Clinton Foundation Opaque "Fundraising Arm of Campaign"

In an interview on CNN this weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders said: "You asked me about the Clinton Foundation. Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships? You don't have a lot of civil liberties, democratic rights in Saudi Arabia. You don't have a lot of respect there for divergent, opposition points of view, for gay rights, for women's rights. Yeah -- do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do."

KEN SILVERSTEIN, ken.silverstein[at]gmail.com, @kensilverstein1
Silverstein is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporter and a columnist for the New York Observer and a contributing editor to VICE. He has written several pieces on the Clinton Foundation including "Shaky Foundations: The Clintons' so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends" for Harper's Magazine.

Silverstein said today: "The Clinton Foundation is a de facto fundraising arm for the Clinton family, its cronies and of Hillary Clinton's political campaign. It's a way for people -- especially foreign leaders and wealthy individuals -- to curry favor with unlimited money that is incredibly opaque. It is only able to operate because of the meaningless 'memorandum of understanding' the Foundation signed with the Obama administration."

Silverstein writes: "It is beyond dispute that former President Clinton has been directly involved in helping foundation donors and his personal cronies get rich. Even worse, it is beyond dispute that these very same donors and the Clintons' political allies have won the focused attention of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. Democrats and Clinton apologists will write these accusations off as conspiracy mongering and right-wing propaganda, but it's an open secret to anyone remotely familiar with accounting and regulatory requirements for charities that the financial records are deliberately misleading. ...

"[A] Canadian charity called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership -- which is run by one of Bill Clinton's close friends, Frank Giustra -- has been moving significant sums of money into the Clinton Foundation's flagship in New York. There's no way for the public to know precisely how much total money the CGEP has taken in over the years -- or how much it has forwarded on to the Clinton Foundation -- because, unlike in the United States, under Canadian non-profit law charities don't need to report donors to tax authorities. Earlier this year, after being severely criticized by the Canadian press, the CGEP released the names of 24 of its donors, but more than 1,000 are still unknown. (CGEP wrote in an email that "going forward [it] will publicly disclose all future donors.") ...

"One money-laundering expert and former intelligence officer based in the Middle East -- who had access to the foundation's confidential banking information -- told me that members of the royal family in Middle Eastern countries, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have donated money to the CGEP that has then been sluiced through to the Clinton Foundation. He told me that the CGEP has received money from corrupt officials in South Africa during the former regime of Jacob Zuma and from senior officials in Equatorial Guinea, one of the most brutal and crooked dictatorships in the world. 'Equatorial Guinea doesn't give to the Clinton Foundation in New York because it's too embarrassing,' he said. 'They give the money anonymously in Canada and that buys them political protection in the United States. The Clinton Foundation is a professionally structured money-laundering operation.'"

Silverstein's books include the recently-released The Secret World of Oil as well as The Radioactive Boy Scout.