kunstler | The email issue won’t go away because it entails serious issues of
racketeering in public office, not just niceties of security procedure.
One of the Secretary of State’s duties is to approve weapons sales to
foreign countries. During her three years at State, Hillary signed off
on $165 billion worth of sales by private commercial arms contractors to
Clinton Foundation foreign donors. On top of that was an additional
$151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries
that gave to the Clinton Foundation. It also happened that the weapons
contractors themselves and companies connected financially to them made
substantial donations to the Clinton foundation — and paid whopping
speaking fees to Hillary’s husband ex-president Bill, during her years
at State.
Salon Magazine has also reported that in contradiction of a
1995 directive signed by then-president Bill against arms sales to
nations violating human rights, Hillary approved such weapons sales. Salon’s David Sirota writes:
As just one of many examples, in its 2011 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department slammed Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption” and a “lack of judicial independence.
That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and the next year Clinton’s State Department approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The jump included authorizations for almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment.” The State Department had not authorized the export of any of such items to Algeria the year before.
There’s no way that the shady doings of the Clinton Foundation will
not become a campaign issue whether Trump emerges as the eventual GOP
nominee or not, and of course the other noisome matter of exactly what
Hillary told Too-Big-To-Fail banks in exchange for many quarter-million
dollar “speaking fees” still lurks behind all that. Hillary’s partisans
at the The New York Times and The WashPo have ignored
these stories for months, but the telltale stench remains, like a dead
body under the floorboards.. In contrast to her beaming victory lap
after the California primary, all this stuff promises some serious
frowny-face for Mz. It’s-My-Turn in the months ahead.
