Elise Jordan, a political analyst for NBC News, writes that Hillary Clinton’s handling of the “Clinton Cash” Clinton Foundation scandals is a “self-inflicted wound” that “just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.”
From TIME:
I recently sliced the tip of my toe on an ocean barnacle. This happened at 6pm on a Friday of a long-awaited beach weekend, so I avoided the emergency room for stitches.
Overdosing on rosé was no cure. My minor wound kept bleeding. I finally went to the doctor when I got home where I got crutches, antibiotics for the infection, and an avoidable weeklong recovery for a tiny cut, for no reason other than my bullheadedness.
As I watch Hillary Clinton wish away the fallout of the Clinton Foundation’s unseemly ties with the State Department during her tenure as Secretary of State, I can’t help but think that her self-inflicted wound just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. Every day that she fails to seriously address the rotten consequences of her poor judgment, Clinton further erodes the already lacking public trust in her. By avoiding a sincere display of contrition, she risks her candidacy and the foundation her family built.
“I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a rare interview.
The numbers on the alleged pay-to-play are damning: as reported by the Associated Press, of 154 non-official meetings or phone calls on her schedule as Secretary of State, at least 85 of those individuals were private-sector donors who contributed up to $156 million to Clinton Foundation initiatives.
The report comes on top of other far more incriminating investigations revealing the appearance of quid pro quo with foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation. Perhaps the worst example was when investors who profited from the Clinton State Department’s approval of a deal for Russia’s atomic energy agency’s acquisition of a fifth of America’s uranium mining rights subsequently pumped money into the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons subsequently did not fulfill the Obama administration’s request for public disclosure of foreign donations.
The public deserves to hear from Clinton an honest explanation of why she felt all of this was appropriate.
Read the rest of the story here.
