The “Podesta emails” being released daily by Wikileaks have produced their first bona fide “smoking gun” — a long email by Clinton Foundation associate Doug Band detailing the manner in which Bill Clinton was using the foundation’s connections as a way to build up personal clients for speech giving and consultancy.
In the email — part of a harvest of emails to and from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, over the past eight years — Band, Bill Clinton’s former adviser, detailed the manner in which he had encouraged Clinton Foundation corporate donors to also hire Bill Clinton directly.
Band was responding to accusations that he was enriching himself from his Clinton connections after he started a consultancy, Teneo, which won contracts with key Clinton foundation donors. To refute the charge, Band was detailing how much unpaid work he had done for the foundation, and how much Bill Clinton had earnt off the back of it. Band estimates this to be of the order of $50 million.
The “Band email” comes at the end of a week in which WikiLeaks’s Podesta releases have become increasingly challenging to the Clintons — leading to the belief that WikiLeaks is saving some truly explosive items for the final week of the campaign. Many of the emails simply deal with the infighting between various players in different Clinton factions, or various acts of sycophancy designed to gain a donation — such as arrange for a Clinton Foundation jamboree to take place in Morocco, after the king gave them a $12 million donation.
This week, however, the first very troubling email emerged — concerning a donation given by Virginia governor and close Clinton friend Terry McAuliffe to Jill McCabe, who was running for a Virginia State Senate position. McCabe’s husband was an FBI agent who subsequently became one of the agents part of the investigation into Hillary’s private email server. Hillary’s defenders have pointed out that the appointment of the agent occurred a year after the donation. That does not rule out the possibility that the agent was navigated into the position — although coincidence and closeness of DC circles is the far more likely explanation.
The Podesta emails might well be having an effect on the Clinton image by prompting a slight fall in her polling — to an aggregate lead of 5%, rather than 6%. If there’s more to come, the final 10 days could be a rocky one for camp Clinton.
In other news of general foreboding, the Bundy family militia who occupied a wildlife sanctuary in Oregon in January have been acquitted of various charges — mostly around illegal firearms — arising from the six-week occupation. The acquittal looks like a case of jury nullification; the Bundy family (who staged the Cliven Bundy rebellion against federal laws in Nevada) defended themselves.
The case sets no legal precedent, but it will act as encouragement for any militias planning on staging some form of “resistance” in the wake of a Trump loss. They will be further encouraged by the double standard still operating — protesters (Native American and supporters) occupying land in the path of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline have been greeted with militarised policing, felony charges with decades-long penalties. November 8 won’t even be the beginning of the end of what’s happening now. And next week will be a doozy.
I am surprised that in view of the evidence the jury wasn’t directed to convict the Bundy family militia. Failing that, I am even more surprised that the prosecutors reportedly aren’t appealing the acquittal, which is possible in at least some Australian jurisdictions if the jury has made a manifest error, which it seems to have done in this case.
Er, smoking gun Mr Rundle … ??? Not sure it quite stacks up against Conversation 741-002.
Call me naïve but I can’t see a problem in Bill Clinton using the foundation’s connections for furthering his engagements. He hasn’t been channelling charity money for personal gain has he? If people want to pay him a lot of money to speak then good on him.
Via Twitter: ‘The point of Wikileaks is that power must be held accountable. The problem is that Wikileaks is powerful and unaccountable.’
So wait, it is a bad thing that the US didn’t put sufficient fear of the militarized police state into the Bundy militia? Of all the ways out of the problem, I don’t think putting down all resistance so it is ‘fair’ to brutally put down other groups is one of them.
A quick google search found Patriots condemning what happened in the specific case you bring up, of the pipeline in Dakota. Here is a snippet of an article on it from the Oathkeepers website
“The optics of the tribes being specifically unarmed even after the dog attacks has really seemed to put the powers that be on notice. As many of you who were either at Bundy Ranch or were closely watching will remember, that also started when unarmed protestors were attacked by the BLM security agents with attack dogs and AR-15’s. These events are two sides of the same land-use-issues coin here in the western United States. We must begin to break down our social differences and stand together as one United people living on the same land to overcome these federal land grabs.
The very propaganda mechanisms that were used to label the protestors at Bundy Ranch as “violent extremists” are also being used by the powers that be to do the same to these native protestors. This commonality offers an opportunity to break down some of our social stigmas on all sides.”
But yeah, sure, the Bundy militia should have been Waco’d because Trump or whatever.