Bill and Hillary Clinton launched their 13-city paid speaking tour in a Canadian hockey arena Tuesday evening, where there were banks of empty seats and the power couple accused President Trump of joining a Saudi ‘cover-up.’
The Clintons riffed on issues ranging form the U.S. elections to the Iran deal, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the murder of Saudi dissident Khashoggi, and got a warm reception from the crowd as they jabbed at the Trump administration from north of the border.
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Organizers blocked off the upper deck of seats. Officials said the Clintons sold about 3,300 seats in a venue that can hold about 19,000 for a big hockey game when the Maple Leafs play.
by Owen | 2111, 5 Jun 1818 | Politics | 5 Comments
As someone who has watched Clinton weasel about his abhorrent behavior toward women for my entire adult life, it is odd, and somewhat refreshing, to see him get a little criticism.
“I do not,” Clinton responded when Melvin asked if Lewinsky was owed an apology over their sexual relationship, which resulted in his 1998 impeachment. “I’ve never talked to her. But I did say, publicly, on more than one occasion, that I was sorry.”
Clinton’s remarks sparked a huge backlash, with Donald Trump Jr. mocking him on Twitter for “claiming victim-hood from his actions against women” — a reaction that was swiftly rejected as hypocritical by critics citing President Trump‘s rumored affairs and allegations of sexual misconduct.
by Owen | 1959, 1 Nov 1616 | Politics | 0 Comments
Yes, these are sleazy, sleazy people who have a long history of selling access and favors in a way that is indistinguishable from bribery.
Pardoning Rich on his last day in office turned out to be one of Bill Clinton’s most controversial acts of president.
The FBI concluded that Clinton did not follow established procedures when he finalized the pardon, and only informed one person at the Department of Justice that Rich had sought the pardon: future Obama administration attorney general Eric Holder.
FBI director James Comey, then a federal prosecutor, ran the investigation into the Rich pardon. He criticized Holder’s involvement in the controversy, calling the pardon ‘a huge misjudgment.’
But he never recommended criminal charges against anyone embroiled in the scandal.
Speaking at a Democratic rally in Flint, Michigan, the former president ripped into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for flooding the health care insurance market and causing premiums to rise for middle-class Americans who do not qualify for subsidies.
“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.
Yes, they have a long, long history of being incredibly scummy people. One might even say that they have a history of being deplorable people.
One of the most irritating aspects of the 2016 presidential election — and God knows there are so many to choose from — is this moral superiority Democrats display over the GOP’s unfortunate nomination of Donald Trump. As if choosing one of the most mendacious and corrupt people in American politics makes them exemplars of responsible governance.
Younger voters who weren’t around in the 1990s may not be fully aware of the range and depth of the Clintons’ duplicitous behavior. We’re getting a little taste of it now, but it’s worth remembering that these are people who used the execution of a man with a partial lobotomy to divert attention away from Bill’s lying about an extramarital affair.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has the power to force the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative to publicly disclose the names of foreign governments and the millions they donate each year to the charities but he’s not doing it, a Scripps News investigation has found.
Schneiderman’s failure to require compliance with New York law and written instructions from his own office keeps the public in the dark about whether the foreign governments that gave money to the Clinton charities also had special access to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, experts in private foundation law say. New York state has long required more transparency from non-profits operating within its borders than many other regulators.
A Scripps Washington Bureau review of tax returns and regulatory filings found that year after year the Clinton charities have ignored New York law and related instructions. However, the office of Attorney General Schneiderman, a Democrat whom Hillary Clinton named to her campaign’s “leadership council” in New York, did not respond to Scripps’ questions about the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which has never publicly disclosed in New York filings the identity of its foreign government contributors or the amounts they give each year. Scripps also discovered CHAI did not report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign government donations to the state.
The guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher- education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.
In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a church-funded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a for-profit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”
There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.
Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.
Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.
Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.
The thousands of pages of newly uncovered records reveal sometimes granular detail about how Bill Clinton’s representatives directed the spending of taxpayer cash allocated by the GSA under the Former President’s Act.
The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton on Monday night at the Phoenix international airport, ABC 15 reported.
The meeting came hours before the House Benghazi Committee on Tuesday released a report on the 2012 terror attacks in Libya. Lynch told reporters the two did not discuss the issue.
“Our conversation was a great deal about grandchildren, it was primarily social about our travels, and he mentioned golf he played in Phoenix,” Lynch said.
“You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter,” the former president told protesters.
One protester’s signs declared, in an apparent reference to the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, that “Hillary is a murderer.” The protesters repeatedly shouted over Clinton, ignoring his responses and invoking Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, as well.
In the exchange, Clinton repeatedly said, “I love protesters” — but complained that they wouldn’t let him respond. “Here’s the thing. I like protesters, but the ones that won’t let you answer are afraid of the truth. That’s a simple rule,” Clinton said.
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“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack, and sent them out in the streets to murder other African-American children,” the former president said. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens — she didn’t.”
“But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the 7 years before that when we were practicing trickle-down economics and no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her,” Clinton said.
I would guess that one of three things is happening… 1) Ol’ Bill could be horribly off message. 2) Bill is on message as Hillary begins to pivot to the general election. Or 3), Bill is intentionally trying to sabotage his wife’s campaign for his own selfish reasons.
(CNN)Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.
In total, the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of $210,795 for each address. The two also reported at least $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, collecting at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks.
By all means… let’s talk about the ‘War on Women’ as a known philanderer and sexual predator comes to Wisconsin to talk up the merits of Mary Burke.
Bill Clinton is reportedly set to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Mary Burke on Friday in Wisconsin, where incumbent Gov. Scott Walker, a potential GOP presidential candidate, has been deeply critical of Hillary Clinton.
This fundraising email made me chuckle. It starts…
Hey there —
Well, hey there, Bill. How ya doin’?
There’s an election around the corner, so I’ve been traveling around the country to help Democrats who are standing up for the values you and I believe in, Owen.
And so it goes. Then we get to this part:
What you’re seeing from our opponents right now is unprecedented, Owen. They’re willing to say just about anything…
So the man who was convicted of lying in court and famously told all of us that “he did not have sexual relations with that woman” is going to complain to me about people willing to “say just about anything?”