Hillary Clinton is the least popular Democrat ever nominated for president. Say her name, and people will respond with words like “scandal,” “untrustworthy,” and “liar.” But are these accusations really fair?
Yes. Go digging through the Clinton closet, and you’ll uncover more skeletons than in your average medieval plague pit.
10. Cozy Ties To Hideous Regimes
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Algeria are disparate countries with different histories. They do have one thing in common: a callous disregard for human rights, something Clinton seemingly ignored when accepting megabucks off their despotic leaders.
Over the years, the Clinton Foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries with appalling attitudes toward women, gays, and religious minorities. Often, those countries had policies directly at odds with the Foundation’s stated goals of promoting gender-equality and LGBT rights.
Clinton’s charity was receiving this money at the same time that Clinton was daily making life-or-death decisions involving these countries as Secretary of State. While this isn’t technically illegal, it was arguably a conflict of interest, especially when you consider Clinton’s policy of...
9. Cash For Access
Photo credit: Karen Bleier/AFP
Crown Prince Salman is heir apparent to the throne of Bahrain and supreme commander of the country’s army. He’s also a Clinton Foundation megadonor, having thrown the charity US$32 million while Clinton was Secretary of State. This just happened to coincide with the State Department approving US$630 million of commercial arms sales to Bahrain’s army - a 187 percent increase from the pre-Clinton State Department.
The sales came just as Bahrain was violently suppressing pro-democracy protests. They also came just after a Clinton Foundation employee had brokered a meeting between Salman and Hillary. While Clinton denies any wrongdoing, the stench of corruption is enough to make even a Prohibition-era gangster retch.
This isn’t the only time such deals have taken place. An IB Times investigation earlier this year suggested strong links between Saudi donations to the Clinton Foundation and a multimillion State Department arms deal with the kingdom signed off by Hillary herself.
8. Setting The FBI On Innocent People
At the start of 1993, Billy Dale was a respected White House veteran. He’d worked arranging presidential trips for the last 30 years and headed a seven-man department for 10. By May 19, he was jobless and under investigation by the FBI. His crime? Occupying a position Hillary Clinton wanted for her friends.
The moment the Clintons entered the White House, Hillary started spreading rumors that Dale’s department was embezzling. She forced the FBI to investigate and sacked Dale’s entire team then handed the seven newly vacated posts to staffers who had worked on Bill’s presidential campaign. When the story broke, she claimed under oath that the FBI investigation hadn’t been her idea. A memo later surfaced showing it had.
As for Dale, he was cleared by the FBI but still wound up losing the job he loved and taking early retirement.
7. Diverting Funds To Friends
In September 2010, the Clinton Foundation set up a US$2 million commitment to Energy Pioneer Solutions (EPS), a group that insulates homes to increase energy efficiency. Sounds kind of harmless, until you realize EPS is owned by personal friends of the Clintons. According to the Wall Street Journal, this may have been done with the express intent of enriching the Clintons’ associates.
Hillary Clinton vigorously denies any wrongdoing, saying the Foundation chose EPS on merit. But it’s not hard to see this as inappropriate. EPS is a for-profit company, so stakeholders benefit financially from such deals. Stakeholders for EPS include Bill Clinton’s personal friend Julie Tauber McMahon, plus the Democratic National Committee treasurer and Democratic operative Mark Wiener. All potentially profited from the Clinton Foundation deal.
6. Mind-Blowing Incompetence
A basic requirement for Secretary of State is the ability to handle classified information. During her tenure at the State Department, Hillary not only mishandled sensitive documents - she possibly let them fall into the hands of foreign hackers.
While Secretary of State, Hillary used a private server to store emails containing classified information. She used multiple, unsecured devices to access them and sent many to other people’s private email addresses, including one later found to have been compromised by hackers possibly linked to Russia. Her staffers even lost a laptop full of confidential archived emails in the post.
Hillary later said she was “unaware” of the procedures surrounding classified information. As excuses go, that’s like saying you shouldn’t be arrested for insider trading because you were “unaware” it was illegal.
5. Hypocrisy On Boycotts
Photo credit: Skip Foreman / AP
Clinton recently tweeted her support for a boycott of North Carolina over its transgender bathroom laws. Not six months earlier, Hillary made a speech savaging anyone taking part in the boycotts against Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.
We don’t want to make a value judgment on either cause. Whether you support them is up to you. But it is hypocritical to attack a boycott as a method of protest for one of the two while allowing it for the other. The sudden delight in boycotts was perhaps Clinton cynically jumping on the progressive bandwagon to win back some wavering Sanders voters.
4. Hypocrisy On Rape
Photo credit: CBS
On December 3, 2015, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” There’s one rape survivor Hillary has refused to believe: Juanita Broaddrick. The man Broaddrick accuses of raping her is Bill Clinton.
The allegations have never been proven. The point here is not whether it happened or not. The point is that Broaddrick’s story is at least as consistent as that of many other assault victims. And if Clinton thinks all survivors should be believed, that entails believing Broaddrick.
Yet Hillary goes further than just not believing her. She denigrates her case, making it sound like the fantasies of a deluded woman. She does the exact things she deplores others doing to assault survivors.
3. Defending A Child Rapist
In 1975, Hillary Rodham defended a 41-year-old factory worker accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. As a court-appointed lawyer, Hillary had a duty to take the case. She did have a choice in how she presented her client’s defense, and she chose to do that by putting a 12-year-old rape victim through hell.
Those are the exact words of the child whose life Hillary dragged through the mud. Still anonymous 41-years later, the victim claims Hillary went to insane lengths to discredit her. She said the child was a fantasist, that she craved sex with older men, that she came from a broken home and constantly claimed men were abusing her. These are all claims the victim says are verifiably untrue.
2. Health Cover-Ups
Despite claiming to be fit and healthy, Clinton has suffered more health scandals in the past few months than you can shake a proverbial stick at.
The most obvious is Clinton’s recent bout of pneumonia, which caused her to collapse during a 9/11 memorial ceremony. There are others, too. In January, Hillary suffered a severe sinus infection that required the insertion of a myringotomy tube. In March, she underwent a brain scan. Perhaps most shockingly of all, she claimed the screw-ups with her emails were due to a 2012 concussion that scrambled her mind.
These are all potentially serious for someone pushing 70. What’s even more serious is that she lied about them.
1. Slush Funds
There are strict limits on how much campaigns can raise per person. Some PACs are allowed to raise more, as they spend on more than one candidate (an Obama fund might also splash money on down-ballot Democrats, for example). Hill PAC was supposedly one such PAC. Yet the Intercept found only 11 percent of its funds went to candidates. The rest went to buying trivial stuff off Hillary’s presidential campaign for eye-watering sums - sums that, conveniently, helped pay off her ’08 campaign’s massive debts.
For example, Hill PAC paid US$822,492 to “rent” a list of contact details off Hillary ’08, way above market price. That money went straight to Hillary’s flagging presidential campaign.
Top gif image: Hillary Clinton on Donald Trump supporters. Credit: Image created from David Seaman/YouTube.
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