Hillary Clinton 2016 Presidential Thread

Not if it gets me emotionally bound to some psychopath on YouTube.

A) Paragraph structure is your friend.

B) You accuse people of being brainwashed, while you don't show a lot of confidence that you aren't being brainwashed yourself by the conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.

And now the top news on Google News is a Huffington Post article about, uh, the rent at Trump Tower? Well, I guess it didn't fulfill the requirements of my betting pool, so I'm not sure how to handle this one. I guess if Trump isn't saying something stupid, they have to reach into the dark and grab anything they can.

Although a conservative group investigating Hillary Clinton’s relationship with donors to the Clinton Foundation maintains that newly released emails prove she granted special “access” and “favors,” during her State Department tenure, nonpartisan experts say that Judicial Watch is right about the former but has not yet proven the latter.



Their insights are important as the Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, becomes a crucial flash point in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton's Republican challenger, Donald Trump, is accusing the Democratic Party's nominee of “pay to play.” It's a narrative sure to continue after Trump hired a Republican operative, Steve Bannon, who wrote a documentary alleging the Clintons got rich from their connections with big business and foreign governments.

Judicial Watch, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, released 725 pages of documents Monday, including 20 exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department. It alleges Clinton’s former top aide, Huma Abedin, provided “special expedited access to the secretary of State” for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Many of the exchanges involve former top Foundation executive Doug Band.

“These new emails confirm that Hillary Clinton abused her office by selling favors to Clinton Foundation donors,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

According to experts, the emails confirm donors were gaining access to Clinton, yet there is no evidence she granted them special favors, an important distinction that may determine how damaging the controversy is to Clinton’s campaign.

“These emails show that there was a long line of Clinton Foundation friends who had no qualms about asking the Clinton State Department for meetings, favors, and special treatment,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO. “Not shocking, but it is disappointing that there were such blurred lines between State Department officials and outsiders. I see little action on these latest requests, but I think further investigation is needed.

“It’s not clear from these emails what actually happened after most of this stuff,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government oversight group. “That’s the missing piece of this puzzle.”

Here are the emails at issue, and the Clinton campaign’s response to them:

-- When Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a 2009 meeting with Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment until Band intervened. According to the Clinton Foundation website, Salman helped establish a scholarship program for CGI, and by 2010, it had contributed $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to the campaign, meeting with foreign leaders is, by definition, the role of the secretary of State and the meeting was arranged through official channels.

-- A 2009 exchange in which Band urged Abedin to get the agency to intervene in order to obtain a visa for members of a British football club, one of whose members was having difficulty because of a “criminal charge.” The campaign says the emails show no action was taken.

-- A 2009 meeting with SlimFast executive S. Daniel Abraham, who’d given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. The campaign notes that Abraham was also head of the Center for Middle East Peace at the time and that the meeting had nothing to do with the foundation.

Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin said "Once again this right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s is distorting facts to make utterly false attacks."

“No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,” he said.

Judicial Watch’s charge that Clinton abused her office is also complicated by U.S. law, as determined by the Supreme Court in a 2014 case titled McCutcheon v FEC. The court determined that placing aggregate limits on campaign contributions is not valid and does not prevent corruption. “Ingratiation and access are not corruption,” the court found.

In the case of the emails, “This is classic access and influence buying,” said McGehee, yet, according to the court, it’s not corruption. “They say this is just the way the system works,” she said. “They‘re saying spending large sums of money doesn’t give rise to quid pro-quo favors.” Instead, the court said the risk of corruption is cured by disclosure requirements, “which tells you how screwed up it is,” she said.

The emails also show that certain donors were frustrated by their inability to quickly pull strings. In June 2009, Joyce Aboussie, a St. Louis-based foundation contributor, seemed frustrated in her attempts to arrange a meeting between Clinton and an energy executive. “We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months,” she wrote.

The emails highlight a trend in which donors are increasingly attempting to influence government not through specific campaign contributions but through affiliated groups, said McGehee. Aboussie and Abraham are also among Clinton's campaign bundlers who've raised at least $100,000.

“Hopefully, this situation tips the scales in favor openness and accountability to ensure that our government isn't captured by those with money or access,” Amey said.

A natural disaster has occurred, and you think that the leader of the country it occurred in shouldn't even bother?

What would you have said if Bush did that for Sandy/Katrina?

You mean like handing out supplies and helping clean up?

Or do you think a better use of that time would be to campaign and ignore the plight of people most likely to vote for you?

I thought people saying he didn't like black people because of how he handled it was ludicrous...

Obama not being there has alleviated stress of the first responders as that's one less important person's security they have to worry about. Also, by staying away while recovery efforts are ongoing, Obama guarantees himself the tools he needs to orchestrate various government agencies, such as FEMA and the National Guard, so they have access and everything they need to do the important jobs of cleaning up the aftermath and saving any people still stranded.

From where I stand, he's handling the whole mess correctly by being of more use while out of the way than being a cause of further stress by wading in hip-deep and possibly making things worse.

I like how you post an article basically exonerating Clinton of selling favors and somehow interpret it as the opposite. Never stop trying King.

Example? He's going to hand some water and food to people in need while he is being protected by god knows how many police officer and secret service? Seems efficient.

I don't know why we are ignoring the morale and publicity aspect of a big figure going to aid people in need.

Cause it's convenient.

Trust me, certain people (who can't be named cause they hit the report feature too often) would automatically decry Bush for not visiting LA but it's too much of a hassle for Obama to do that.

It's funny because: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/flashback-obama-scolds-george-w-bush-not-visiting-louisiana-flood-victims/

Ignoring all other words in this article, the quote alone speaks 1000 words.

Maybe you should read the article then? Bush took a huge amount of heat for simply doing a flyover while on his way back to D.C. from Crawford, and not actually touching down in New Orleans. The photograph dogged him. He has since expressed serious and sincere regret for that. There is no comparison here.

We can talk about what happened for a few days in 2005 and we should. We can talk about levees that couldn’t hold, about a FEMA that seems not just incompetent but paralyzed and powerless. About a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground.

So, according to Fox News, a judge has ordered Hillary to answer questions to some guy under oath.

....really? Again? I have a feeling this is how the next 4 years is going to be, every week someone is going to pull ***like this.

Yeah, written answers, its a joke. She won't even look at them, her lawyers will take care of it.

Well, apparently her lawyers are the reason for it. Her lawyers apparently removed personal emails from those turned over to the state department. I'm not sure how this is a Hillary thing instead of a Hillary's lawyers thing.

Its funny how he bolded the wrong part of the Obama quote.

If anything, this gives the impression that she's incompetent and/or a poor leader.