AP: Over Half of Non-Govt. People W/Access To Clinton In State Dept Were Foundation Donors

It’s time for the team Clinton to start talking about the AP being part of the right wing conspiracy because they can count.  According to theAssociated Press more than half of the people (85 of 154) outside of any government who had in-person or phone access to Hillary Clinton while she was running the State Dept gave money to the Clinton Foundation either personally or through companies or groups

Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton’s help with a visa problem and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.

The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

Before the liberals can start screaming there is no evidence of a quid pro quo, allow me to suggest they are very wrong.  This is Washington D.C., the seat of the most powerful government in the world. The prize is not gold or money in most cases.  The most valuable thing inside the beltway is access. Even in cases when the visitor’s request is rejected by the Secretary, the fact that the Clinton Foundation was able to sell access to Hillary, guarantees continued money to the Foundation and of course Bubba and Hillary also.

The AP’s findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.

The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP’s calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.

Not that there weren’t examples of direct connections also:

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest “microcredit” for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank’s board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.

American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank’s nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation — a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution’s annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.

Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department’s foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton’s tenure.

By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton’s top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh’s government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money — a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.

“Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way,” he asked Verveer. Yunus sent “regards to H” and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.

There are other examples in the AP story which you can read here.

Now you can believe that the fact that most of the people who got access to Hillary as Secretary of State is a total coincidence, and I am sure that team Clinton is making that claim as this is being written.  The American people are not as stupid as team Clinton believes.  For those who believe the 85 of 154 number is a coincidence, must also believe in unicorns, the tooth fairy, and that Obama would have been in Louisiana today even if Trump wasn’t there on Friday.

http://lidblog.com/ap-over-half-of-non-govt-people-waccess-to-clinton-in-state-dept-were-foundation-donors/