Clinton Cash, Book Review

[book review]
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,
by Peter Schweizer
(Harper, 256 pp., $27.99)

George Washington Plunkitt, a late- nineteenth-century New York State legislator, made his extra money in a straightforward way. “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” he said after people criticized him for patronage, corrupt land sales, and other business-as-usual Tammany Hall goings-on. But Plunkitt distinguished between “honest graft” and the regular kind.
[. . .]
Bill and Hillary Clinton are good students of Plunkitt’s first lesson, according to Peter Schweizer’s new bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Since Bill left the presidency, the Clintons seen a lot of opportunities—and took ‘em all.
[. . .]
Between 2001 and 2012, Bill made $105.5 million in such speeches.
[. . .]
In 2010, Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake. The impoverished nation would require billions in foreign donations to rebuild. Who got himself put in charge of directing those donations? Bill Clinton, as co-chairman of the Interim Haitian Relief Committee. Where would much of the relief money come from? Hillary Clinton, via the U.S. Agency for International Development, a State Department arm. USAID approved cash for a “mobile money initiative” run by Ireland’s Digicel, whose owner, Denis O’Brien, is a key Clinton patron. Bill and Hillary, directly or indirectly, also approved Haiti contracts for companies controlled by Clinton sponsors in housing reconstruction and economic development. The housing contractors performed poorly. Here, too, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the Clintons took money out of the hands of Haitian earthquake survivors. The money again took a circuitous route.
[. . .]
Schweizer’s deliberate writing style strengthens his case. There’s no sex and few women. The author relies almost entirely on public documents, from State Department cables via Wikileaks to global tax records to foreign-language press accounts. When he isn’t sure of something, he says so. This is no breathless, Clinton-hating book dependent on third-hand speculation. Even Schweizer’s subtitle is careful: “foreign governments and businesses helped make Bill and Hillary rich,” he says. They didn’t do it all.
[. . .]
If, to defend Hillary, you must rely on debating whether the secretary of state indeed has control over the State Department, or, alternatively, if you must whine that Republicans behave badly, too, you have a weak case. With months’ worth of warning, the Clintons have not answered the overriding question: Why take this money and create even the appearance of a scandal? Do they need the millions that badly?
Hillary, now a presidential candidate, participated in actions that seem little different from the alleged actions that got both the New York State Senate leader and the New York State Assembly leader indicted this year—essentially, bribery. Outside of New York, the abuses of these state officials won’t matter much. It matters a lot, however, that the Russians control much of our uranium. That foreign dictators and oligarchs now believe that the American government is biddable matters, too.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0517ng.html

Nicole Gelinas

The Kickback Kids

Peter Schweizer’s new book documents the Clintons’ disturbing financial dealings.

May 17, 2015