Wikileaks Releases "Rosetta Stone" Of Clinton Foundation Corruption Story

As many will note upon reading the ledes in Thursday's Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and elsewhere throughout Thursday's media cycle about the latest Wikileaks' email dump--specifically: a 2011 memo from President Clinton's right-hand-man-turned-"public-relations"-mogul Doug Band--it is now crystal clear that it was, indeed, as many have speculated for the last couple of years, Band who provided much of the ethically bereft (outright forbidden--by none other than President Obama--if not blatantly illegal) nexus between Clinton Foundation donors and the former Secretary of State and her family.

In fact, upon a full scan of Thursday's lede, readers will learn that Band (per his memo), himself, back in 2011, while running an arm of the Clinton Foundation, was taking credit for generating no less than a third ($50 million through 2011, with $66 million in potential/future revenue--see page ten of the memo, below) of all the cash that's accrued to the past-and-soon-to-be-present first family's personal bottom line(s), since President Clinton left office.

(Of course, the public was already aware that many of the current Clinton campaign's leading figures, such as none other than John Podesta and Huma Abedin, were closely involved in/aware of this effort, as well. But, the November 2011 Band memo which has just been released, and the resulting communications about it between folks such as Podesta and Abedin, makes this entire matter brutally obvious and virtually impossible for team Clinton to now refute.)

To say this extended story--about which books have been written and movies have been made; and thousands of hours of Clinton campaign staff time has been spent feebly attempting to discredit those books and movies--of "perfectly legal" American graft and corruption of the highest order, is now, as of today, to the point of being so clearly-documented, it is fair game to call the publishing of Band's 2011 memo the definitive "Smoking Gun" on the subject. Or, as the New York Times' Nick Confessore referred to "the Teneo-Clinton Foundation complex" in a series of tweets on Wednesday night:

This Doug Band memo, in the latest Podesta dump, is the Rosetta stone of the Teneo-Clinton Foundation complex.
https://t.co/a1g3nSoGPM
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

Band's argument: I am not get fully compensated for all of the stuff I do for Clintonworld, so you should let me do Teneo. Everyone wins.
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

Now, you could argue: So what? If Band gets his clients to pop over money to a charity, why is that bad?
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

But consider that Band was selling his clients on idea that giving to foundation was, in essence, a way to bolster their influence.
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

Clinton & Band built a platform for executives to bolster their companies' images, bathe in BC's praise, and do some good, while...
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

...Teneo extracted earnings for Band and, depending on what you see in these e-mails, Clinton himself. Teneo paid Clinton until late '11.
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

I guess you can wave it all off as a nothingburger. But Chelsea Clinton and some of Clinton's other aides were clearly freaking out.
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

Generally, the emails show Clinton's *own closest aides* troubled or horrified by things that her surrogates have spent years waving off.
— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016

Here's the link to the Band Memo: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32240

Teneo Foundation Final 11162011 by Daily Caller News Foundation on Scribd

Here's the story from Thursday's WSJ (which is slightly less-slanted than the even more pathetic coverage from the NYT; to get around the WSJ's firewall, just take the headline of the article, enter it into a Google search, and click on the first link in the search returns):

Clinton Foundation’s Fundraisers Pressed Donors to Steer Business to Former President

Two chief fundraisers for the Clinton Foundation pressed corporate donors to steer business opportunities to former President Bill Clinton as well, according to a hacked memo published Wednesday by WikiLeaks.

The November 2011 memo from Douglas Band, at the time a top aide to Mr. Clinton, outlines extensive fundraising efforts that Mr. Band and a partner deployed on behalf of the Clinton Foundation and how that work sometimes translated into large speaking fees and other paid work for Mr. Clinton.

The memo, part of a cache of emails stolen from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, resurfaces an issue that she has had a hard time shaking: questions over the relationship between the Clintons’ charity work and their personal business.

Mr. Band and an associate introduced top corporate executives to the former president, on the golf course and elsewhere, and then asked them to contribute money to the Clinton Foundation or attend the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual foundation event...

And, for kicks and giggles, here's the "non-story" from Thursday's NY Times:

Donations to Foundation Vexed Hillary Clinton's Aides, Emails Show

In the years before Hillary Clinton announced she would run again for president, her top aides expressed profound concerns in internal emails about how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s own moneymaking ventures would affect Mrs. Clinton’s political future.

The emails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month, also are revealing how efforts to minimize potential conflicts at the foundation led to power struggles and infighting among aides and Mrs. Clinton’s family.

One top aide to Mr. Clinton, Douglas J. Band, noted in an email that the former president had received personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”

Chelsea Clinton accused her father’s aides of taking “significant sums of money from my parents personally,” of “hustling” during foundation events to win clients for their own business, and of even installing spyware on her chief of staff’s computer.
Hillary Clinton, another email showed, had promised to attend a Clinton Foundation gathering in Morocco at the behest of its king, who had pledged $12 million to the charity. Her advisers worried that would look unseemly just as she was beginning her presidential campaign in earnest.

“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Mrs. Clinton in a January 2015 email.
For months, the Clintons have defended their foundation, making public proclamations that it went above and beyond what the law required in terms of transparency while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department.

The emails, which came from the account of John D. Podesta, who had a leadership role at the foundation and is now Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, have not contained evidence to support Republican contentions that Mrs. Clinton performed any favors for foundation donors.

But they do show pronounced worries among the Clintons’ closest advisers about the millions of dollars coming into the foundation, and to Mr. Clinton personally, and how they could inoculate Mrs. Clinton from criticism over it...

Last but not least, I'm adding the LA Times coverage of this story to the mix, if for no other reason than its headline...

An aide says he once arranged for $50 million in payments for Bill Clinton

A close aide to Bill Clinton said he arranged for $50 million in payments for the former president, part of a complicated mingling of lucrative business deals and charity work of the Clinton Foundation mapped out in a memo released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.

The report was written by Doug Band, who has transitioned from his job as a Clinton aide to a partner in Teneo Consulting, a firm whose client roster now includes some of the biggest companies in the world. Along the way, Band wrote, he also pushed his clients and contacts to donate millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and to help win business deals for Bill Clinton.

Band wrote the memo in November 2011 to John Podesta, now chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and sent copies to other key Clinton aides, apparently to explain and justify his work in the face of criticism from others in the Clinton orbit — notably Chelsea Clinton.

WikiLeaks has been releasing thousands of hacked emails from Podesta’s account in recent weeks, revealing the rivalries and controversies roiling inside the Clinton family network as Hillary Clinton prepared to run for president...

Of course, there's everything "nothing to see here." Apparently, it really was all "perfectly legal" (corruption)...and, besides, it's "all Putin's fault!"

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Shahryar's picture

if Americans have no attention span and no ability to think critically, how do we fight against the strategy that seems to work?

Telling the truth seems to be pointless. There must be some emotional thing that lies beyond facts and that's what's working on the public. This applies not just to elections but to issues as well.

Then we have a natural reluctance to "play games", which is what we call employing psychological methods. Besides, we're not very good at it.

I'm going to go study those 13 (or however many) techniques that companies use. You know....the bandwagon, glittering generalities, etc.

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But Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" is a classic.

Stein - Baraka 2016

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gulfgal98's picture

Have you been listening to too much Mersey Beat?

Blimey...

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

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