Well, it appears as if the Clintoon Foundation – and its namesakes – are in the news again.\u00a0 And not in a good way, either.<\/p>\n
When Clintoon became SECSTATE in 2009, she and her husband – the famous cigar lover – did not divest themselves of their interests in their Clintoon Foundation.\u00a0 However, Ms. Clintoon did<\/span> enter into a written ethics agreement with the State Department regarding the financial operations of that foundation.<\/p>\n Specifically, she agreed that she would “notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to ‘increase materially’ its contributions.”<\/p>\n In 2011, the government of Qatar gave a $1 million donation to the Clintoon foundation.\u00a0 Ostensibly, the purpose was to honor Cigarman’s 65th birthday.<\/p>\n I don’t know about you, but I’d consider a $1 million “donation” to be a “material increase” in anyone’s<\/em> contributions.\u00a0 That’s especially true since the Clintoon Foundation itself says that they’ve received donations of “between $1 million and $5 million” from the Qatari government.\u00a0 That means that the $1 million in question is at least 20% <\/em>of the Qatari total – and maybe most or all of it.\u00a0 That damn well seems significant to me.<\/p>\n But maybe that’s just me.<\/p>\n In any case:\u00a0 neither Ms. Clintoon nor the Clintoon Foundation ever notified the proper State Department ethics official of the donation.\u00a0 And the following April, Qatari government officials sought to meet with Mr. Clintoon personally.<\/p>\n Hmm.\u00a0 For some reason the term “pay for play” comes to mind.\u00a0 Yet again.<\/p>\n Fox today has a decent article on the matter<\/em><\/a>; Reuters had a similar one a couple of days ago<\/em><\/a> .\u00a0 IMO they’re both worthwhile reading.<\/p>\n Apparently Ms. Clintoon has decided to follow the lead of another “paragon of virtue”, Leona Helmsley.\u00a0 Ms. Helmsley famously once remarked that, “Only the little people pay taxes.”<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 It certainly seems to me that Ms. Clintoon – and likely Mr. Clintoon as well – feels the same regarding following Federal laws and regulations.<\/p>\n Hopefully they’ll eventually get the same comeuppance as did Ms. Helmsley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"