Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (32 page)

One valuable piece of art the Clintons attempted to steal was a Norman Rockwell painting showing the flame from Lady Liberty’s torch. Hillary had the painting taken from the Oval Office to the Clinton home in Chappaqua, but the Secret Service got wind of it and sent a car to Chappaqua to get it back. Hillary was outraged. Even here, though, the Clintons got the last laugh: they persuaded the Obama administration to let the Clinton Library have the painting, and there it hangs today.

In
Living History
, Hillary put on a straight face and dismissed media reports about the topic. “The culture of investigation,” she wrote, “followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.”
¹⁷

THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RACKET

Just two months after leaving the White House, Clinton sat down with progressive writer Taylor Branch to offer some White House recollections. In the course of the discussion, Clinton relaxed and said what was really on his mind. What was really on his mind was money. Clinton knew there was a lot of money to be made. “I know where to find this money,” he said. “I think I can find it so that’s what I want to do.”
¹⁸

And that’s what the Clintons did, together. They figured out a charity racket and decided to name it the Clinton Foundation. It gives only 10 percent of its income to charity and actually serves as a war chest for the Clinton machine and Hillary’s presidential campaign. To date the Clinton Foundation has raised more than $3 billion in contributions. How the Clintons got that money is the theme of Peter Schweizer’s
Clinton Cash
. Other publications have supplemented Schweizer’s reporting with their own investigations. Here, from these sources, are a few choice details.
¹⁹

A substantial portion of the money donated to the Clinton Foundation came from foreign governments. Some sixteen nations together gave $130 million. Among those are the countries of Algeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar. Most of this money was donated while Hillary was secretary of state.

It just so happened that, during this very time, Hillary’s State Department approved more than $150 billion in arms sales to the very nations whose governments were donating to the Clinton Foundation. Many of these deals involved countries whose human rights records were suspect. Yet somehow they all got clearance from Hillary’s team to buy American-made weapons.

Wow, you might say, what world-class thieves the Clintons are. But a world-class thief knows that there is more money to be made on these same transactions. At the same time the Clinton Foundation was raking it in from foreign governments, it was also taking money from defense contractors who had lucrative deals with the U.S. government to make the weapons. Lockheed Martin gave $250,000; Hawker Beechcraft, $500,000; General Electric, $1 million; and Boeing, $5 million.

The Foundation, though ostensibly a charitable enterprise, gives only one dollar out of ten to charity. The Clintons have developed a penchant for traveling in high style, and use a substantial amount of donation money on private planes and penthouse suites. Clearly they are their own favorite charity. The rest of the foundation’s loot seems to have been accumulated into a war chest that is at the behest of the Clintons and the Hillary presidential campaign.

Here’s an example of how the Clintons work through the Foundation to collect money in exchange for favors. Frank Giustra is a Canadian billionaire who had his eye on the uranium wealth of the tiny country of Kazakhstan. He donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation. His business partner Ian Telfer directed another $2.3 million to the foundation.

Following these donations, things began to happen. The Clintons took Giustra to Kazakhstan to meet the dictator there, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Hillary gives a benign account of her Kazakhstan trip in
Living History
. She writes, “I visited a small women’s wellness center funded through U.S. foreign aid.”
²⁰
And that’s it. No mention of the real purpose of the trip.

Mukhtar Dzhakishev, who oversees Kazakh mining, revealed the real purpose. Dzhakishev reports that Hillary Clinton pressured Kazakh officials to sell uranium assets to Giustra’s firm and said that Hillary refused to meet with him until he agreed to approve Giustra’s deal. He did so.

After a series of mergers, Giustra’s firm was acquired by a Russian conglomerate that built the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran. This conglomerate applied to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to buy a controlling interest in U.S. uranium mines. This committee, made up of high-ranking officials, counted among its number one Hillary Clinton.

In the midst of this transaction requiring cabinet-level clearance, a Canadian company named Salida Capital made a $780,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. This was a down-payment; between 2010 and 2012, Salida would give more than $2.6 million. The group also
sponsored a talk by Bill in Calgary. Peter Schweizer discovered that the 2011 report of the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom identifies Salida Capital as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Once again, the bribe seems to have worked. Despite obvious national security concerns, the committee approved the Russian takeover. No surprise, Hillary was in favor. Giustra and his partners got more than a lucrative Kazakh deal; they also got control of one-fifth of the entire U.S. uranium production capacity. Bill and Hillary got rich off this deal, and so did Frank Giustra and his partners. The Russians got what they wanted. Everyone benefited—except the United States of America.
²¹

Along the same lines, mining tycoon Stephen Dattels in 2009 donated two million shares of stock in his company to the Clinton Foundation. Two months later, with the support of the U.S. government, including one Hillary Clinton, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh pressured that nation to reauthorize a mining permit that benefited Dattel’s company. The Clinton Foundation never disclosed Dattel’s donation.

In 2008, the Swedish telecom company Ericsson found itself under investigation by the U.S. State Department for selling telecom equipment to the regimes of Iran, Sudan, and Syria—all considered state sponsors of terrorism. In 2011, a State Department report proposed putting restrictions on telecom companies like Ericsson that worked with terrorist-supporting regimes.

That year, Ericsson sponsored a speech by Bill Clinton and paid him a whopping $750,000, around three times Clinton’s fee at the time. Ericsson had never previously sponsored a Clinton speech. Ericsson’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. Later that year, the State Department unveiled its new sanctions list; telecom companies were given a pass.

Douglas Becker is CEO of Laureate Education, a for-profit educational firm that provides online instruction to students in several foreign countries, including Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia. Laureate named Bill Clinton an “honorary chancellor” and paid him to speak several times a year, netting him around $1 million in speech income from Laureate alone. Altogether Bill has received more than $16 million from
Laureate. But on the required disclosure forms, Bill merely says he was paid “more than $1,000” by Laureate.

Becker also runs a nonprofit group called International Youth Foundation (IYF). Once Bill got on the Becker payroll and Hillary became secretary of state, U.S. government funds through USAID to IYF increased dramatically. From 2010 to 2012, IYF received annual grants exceeding $20 million, for a total of nearly $65 million.

In addition, the International Finance Corporation, a division of the World Bank—headed by Clinton pal Jim Yong Kim—made a $150 million equity investment in Laureate. Once again, the Clintons’ good fortune corresponded with good fortune for a large contributor.

“CASH HAS NO PROOF”

Sant Chatwal got into trouble in 1997 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. According to the
Washington Post
, the FDIC sued Chatwal “over his role as a director and guarantor of unpaid loans at the failed First New York Bank for Business.” Chatwal owed a cool $12 million. He claimed he couldn’t pay, even though he lived in a multimillion-dollar penthouse in New York, besides maintaining other residences.

So Chatwal decided to improve his prospects for favorable treatment on the part of the government by raising money for Hillary Clinton. In the fall of 2000, he held a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate campaign, raising $500,000. That same December, while the Clintons were still in the White House, the FDIC “abruptly settled” the case, in the
Washington Post
’s words, allowing Chatwal to pay just $125,000 and be done with it.

While Hillary was in the Senate, Chatwal also connected the Clintons to various wealthy Indians, who funneled millions of dollars into the Clinton Foundation. Those donations continued when Obama appointed Hillary as secretary of state. Again, Chatwal and his pals had an ulterior motive. They wanted Hillary to back a U.S.-India nuclear deal that Hillary had previously opposed. Sure enough, Hillary’s position
“evolved” in the direction of the incoming cash. Chatwal knew the score. “In politics,” he boasted, “Nothing comes free. You have to write checks. I know the system. So I did as much as I could.”

Chatwal knew that Hillary could be bought. This is exactly what the campaign finance laws were passed to prevent, the buying and selling of influence. While Hillary has dodged every prosecution, however, Chatwal, like me, got into trouble with the government for exceeding those laws. (Chatwal is Asian Indian; we Asian Indians appear to specialize in campaign finance violations.)

Except in my case I gave $20,000 over the limit to a college friend without expectation of any return. Chatwal was charged in 2014 with using straw donors as fronts to give more than $180,000 above the limit to Hillary Clinton and a whole group of Democratic candidates. In addition, Chatwal was convicted of witness-tampering; the FBI recorded him trying to get witnesses to lie in court. “Never, never” admit to reimbursements, Chatwal said on tape. “Cash has no proof.”

While my case involved no corruption whatever, I got an eight-month confinement sentence, narrowly escaping the Obama administration’s attempt to send me to federal prison. Chatwal got no prison, no confinement.
²²
There’s progressive “justice” for you. What these two cases prove is that if you’re going to be a crook, it helps to be a crook working on behalf of the Democratic Party. That’s where the big crooks like Hillary operate without accountability and even the small crooks like Chatwal get all the breaks.

Hillary’s entire tenure at the State Department seems to have been devoted to exchanging cash for favors. Microsoft gave her $1.3 million and, in exchange, she lobbied the Chinese on software piracy. Hillary convinced Russia to buy fifty Boeing 737s for $3.7 billion, and two months later Boeing gave $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation. In appreciation for Hillary lobbying India to remove restrictions on large retail stores like Walmart, Walmart gave $1.2 million to the Clinton Foundation and has paid an additional $370,000 in membership fees.
²³

Jeffrey Epstein gave $3.5 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2006, shortly after the FBI began investigating him for participating in the
exploitation of teenage girls as sex slaves. Epstein’s standard practice was to fly celebrities on his plane to a private island near the U.S. Virgin Islands. The plane was nicknamed the Lolita Express and the island Orgy Island because both were venues for older men to have sex with underage girls.

The case came to public light when one of the girls, Virginia Roberts—now thirty-two, but pimped out by Epstein starting at the age of fifteen—spoke out about Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Roberts named Bill Clinton as one of the regular travelers on the Lolita Express. Flight records show that Bill made twenty-six trips on Epstein’s jet—on at least five occasions ditching his Secret Service detail in order to avoid a record of his travel on the Secret Service logs.

Epstein faced a long prison sentence, but somehow the investigation was concluded in 2008 with a secret settlement. Epstein pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting underage girls, for which he served a year in prison. All other charges were dropped, and all the records in the case were sealed. Only Swiss bank records leaked by a whistle-blower brought the secret settlement to public light. So far Hillary has not said a word about the case, even though she undoubtedly knows about it.
²⁴

This is the level of sordid depravity that we can expect if Hillary is reelected and the Clintons are returned to the White House. Are we not done with this larcenous duo? Their criminal schemes were bad enough in Arkansas and during Bill Clinton’s two terms as president. They escalated during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state. How much these partners in crime have already stolen! Yet, from their perspective, there is a lot more to take, if only they get the opportunity to return to the White House.

CHAPTER 10

REPUBLICANS TO THE RESCUE

STOPPING HILLARY’S AMERICA

If not now, when? If not us, who?

—Progressive slogan from the 1960s

T
his is not an election about Donald Trump; it is an election about Hillary Clinton. The big question goes beyond the two candidates. It is: which gang are we going to put in power, the Republican gang or the Democratic gang? I believe I have shown that there is only one answer: the Republican gang.

Why? It’s not because the Republicans necessarily deserve to rule. It’s not because they always know how to rule. The GOP can be exasperating. There’s a reason some people call it the Stupid Party. Even so, I’m a proud member of the Stupid Party because the alternative is the Evil Party.

Politics is not an individual endeavor; it is a team activity. The Democrats led by Hillary are trying to steal America, and Republicans led by Trump are trying to stop this from happening. That’s the basis for my conclusion that every Republican—no matter who he is—is preferable to every Democrat.

Look at who the Democrats are. For more than a century, this party focused its oppression on blacks and American Indians. The venue of this oppression was the slave plantation and the Indian reservation. The Democrats stole the land from the Indians, and the labor and lives of the blacks. In this era, one may say that the Democrats took everything from some people.

Since the rise of progressivism in the 1930s, the Democrats shifted to a new strategy. As blacks moved to cities, Democrats re-created the plantation there. These urban plantations were built to accommodate not blacks but also poor immigrants. To the plantation, one might say, the Democrats added the immigrant ghetto and barrio. In all these places, poor people were kept from rising beyond a minimal level, and minority suffering was used to justify the expanding and increasingly confiscatory progressive state. So in this era, Democrats went from taking everything from some people to taking something from everyone.

But now we are in a new era. The Hillary Democrats want to complete the stealing of America that has already come a long way in the Obama years. Progress toward the goal of complete seizure and complete control—this is what Democrats mean when they use the word “progressive.” These thugs have gone from taking everything from some people to taking something from everyone to—their final goal—taking everything from everyone.

Once this happens, we have lost America, or to put it differently, we will all be serfs in Hillary’s America. The medieval serf typically turned over half his produce to the lord he served. Serfdom, in this sense, represents the midway point between freedom and slavery, because slavery means we have no claim whatever on what we produce.

For Hillary, serfdom is not enough. The Hillary Democrats would not be satisfied with a marginal tax rate that topped out at 50 percent. They want full control over the wealth and productivity of America, which means full control over your wealth and the fruit of your labor. Essentially Hillary wants to take the historic Democratic rip-off scheme to its final limit. She wants to turn all of America into a plantation.

How to stop Hillary’s America? There is only one way. To see why, let’s consider how previous incarnations of subjugation, exploitation, and theft have been stopped in this country. The British, of course, were the original culprits, ruling America from afar and slowly but systematically stealing wealth from this country. It took the American Founders—led by George Washington—to stop them.

There was no Republican Party in 1776, but the Republican Party has, from its founding in 1854, been the custodian of the principles of the American Revolution. In fact, this is what it means to be a conservative in America today; we are conserving the ideals of the nation’s founding. So conservatives and Republicans are the inheritors of the founding legacy.

A REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION

There is, admittedly, an irony in this; American conservatism is distinct in that it protects not the
ancien régime
or tradition per se. Rather, it protects a revolutionary tradition. Moreover, this revolutionary tradition is the tradition of classical liberalism and involves three types of freedom: political freedom, economic freedom, and freedom of thought and religion.

The Founders didn’t just care about freedom; they also cared about justice. For them, justice had two main components, the justice of economic allocation and the justice of rights. The justice of economic allocation is the justice of free market capitalism: the basic idea is that people should keep the fruits of their labor. The other main form of justice was equality of rights under the law. The Founders knew this second type of justice was betrayed by slavery; that’s why they set up institutions designed over time to get rid of that form of systematic theft.

The contradiction between the principles of the Founders and the practice of American slavery came to a head two generations later, in the Civil War. In 1860, once again America’s core principles, and indeed America’s survival as a nation, were threatened. The threat came not from “the South.” The idea that the South is wholly to blame is a progressive
canard. What the canard leaves out is what caused southern secession in the first place.

Why does this matter? After all, it was the South, not the Democrats, who seceded. But the South seceded because its party, the Democratic Party, lost the election. Had the Democrats won, slavery would have been safe and the South would have remained within the union. The defeat of the pro-slavery party in 1860 caused the Civil War.

Once the Civil War started, northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas panicked. They had coddled slavery but they had not expected to carve the nation itself in two. So the northern Democrats condemned secession and pledged fealty to Lincoln. But it was a false fealty; a powerful faction of Copperhead Democrats worked overtime to undermine Republican prospects for winning the war.

The truth is that the Copperhead Democrats wanted Lincoln to lose the war. They wanted to make peace with the South so that slavery, if not extended, could at least be retained. The slogan of the Democratic Party in 1864 was to keep things just as they were before the war. In other words, restore the union but let the South have slavery.

These grim facts make it clear that it was Lincoln’s reelection, and the success of Lincoln’s armies, that ultimately sealed the fate of slavery. So slavery was not ended by “the North” because the North was divided between Lincoln loyalists and Copperhead Democrats. Slavery was actually ended by the Republican Party.

After losing the war, the Democrats could not restore slavery so they switched to enslavement. They carried out this enslavement through a series of horrific schemes aimed at blacks: the Black Codes, segregation, Jim Crow, and the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Republicans again fought back with Reconstruction, going to the extent of having military governors throughout the South to thwart the Democratic effort to suppress, disenfranchise, and murder blacks. The GOP measures were heavy-handed at times but a certain amount of heavy-handedness was necessary to deal with Democratic thuggery and exploitation.

Republicans didn’t always win. They could not overturn segregation laws that were passed by Democratic legislatures, signed by Democratic governors, and enforced by Democratic sheriffs and other government officials. Republican anti-lynching bills were thwarted by one progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, and then by another progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Both were allied with some of the worst racists in America.

Although GOP anti-lynching measures were defeated, the party did stop the Klan just a few years after its founding, at least until it was revived again by Democrats in the early twentieth century. Republicans also led the first civil rights revolution, which resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the three Civil War amendments: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments.

The Democrats
de facto
nullified these amendments, turning them into dead letters in the South and preventing blacks and other minorities from enjoying their rights for another three quarters of a century. But the GOP won in the end, even though it took a second civil rights revolution, almost a century later, to actually enforce the Civil War amendments.

Ironically it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who introduced the Civil Rights Act, but he did so out of low political motives. The main opposition came from his own party, not from the GOP. Indeed, without Republican pressure, and without Republican votes, LBJ would not have been able to sign, and likely would not have wanted to sign, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill.

Contrary to progressive propaganda, the Democrats have, almost without interruption, proven to be the party of bigotry while the Republicans have a consistent record of opposition to bigotry. The Democrats are the party of subjugation and oppression while the Republicans are the party of equal rights and the level playing field. From slavery through modern progressivism, Democrats have always stolen the fruits of people’s labor while Republicans stood for letting people keep what they produce and earn.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Why, then, has the GOP proven largely ineffective in the age of Obama and why does it seem to be in such trouble at the presidential level in 2016? What has happened to the party of Lincoln and Reagan? After eight disastrous, dispiriting years of Obama, the GOP should be the runaway favorite in November; yet this is not the case. I count three serious disadvantages facing the GOP in this election.

First, the Democrats are highly motivated. This by the way is not unusual. All criminals are highly motivated. “Stealing is hard work,” one convict told me in the confinement center. The progressive Democrats know this. Stealing is how they make a living. So it’s a mistake to consider the progressives to be an indolent, do-nothing group. They are very industrious in conniving and carrying out designs on your wealth and your life.

By contrast, the Republicans seem relatively listless. Even politically active Republicans appear to engage around election time, only to return to “normal life” when the votes are counted. I sometimes hear it’s because Republicans have jobs and because they don’t have as much at stake as the Democrats, many of whom depend on federal programs for their livelihood. But in reality Republicans have even more to lose than Democrats, because Republicans who lose elections become easy prey for the progressive Democratic state to go after their income and their wealth.

Make no mistake, the progressives aren’t just about raising the top income tax rate a few percentage points. They want to return to the halcyon days in America where marginal tax rates topped out at 80 to 90 percent. That was the wartime rate under FDR during World War II. Moreover, Democrats want to take your wealth by establishing increasing state control over all you own and what you do. If this isn’t enough to motivate you, I’m not sure what is.

The disproportion between Democratic and Republican seriousness and effort can be seen in the Supreme Court, which is also at stake in the 2016 election. Although the majority of court nominees are Republicans, the Supreme Court has been precariously balanced for a decade. Neither side has enjoyed a clear advantage.

Why? Because Democrats can with almost Euclidean certitude count on their votes, while Republicans must keep their fingers crossed about more than one of their nominees. “Hope we get Kennedy this time! Whew, we got Kennedy. Oops, we lost Roberts.” This is the pathetic Republican predicament.

Democrats are never in this predicament. Democratic justices on the court act like good Democrats and vote the party line, while Republicans seem to decide each case on its merits. While Republicans come to the court to perform constitutional rumination, Democrats come to the court to advance Democratic Party objectives.

This disproportion of conviction and application leads me to the second advantage the progressive Democrats enjoy. Over the past generation, they have one by one taken over the most influential institutions of our culture. Here I am referring to Hollywood, Broadway, the music industry, the world of comedy, the mainstream media—both TV and print—higher education, and increasingly also elementary and secondary education.

I call these the megaphones of our culture, because these are the ways that information is transmitted to the American people. Young people get their knowledge mainly from what they learn in school and college. Many of them today get their political information from comedians like Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart. All Americans are shaped by the music they listen to and by what their see on TV and in the movies.

While conservative Republicans have been fighting in one corner of the battlefield—can we take the House and Senate? Will we win the presidency this time?—the Democrats have been occupying the high ground of the culture. Incredibly the Right has let this happen. To take one depressing example, in the sphere of comedy, they have Maher, Colbert, and Stewart and we have nobody, nobody, and nobody.

Long-term, the GOP cannot win if it doesn’t take some of this ground back. This requires a serious commitment of funds and effort. This is not philanthropy or political contributions; this is survival money. Just as people who moved west and built homesteads had to invest in
fences and gunslingers to protect them from hoodlums, conservatives and Republicans must recognize that not just America’s wealth is at stake here; their own livelihood is too.

In the long run, it’s not enough to send speakers like me to college campuses or even to establish alternative educational institutions like Hillsdale College. I speak on a campus Monday and am gone by Tuesday, while the progressive faculty is there day after day, drumming their propaganda into the students. Conservative colleges like Hillsdale are islands of liberty in a sea of repression, but they offer no chance to alter the general landscape of higher education.