What? The Clintons Were Selling Access??

In a fascinating announcement and news story Monday, which may or may not have been analyzed or even picked up by most major media, the Clinton Global Initiative will shut down effective April 15th.  The good old "CGI" was a gathering of money and power from around the world -- Australia had picked up $44 million of the tab in the past -- to claim to be doing good works.

But the CGI will be no more.  And that needs to be investigated heavily.

Here's the thing, and I know you already know where I'm going.  Hillary Clinton thought she was going to be president, and she thought that for a long time.  No one around her would tell her otherwise, and they wouldn't have had their jobs if they had.

But oops, she lost, and she is obviously never going to be president, at least of the USA.  So with the CGI shutting down after a surprise (the Trump victory), can we not assume that it would not have shut down if she had been elected?  After all, with billions flying around something with your name on it, the big neon lights flash "CONFLICT OF INTEREST" as brightly as you can imagine.  So if she thought she was going to win, she would have shut it down a long time ago.  But she didn't.

Now, in fairness, its employees were told in August that it would be shut down and given the Federal WARN notice telling them so.  But that is a routine action on the part of employers for whom a disaster is possible, as I will be writing about in tomorrow's piece.

So it was not going to be shut down had she won, and the conflict of interest would have been all over the place -- but she knew the media would not make an issue.  The Clintons could have made tons more money, same as they did when she was Secretary of State, and could pocket millions through the Clinton Foundation for her influence (think UraniumOne as a start).

So why is it shutting down now?  Well, Occam's Razor, the principle that you start with the simplest explanation for something you don't understand, meets the FTM ("follow the money") principle that I always go with.  The CGI is, or was, simply a forum for massive influence peddling.  If it were, then as soon as Hillary lost the election, the contributions would dry up because the influence was then gone.

Sure enough, the now non-president Hillary lost both the election and her capacity to sell influence on November 8th and, as some predicted, the contributions to the CGI as well as the Foundation dried up more than a Baptist wedding.  The Australians were, in fact, one of the first to pull their funding.

The CGI was the first to go, and I would be really surprised if there is even any Clinton Foundation either by 2020, or just a shell.  I mean, there are actual charities that do actual work that you can give your money to, so there is no point giving it to a political charity when you can give it straight to the doer of the good works.  Clearly, given that when you pressed Hillary or Foundation staff about what they actually did, you heard "AIDS medication" and then stony silence.

As I've written before, the FBI can blow off the whole Hillary-email server part of their investigation.  I won't care.  But the Foundation and the CGI need to be investigated heavily as a RICO scheme, so that no one ever tries to get away with what the Clintons got away with.

It needs to happen.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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