Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efforts to provide favors to major donors to her husband’s global charity or her own political career stretch back far earlier than her tenure as America’s top diplomat, dating to the time she served as a U.S. senator and had the power to earmark federal funds and influence legislation, records show.
For instance, Mrs. Clinton introduced a bill when she was New York’s junior senator that allowed a donor to the Clinton Foundation to use tax-exempt bonds to build a shopping center in Syracuse, New York, public records show.
She also went to bat for Freddie Mac, working to defeat legislation that would have subjected the mortgage giant to tougher regulations before the housing bubble burst and led to a major recession. That same year, Freddie Mac donated $50,000 to $100,000 to her husband’s charity, originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation records show.
Mrs. Clinton also used her leverage as a senator to help persuade the Chinese government to reduce tariffs on Corning Inc.’s fiber optic products. The central New York company’s employees and executives contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns and political action committee.
Analysts on political money have said the pattern of Mrs. Clinton’s intervention on behalf of donors to her husband’s charity raise troubling ethical questions.
“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group, told the New York Post in April after conflict-of-interest reports started surfacing between the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s political work. Mr. Allison declined to be interviewed for this article.
A Fox News poll released last week suggests that Americans agree with Mr. Allison’s viewpoint. Sixty-one percent of voters said it was somewhat likely that the Clintons were “selling influence to foreign contributors” who made donations to the Clinton Foundation while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state.
In a CNN/ORC poll conducted this month, 57 percent of Americans said Mrs. Clinton was not honest and trustworthy, up from 49 percent in March.
Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as New York’s senator only adds to the storyline of political favors for wealthy contributors.
In 2004, Robert J. Congel, an upstate New York builder, contributed $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation — one month after Mrs. Clinton, as senator, helped enact legislation that allowed Mr. Congel’s firm to use tax-free bonds to build a mega-shopping center dubbed Destiny USA in Syracuse.
About year later, Mrs. Clinton put an additional earmark in a highway bill for $5 million for Mr. Congel’s development project, which passed nine months after Mr. Congel donated to the Clinton Foundation.
Overall, Destiny USA, now the sixth-largest shopping mall in the U.S., received 15 government tax subsidies valued at more than $703.6 million, making the Syracuse property one of the biggest recipients of economic development dollars in the nation, according to a report released by Good Jobs First, a research center in Washington. Not all the money was paid out during Mrs. Clinton’s term as senator.
Mr. Congel declined to be interviewed for this article, as did a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. But back in 2009, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman Philippe Reines told The New York Times that there was no connection between Mr. Congel’s donation and her legislative work on his project.
Mrs. Clinton supported expansion of the mall “purely as part of her unwavering commitment to improving upstate New York’s struggling economy, and nothing more,” Mr. Reines told the New York paper. He added that Mrs. Clinton didn’t solicit the money from Mr. Congel or discuss it with him or anyone on his behalf and was unaware of its timing and size until some years later.
Mrs. Clinton’s team was quick to note that she was just one of a number of New York politicians, both Democratic and Republican, who helped enact the bill that gave the tax breaks to Destiny USA.
View the original content and more from this author here: http://ift.tt/1QOy8qg
from democratic dojo http://ift.tt/1TdlqFm
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment