Unlikeable (11 page)

Bill Clinton made almost $48 million in speaking fees while his wife was secretary of state.

As for Frank Giustra, he denied any wrongdoing. He pointed out that he was just one of 1,100
undisclosed
donors to the Clinton Foundation, most of them foreigners.
The donations were routed through the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership in Canada, which bundled the money and sent it along to the Clinton Foundation in America.

Oops!
Giustra had spilled the beans about the foundation's failure to disclose the names of its foreign donors.
The news was a political bombshell, for as a condition of becoming secretary of state, Hillary had promised Obama that the foundation would disclose
all
of its donors.

Worse yet, Giustra made the foundation sound like an international money-laundering scheme.

“Rather than taking cash from blatantly illegal activities (as far as we know) and then cleaning it up by running it through legitimate businesses before it ends up at its final destination,” wrote the Federalist's Sean Davis, “the Clinton Foundation mops up cash from wealthy foreigners, bundles it within a larger organization to hide the money's original source, and then funnels the cash from that legitimate charity right into the Clinton Foundation coffers.”

The Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog, apparently agreed. It put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” along with Al Sharpton's National Action Network.

“I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive such a [documented series of scandals],” Peggy Noonan wrote. “I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It's not news anymore.”

THE QATAR CONNECTION

While Hillary was secretary of state, soccer's top governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), awarded Qatar, a tiny oil-rich Arab state with a population of just two million people, the lucrative rights to host the World Cup in 2022.

Qatar was, to say the least, a puzzling choice. Among its many drawbacks, the desert kingdom had a terrible record of human-rights abuses, no soccer history, and summer temperatures that reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit, which made it too hot to play soccer.

Rumors had been circulating for years that the World Cup bidding process wasn't kosher. It was suspected that the votes of some of FIFA's officials were for sale to the highest bidder. And indeed, in May 2015, several of those officials were arrested in Zurich, Switzerland, and charged with a massive corruption scheme, including racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. The U.S. Department of Justice charged that the officials had enriched themselves to the tune of $150 million.

At the time Qatar won the World Cup bid, Bill Clinton was an honorary chairman of the committee that put together the
U.S. bid. Shortly after Bill's committee lost its bid, the United States, along with Australia, hired private investigators to look into the bidding process.

Qatar's winning committee suddenly ponied up between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in an effort, as the Daily Beast put it, to “make it up” to Bill. That sum was on top of the $1 million to $5 million that the state of Qatar had already given the foundation.

While all this was going on, the United States was negotiating an $11 billion arms sale to Qatar that was approved shortly after Hillary left the State Department.

THE UBS CONNECTION

While she was secretary of state, Hillary took the highly questionable step of intervening to fix a problem that UBS, a giant of the Swiss banking industry, was having with the IRS.
The story of Hillary's dodgy behavior was broken by Kimberley A. Strassel, a member of the
Wall Street Journal
's editorial board, who writes a weekly column for the
Journal
titled “Potomac Watch.”

“In the years that followed [Hillary's intervention on behalf of UBS],” Strassel wrote, “UBS donated $600,000 to the Clinton Foundation, anted up another $32 million in loans via foundation programs, and dropped $1.5 million on Bill for a series of speaking events. Both sides deny any quid pro quo. But the pattern is clear: More than 60 major firms that lobbied the State Department during Mrs. Clinton's tenure also donated some $26 million to her family's foundation.”

“It never seems to end,” wrote Tom Bevan, the cofounder and executive editor of RealClearPolitics. “Drip, drip, drip. The web of global and corporate connections to the Clinton Foundation is so vast, there's virtually no issue on which Hillary Clinton can comment without her being immediately tied, via foundation donations or her or her husband's paid speaking engagements, to some entity with skin in the game.”

CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 17

A “CLASSIC WASHINGTON OMELETTE”
A “CLASSIC WASHINGTON OMELETTE”

He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual. He tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

—Thomas Jefferson

I
n the past, Hillary had always managed to wriggle out of tight places, and many of her supporters on the Left were rooting for her to pull off another Houdini act.

Her followers had good reason to believe Hillary would succeed. After all, the Clintons were past masters at weathering scandals, from the trivial (revelations that the Clintons took a tax deduction on Bill's donated underwear) to the consequential (an impeachment trial for lying under oath about Bill's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky).

“The Clintons have been sent off to their certain doom more times than Tyrion Lannister,” wrote Matt Latimer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “Yet whatever the
storm—from blue dresses to funny money from China to an actual impeachment trial—Bill and Hillary are this generation's Six-Million Dollar Man (and Woman). They always rebuild faster, stronger, and a hell of a lot richer than ever.”

The Clintons' battle-tested strategy was simple: wait out the first wave of attacks, then step forward and say there's nothing new.

“Republicans trying to turn the Benghazi attacks into a scandal that taints
Hillary Clinton's chances at a 2016 presidential run must realize that scandals don't weaken Hillary Clinton,” left-wing scourge Bill Maher sounded off on his cable TV show. “They only make her stronger. Travelgate, the Rose Law Firm, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinsky. . . . Hillary eats scandals for breakfast.”

But this time it appeared that the scandals might be consuming Hillary, rather than the other way around.

Because this time was different.

During Hillary's previous scandals, she had not occupied a public office. “Co-president” was a nickname, not an official title. As secretary of state, however, she had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She held a great public trust. She was the face of America around the world, the first among equals in the president's cabinet, and the fourth in the presidential line of succession.

And now she was asking Americans to
trust
her and
elect
her as their president.

“Hillary Clinton,” wrote Michael Barone, author of
The Almanac of American Politics
, “is in a different position. She is a candidate . . . and candidates are easily dispensed with, as former
Senator Gary Hart learned when the photos of him sailing on the ‘Monkey Business' appeared in May 1987 when he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. His staffers vowed he would hold onto his support, but it wasn't his to hold on to. He quickly withdrew and faded from view.”

Turning a $1,000 bet on cattle futures into $100,000 when you were the first lady of Arkansas was one thing; turning the office of the U.S. secretary of state into a money machine for your husband, your relatives, and your family's foundation was something else.

If you believed the polls, Hillary's cheating and chicanery were beginning to erode her reputation among potential voters.
According to a Quinnipiac poll that was conducted in the spring of 2015, 61 percent of independent voters—the voters she needed to win the White House—did not think Hillary was honest.

A month later, Quinnipiac did a poll of Democratic voters and came up with pretty much the same result: a majority—53 percent—did not feel that Hillary was
“honest and trustworthy.”

Yet another poll, this one conducted by the Associated Press and GfK, one of the world's largest marketing research organizations, found that a majority of people did not find Hillary inspiring and likeable.

And the rapid drop in Hillary's “favorability” ratings continued throughout the summer months and into the fall, dimming her prospects of capturing the White House.

For instance, another Quinnipiac University poll found that Hillary would lose Colorado by nine points in a matchup against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and that she would lose Iowa
by at least six points to Walker, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and Senator Marco Rubio.

When voters were asked if Hillary “cares about the needs and problems of people like you or not,” 57 percent of respondents in Colorado replied that she did not.

In late July, Niall Stanage, associate editor of the political paper the
Hill
, published a story about the mounting fear among Democratic insiders that Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate who could lose to a Republican challenger in 2016. And Charlie Cook, the highly respected political analyst and editor and publisher of
The Cook Political Report
, wrote a piece for
National Journal
titled “Is Clinton's Tide Shifting?”

“Up until now,” Cook wrote, “the controversy regarding then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server has been one that has consumed only those who fit into one or more of the following categories: conservative Republicans, regular Fox News–watchers, conservative talk-radio listeners, or Clinton-haters (both professional and amateur). . . .

“The most recent development—that the inspector general of the intelligence community found that in a sample of 40 e-mails provided by Clinton from her server, four (or 10 percent) included classified material—potentially puts a different twist on things. . . . this story would seem to reinforce critics' claims that the Clintons don't play by the rules.”

Going one step further, Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., asserted: “The bad news for Team Hillary is that this issue [using her private e-mail server for classified material] is going to fester. Indeed, over the
next months, given the law, precedent and facts already on the record, the imbroglio holds the potential to kill her candidacy.”

“We . . . see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Peter Schweizer noted. “During Hillary's years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions [with foreigners]. Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”

Skeptics raised an objection.

They said the evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary was purely circumstantial; no one had produced proof that she had provided favors in return for speaking fees or donations to the Clinton Foundation.

“It is highly unlikely that very much of what Schweizer alleges will stick, if only because that classic Washington omelette made of equal parts policy and political reasons can never be unmade once it's cooked,” wrote one of the skeptics, Michael Hirsh. “Especially among the uber-cautious Clintons, you'll never find the smoking ingredient; no one will ever be caught saying, ‘Let's make a policy decision for Bill's donors.'”

The skeptics demanded a smoking gun.

They were demanding hard evidence.

Something on paper.

Like a document or a sworn affidavit or . . . an e-mail.

But Hillary had wiped her private e-mail server clean. She had destroyed half of all her e-mail communications while she was secretary of state.

She had made it all but impossible to find a smoking gun.

Or had she?