.S. response to an Islamic terrorist attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, that left four Americans dead. At the time Clinton scapegoated the innocent director of an anti-Islam movie trailer that almost nobody had seen at the time of the assault, claiming that the sophisticated military-style attack arose spontaneously from an angry mob of protesters gathered outside the facility which was in Islamist-held territory. The Benghazi coverup the Obama administration engineered to get President Obama safely reelected in November 2012 has been gradually falling apart.
More recently Hillary revealed that all her government emails from her time at the State Department were routed through her own personal Internet server and that tens of thousands of the emails that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted. Emails were deleted while subject to a congressional subpoena from the Benghazi Select Committee.
This suggests Mrs. Clinton is guilty at a minimum of a species of obstruction of justice known as spoliation of evidence. Although many journalists are now burning up the telephone lines trying to find a so-called smoking gun that incriminates Hillary, they don’t seem to realize they already have it. In legal proceedings the finder of fact is entitled to draw an adverse inference from the fact that an individual destroyed evidence that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal case, something Mrs. Clinton confessed to when she openly admitted her server was scrubbed. This spoliation inference, as lawyers call it, can by itself be deemed to constitute evidence sufficient for a criminal conviction or a civil judgment.
The four wealthy, powerful, and shady men fingered by Schweizer are tech magnate Vinod Gupta, hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal, billionaire Victor Dahdaleh, and energy tycoon Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, Breitbart News reports.
Gupta, Chatwal, and Dahdaleh are former members of the Clinton Foundation’s board of trustees; Bunster serves on the board now.
The endless corrupt tax-exempt 501c3 charity, which has vacuumed up mountains of money from Islamic regimes that persecute women and religious dissenters and employed convicted Egyptian terrorist Gehad el-Haddad for five years, used to be called the William J. Clinton Foundation. The charity and its corrupt activities were examined at length by this writer last month at FrontPage.
The most prominent of the trustees who has had serious run-ins with the law is tech magnate Vinod Gupta, “the founder and chairman of the database firm InfoUSA, [who] was a major Clinton financial supporter,” the book states.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Gupta:
improperly used corporate funds for over $3 million of personal jet travel for Gupta and his family and friends to such destinations as South Africa, Italy, and Cancun; $2.8 million of costs associated with Gupta’s yacht; $1.3 million of personal credit card expenses; and costs associated with 28 club memberships, 20 automobiles, his homes around the country, and premiums for three personal life insurance policies. The Commission also alleges that Gupta failed to inform Info’s other board members of the material fact that he had purchased shares of an Info acquisition target for his own benefit from which he obtained realized and unrealized ill-gotten gains.
The book reports that Gupta paid Bill Clinton a $3 million “consulting fee,” an abuse of corporate funds that led to a shareholder lawsuit against Gupta. Eventually the company settled, agreeing to fork over $13 million to shareholders.
Gupta settled the civil charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing. According to an SEC press release Gupta agreed to disgorge $4,045,000 plus prejudgment interest of $1,145,400, along with a $2,240,700 civil money penalty. He was also barred “from serving as an officer or director of a public company,” and restrictions were placed “on Gupta’s voting of his Info common stock.”
It appears that two of Gupta’s projects in India that were to be named after Mrs. Clinton failed to materialize.
Gupta’s charity, according to the Clinton Foundation’s website, committed to underwrite something called the “Hillary Clinton School of Journalism.” Courses offered would presumably include Evading Questions, Treating Reporters As Stenographers, Lies Damn Lies and Statistics, Useful Subterfuge: The Art of Smearing, and so on. (Longtime Clinton lapdog and character assassin Sidney Blumenthal would have been an excellent choice to serve as dean of the j-school.)
The Vinod Gupta Charitable Foundation pledged $6 million to the journalism project in 2007. The school was to be established in India but web searches conducted by this writer failed to locate the educational institution. It was unclear at time of writing if the school project ever went forward but another project bearing Mrs. Clinton’s name is now referenced on the Gupta charity’s website.
The website refers to the “Hillary Rodham Clinton Nursing School,” which was proposed to be constructed in “Rampur Maniharan, Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh).” However, the link the website provides to the “Hillary Rodham Clinton Nursing School,” http://www.womenspolytechnic.in, leads to a placeholder page of an Internet domain name broker that reads, “Click here to buy womenspolytechnic.in for your website name!”
According to its website, the Vinod Gupta Charitable Foundation was incorporated in India. It was “established as a society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860 in Delhi on 4th July, 1997.”
Sant Singh Chatwal, a wealthy Democratic fundraiser and a longtime friend of the Clintons, was convicted last year of illegal campaign financing(including contributions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign), obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. As part of his plea bargain, Chatwal agreed to pay the U.S. government $1 million.
Jordanian-born billionaire Victor Dahdaleh, according to Clinton Cash, “was charged by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in Great Britain with paying more than 35 million pounds in bribes to executives in Bahrain to win contracts of more than 2 billion pounds.”
The SFO’s case against Dahdaleh, who worked for the U.S. company Alcoa as a “super-agent,” fell apart when “a key witness … pleaded guilty to conspiracy to corrupt but refused to testify.” Alcoa entered a guilty plea in a U.S. case related to the bribery saga and agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Justice $384 million.
According to Clinton Cash, current Clinton Foundation trustee Rolando Gonzalez Bunster “has been named in a fraud case in the Dominican Republic involving his company InterEnergy.”
An anti-corruption agency within the government of that Caribbean nation charged Bunster and others in 2013 “concerning alleged ‘ballooned’ fees charged to the government.” Bunster’s company says the claims are “baseless allegations.’”
Probably the most disturbing allegation to emerge from the book so far is that then-Secretary of State Clinton gave her blessing to a financial transaction that handed partial control of America’s strategically important uranium resources to Vladimir Putin’s Russia after investors paid off her husband and gave huge donations to the Clinton Foundation.
A New York Times report on the Canadian company Uranium One, which controls some U.S. uranium facilities, “is based on dozens of interviews, as well as a review of public records and securities filings in Canada, Russia and the United States.” The newspaper acknowledges that “[s]ome of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer … [who] provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting.”
From 2005 through 2011 investors in Uranium One reportedly donated to the Clinton Foundation. In 2010 Bill Clinton took $500,000 from an investment bank to give a speech in Russia. The bank had a “buy” rating on Uranium One stock and connections to the Russian government. Eventually the Kremlin gained 100 percent control over Uranium One through a subsidiary of Russian government-owned Rosatom.
Secretary Clinton was supposed to disclose the millions of dollars that the chairman of Uranium One gave to her foundation through his family foundation while various agencies within the Obama administration were reviewing the deal. So now the nation that succeeded the brutal Soviet Union and now seeks to revive its old empire controls a large swath of American uranium that is needed to produce U.S. nuclear weapons.
Although Mrs. Clinton laughably claimed the former first couple was broke when they left the White House in January 2001, Schweizer reports that the Clintons earned a staggering $136.5 million or more from 2001 to 2012. “During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, according to the book. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”
Reporting by Reuters has already forced the Clinton Foundation to admit that at a minimum its IRS filings from 2010 through 2012 and those of its Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) from 2012 and 2013 are works of fiction. According to Reuters, “[f]or three years in a row beginning in 2010, the Clinton Foundation reported to the IRS that it received zero in funds from foreign and U.S. governments, a dramatic fall-off from the tens of millions of dollars in foreign government contributions reported in preceding years.”
More revelations are coming from Clinton Cash.
Whether Hillary’s struggling candidacy will survive is anyone’s guess.
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