Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been meticulous at erasing her tracks on everything from her “cattle futures windfall” and missing Rose Law Firm billing records in the 1990’s to her State Department emails that went missing from the private server she wiped clean of data in her Chappaqua, New York home – with one exception.
While she has been astute enough to break U.S. laws without fear of effective investigation from the American people or even Congress, she did decide comply with Canadian law when it comes to reporting donors to her many endeavors including the Clinton Foundation in particular.
That’s a scramble is on at the Canadian arm of the Clinton Foundation where it turns out more than 1,100 donors were reported to Canadian authorities went missing from U.S. filings – documents needed to conduct audited financial statements required under federal and state law as well as her foundation’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 tax filings.
Ostensibly, the disclosure fiasco concerns the breaking of Hillary Clinton written pledge to Obama Administration – before she became Secretary of State – to disclose donation’s to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments, corporations and individuals in advance of receipt so the administration could vet the gifts for any conflict of interest.
With the Canadian disclosures now public, breaking a written pledge between two politicians is the least of Hillary’s worries.
As the drama plays out in Washington, her status as a viable presidential candidate is being called into question as she rushes to refile at least five years’ worth of Clinton Foundation tax returns in advance of IRS and congressional review.
Reporting for The Daily Caller, Chuck Ross writes that the Canadian arm of Clinton’s empire known as the Vancouver-based Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership “is also troubling because of Bill Clinton’s close relationship with Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra.”
“Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2005, months after Clinton accompanied him on a business trip in which he secured a lucrative mining deal with Kazakhstan’s energy agency.
Giustra has since donated another $100 million, which was used to create the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership.”
One of the partnership’s major donors was the Canada-based Fernwood Foundation that gave an unreported $2.35 million donation to the Clinton Foundation.
More troubling is the fact that the Fernwood Foundation is controlled by Ian Tefler – former chairman of Uranium One – the uranium mining company now controlled by Russia in a sale that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to approve.
Was it pay for play? So far, no one knows. But the timing of contributions and the taking of official government actions by Secretary Clinton closely correlate creating suspicion all around.
For now, Hillary Clinton is hiding behind privacy laws that govern entities like the Canada-based partnership that is now reaching out to the groups top 28 donors for permission to disclose their identities according to a report published in The Washington Post.
Nothing in Canadian law prevents the disclosure of donor information by a partnership so it becomes a matter of trust in Hillary Clinton.
The question for her is which is more important – the risk of dashing continued donation’s from foreign governments, companies and individuals to the Clinton Foundation by disclosing their names without permission or remaining a viable 2016 presidential candidate (at least in the short term) depending on gravity of what is disclosed.