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Oct. 24, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:55
3466 Clinton Foundation Corruption | Charles Ortel and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We're back with our friend, Charles Ortel.
He is an investor and writer who graduated from Horace Mann School, Yale College, and Harvard Business School.
I guess he couldn't get into any decent colleges.
Mr.
Ortel has been one of the leading voices in exposing the corruptions.
Yes, that's with an S. It's plural.
Corruptions of the Clinton Foundation.
And please visit his website for more information at charlesortel.com.
We'll put the link to that below.
Charles, how are you doing today?
Very fine.
Thanks for having me on, Stefan.
So, we're going to touch on Haiti, which of course is back in the news because of natural disasters, and let's just say man-made disasters that reek of corruption, and then we're going to go on to some of the new stuff that seems to have come out about the Clinton Foundation.
Haiti is not particularly in the news other than, you know, its repetitive, seemingly endless series of natural disasters, but problems with the Clinton Foundation seem to be sidestepped almost deliberately by the mainstream media and What do people need to know about the history of the Clintons and charity and Haiti?
Well, unfortunately, the history of the Clintons in Haiti goes way, way back.
And we won't dwell on what happened when he was president when the United States meddled in Haiti.
That's a long sort of tale.
We'll just pick it up in 2003.
That's the year in which the Clinton Foundation, the first year I can find where the Clinton Foundation is named is being involved in Haiti.
Now the problem with that is that in 2003 the Clinton Foundation certainly was not authorized to engage in any international activities as a charity.
It was just in the middle of completing its Little Rock Arkansas complex.
It was called then the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation and when you look closely at the 2003 IRS forms What you see is when you look at the personnel section, the cost section under program services, magically this foundation was able to operate with no payments to anybody for salaries and wages, which is rather difficult to do in real life.
So on the one hand, its IRS forms are a shambles.
On the other hand, on the Maine Clinton Foundation website, there are no audits of any kind provided for the period 1997 through 2004.
So no independent accounting firm has done the type of work that is required, strictly required, under New York law, which does apply to this foundation and did apply to this foundation in that period.
You have to have a strictly compliant audit, which means that a real accounting firm that has the capability to go inside and assess numbers and has international reach, if international reach is required, has to check And make sure that the Foundation A, in fact, is a tax-exempt foundation, B, that it's registered properly in every state where it solicits and operates, and in every foreign country where it operates, and clearly nobody did that.
So, at the very beginning of Haiti, the Clinton Foundation's role in Haiti, it began as a bastardized charity, a rogue charity.
It was not authorized in the U.S. for this work, and therefore it couldn't be authorized properly in Haiti.
And what they claim they did is that they started to distribute HIV-AIDS medicines to the poor people of Haiti and those who were afflicted by this dread disease.
Now, the problem with that is that in 2003, there are numerous reports in the press and elsewhere, academic reports, that suggest that the Clinton Foundation, That one of the companies the Clinton Foundation was using to source these HIV AIDS medicines was a diabolical company by the name of Ranboxy,
R-A-N-B-A-X-Y, that later information shows in 2003 this company had no ability of any kind to discern the quality of any of the medicines it provided anywhere in the world.
This is a large manufacturer in India of generic AIDS medicines.
We know this Because years later, the FDA and the Department of Justice and others exacted a $500 million economic penalty from Remboxi because a long, multi-year investigation revealed that this was really just the antithesis of a well-run pharmaceutical company.
So, in the very beginning when they were toying with Haiti and in many other countries, the Clinton Foundation was committing Charity, gross charity fraud, putting people's lives at risk, not controlling its international operations as is required under U.S. and other law, and certainly not behaving the way it was supposed to behave.
They meddle, they meddle, they do this for years.
Then Haiti has a series of natural disasters.
I think it was by 2008 there were a series of problems in Haiti.
Then in 2009, Bill gets appointed Special UN Envoy to Haiti.
And here, the true tale remains to be told of what was going on for some strange reason.
This is in 2009 when Hillary, his wife, is Secretary of State.
For some strange reason, the William J. Clinton Foundation created a subsidiary, or actually created a new charity in Florida.
They didn't just register the Arkansas charity in Florida, they created a new charity in Florida.
And the reporting on that is highly suspicious.
And then the bill got involved helping various, people got involved around the Clintons, helping various parties that wanted to operate in Haiti.
One of them was a company called Innovida Homes.
Innovida Homes had this idea of providing low-cost housing to the poor people of Haiti.
But the problem with Innovida, as it later turned out, was that the guy running it was a complete crook who now is in prison.
For having gotten money out of the U.S. government, who knows exactly how, and instead of using it for its intended purpose, using it to send cocaine up his nose and high living and fancy mansions and travel, etc., he got caught.
And actually, this scam artist was very clever.
He realized that the cookie jar has bipartisan covers and handles.
So he reached out, and I think he got for a time Jeb Bush interested, he got Wesley Clark interested, and of course he got various Clinton cronies interested, so he got some U.S. government money.
Then on January 12, 2010, disaster struck Haiti.
And that is, as you rightly point out in the introduction, that is a country that cannot seem to catch a break.
I mean, our country and Haiti, modern Haiti, owe their roots to around the same time.
In modern roots, anyway.
Columbus landed in 1492 on what is now, I think, the Dominican Republic, but in the same year, a number of days later, weeks later, he was in ground that is now Haiti.
Our country is economically prosperous.
Their country has never been able to get off the ground, though it is rich in many resources on the land, and supposedly underneath there are large energy resources in the waters and underneath the island that is now Haiti.
But, nonetheless, the people of Haiti couldn't catch a break.
And almost immediately, when the earthquake struck, Bill Clinton was out there, others were out there raising money over the internet.
Bill touted something called the Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund.
And in his annual letter On the glossy brochure that's on his site for 2009 and in materials for 2010, he talked endlessly about large numbers of contributions coming into something called the Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund.
The only problem with that is there is no such entity.
There is no such thing as the Clinton Foundation, legally, no such thing as the Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund.
There was something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund that was slapped together, but there are major league problems with that one, too.
Before you raise money in the great state of New York, where I live, for a charity, you've got to make sure that anybody engaged on your behalf raising money, any professional solicitor, has registered properly in the state.
You've got to register your solicitation materials in the state, and you've got to make representations about all the people involved with the charity.
Unfortunately for this collection of charities, there are numerous people who have been involved Please do.
This is really, really important stuff for people to get, so take your time.
Sure.
So the filings in 2010 are very interesting.
I've been warning the Clinton Foundation people publicly for well over a year that all of their filings back to the very beginning, October 23, 1997, all of them need to be amended because all of them are wrong.
But if we just start with 2010, there's two sets of issues when it comes to Haiti.
You have the parent company Clinton Foundation filings, and then you have the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund filings.
There are other affiliates.
We'll leave them aside for a moment.
The parent company claims that it sent $37.2 million in cash to the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
The problem with that is that the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund separately registers in New York and states on its filings, which must be true and accurate in all respects, that it has only one office and that office is in Washington, D.C. The forms filed for the Clinton Foundation, its largest grant, the $37.2 million cash grant, is to this entity.
But it lists, as the address of this entity, a post office box in Maryland.
There was no such post office box.
There was no legal office in Baltimore, and there certainly probably wasn't a post office box, and it would have been most unwise For the Clinton Foundation from a parent company to send $37.2 million to a post office box.
So that's a serious problem.
And it's a serious problem because it's not like there were billions of dollars of grants at the Clinton Foundation.
This is by far and away its most significant grant.
It is an intercompany connected grant.
It didn't go to a post office box in Maryland.
So where did it go?
And this original filing submitted for 2010 in 2011 was amended in November 16, 2015.
And again, the same information was given.
So that's your first set of problems.
That's a major league problem.
To put that problem in perspective, that problem alone would cause most charities to be raided.
There's Corrine Brown, there's a representative down in Florida, an African-American Democrat, superdelegate for Hillary, has had the book thrown at her for far smaller problems, an $800,000 alleged slush fund.
She faces a federal prison term of 357 years.
Sorry, 357 years for $800,000 as opposed to $30 million plus.
This is just one part of the problem.
Now, the second part of the problem in 2010 is the Clinton Foundation claims, again, that it sent $4 million in non-cash contributions to the same post office box.
And when you look at the Clinton-Bush-Haiti Fund audit, which has its own issues, it claims that in total it received $1 million in non-cash.
So, we're round numbers.
So there are major league discrepancies just for this one-year, one entry with the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
Another problem with the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund filings is that they claim you have to, in the United States, you have to list out any foreign bank accounts you have over $10,000 in any countries where you have a foreign office.
And the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund says it has no foreign bank accounts.
Well, how do you operate a fund in Haiti with a separate currency with no bank accounts?
So, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.
So you've got $37 million that they say they're sending to a PO box.
Of course, that's not a financial entity, so would that be a check?
Well, somebody's got to pick up that check, somebody's got to put it into a bank account, and then someone has to transfer, at least I hope, some of that money to Haiti.
And I don't, like, how does the trail go from the PO box to Haiti?
Is there any footprint or any kind of breadcrumbs that show where things went from there?
Yeah.
Well, there would be on the inside.
So the issue here, Stefan, and for your viewers, is that this is a screaming set of red flags for fraud.
If you Google FBI charity and fraud, or just charity fraud warning signs, you'll see that the federal government has a special department here that looks into charity scams.
And the standard scam that sadly that still is operating probably even now following this hurricane, Matthew, I guess, down in Haiti, is that fraudsters lie in wait for natural disasters.
And when they strike, they create phantom charities with phantom bank account and phantom internet addresses where gullible suckers in the public send money thinking it's going to Haiti, when in reality it's going to the fraudsters.
And normally, you know, the federal, the FBI and our federal government and state authorities are really, really strict about it.
In my modern memory, you know, the first time I became aware of this was after the events of September 11, 2001.
You know, it was amazing to me.
I actually was here, as many others were on that day, and I remember, you know, it was amazing to me that this rich city, because New York is a very rich city, we were just got Streams of money and help.
People drove.
People got in their cars, jumped in their cars to try to help out here.
That's the American spirit.
That's the Western spirit.
You know, when disaster strikes, the fraudsters know that there's going to be huge incoming streams.
So when you look at this Clinton Foundation operating in Haiti and in other natural disasters, you know, it seems to me to be a despicable record.
And I've been approached because of the visibility on this matter by numerous Haitians.
I've been interviewed by Haitians.
I've actually gone to demonstrations here in New York City where the different streams of Haitians will show up in front of the Clinton Foundation office or other places.
And these people want the Clinton family, the entire Clinton family, in jail for what's going on down there.
I mean, the amount of money that the Clinton Foundation itself has raised is not that much Call it round numbers, $100 million in total.
But governments and people around the world have sent, and nobody really knows exactly how much money to Haiti, low estimate $6 billion, high estimate $14 billion range.
And that money and the process of rebuilding Haiti after 2010, or during 2010, was put in charge of something called the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, of which Bill is one co-chair and a former prime minister, I think by the name of Bill Reeve, is the other co-chair.
And these gentlemen, in quotes, refuse to account for any of this money.
And, you know, there are all kinds of allegations.
Of course, there are only allegations because nobody can get inside the hard numbers that monies have basically been diverted, channeled to cronies.
There's the horrible...
A long-standing record of one Dennis O'Brien in a company called Digicel.
He's an Irish gentleman whose Peter Schweitzer has written about him.
There's a lot written on the long trail of suspect business activities.
He's managed to make, I think, billions of dollars in wireless telecommunication and other ventures around the world, particularly down in Haiti.
So he's been able to get all kinds of money together.
If you look at the amounts of money that Digicel has procured from the International Finance Corporation, I think, and other multilateral organizations, it's incredible.
And, you know, that's what you see here in Haiti, that instead of going, I mean, this is a small economy.
It's all in, I want to say it's 10 billion.
It's roughly 10 million people, so that means they make $1,000 per year Round numbers now, per person.
And, you know, this is an economy and a country where the United States, Canada, and other nations have long relations.
You know, and we're very active, both U.S., Canada, other countries, trying to help around the world.
Why is it that we cannot help the poor people of Haiti?
And since we haven't been able to help them, since we can't discipline this former president, Why do we believe that we can help any other country?
I mean, Haiti is not Afghanistan.
Haiti is not Iraq.
Haiti is not, you know, a place wrought with radical Islamic terrorists.
And we can't make this island nation work with a tremendous amount of money.
I mean, let's say we sent them $10 billion.
That would be the equivalent of sending, I don't know, $12 trillion to the United States.
And the Haitians have nothing to show for it except some fancy resort hotel Built on a part of the island that was not even hurt by any of these natural disasters.
Right.
It is.
And of course, as we all know, preying upon people's kindness is one of the worst crimes against charity because it makes people skeptical of future charities.
I mean, I remember back in the day when I sent money to a charity that was dealing with a natural disaster in Eastern Europe and finding out later that it was just some ripoff thing and then you're like, oh, You know, do I have the time to research everything and everyone?
And it really keeps money not just from the people in the moment who need it, but in the future, where people are like, ah, you know, last time I sent it, it got ripped off, and do I really want to bother again?
And it really does keep the flow of charitable donations in the future down, which I think is one of the great crimes.
You know, when I got into this last year, I did some research, and it's on my site, the so-called First Foundation Report, April 20th 2015 at the end of it I put some statistics in there for a reason to just illustrate that in fact in our country there are good statistics that they do show that relative to income and relative to the small amount of financial wealth at the bottom eighty percent in this country have it is the bottom eighty percent were actually the most generous
when you look at it from a financial viewpoint relative to their resources You hear about Bill Gates, you hear about Warren Buffet and other big guns, the Rockefellers.
But, you know, those are isolated cases and they're big amounts.
But when you put large tens of millions of people together and they chip in $5 a year or whatever, it adds up to a lot of money.
And, you know, these people who are giving money in disproportionate, contributing to large flows of grants to charities and charities in the United States of America A huge percentage of estimated total economic activity.
It's like a sixth to a seventh of our vast economy.
Just our charitable sector alone would be among the top, say, 15, 20 countries in the world, if not even larger than that.
Just the charitable sector.
So people who give in small amounts may not itemize their deductions.
They may not check even any of the financial reports.
And they actually need this money.
They'd be better off keeping money than giving it to a charity like the Clinton charity, which seems to me to be a gigantic, unregulated political and personal slush fund.
I've seen it referenced that it's less of a charity and more of a perpetual political campaign.
And one of the things that struck me in looking at the very grim footage about what's going on in Haiti at the moment, how incredibly frustrating and enraging it must be for the people on the ground Because there's the fact that people have given a huge amount of money to the Clinton Foundation and trust the Clinton Foundation to do its good work in Haiti means that there's not a backup plan.
And so if the money is given to the Clinton Foundation and people read, oh, wow, you know, It's $37 million.
That's a huge amount for Haiti and so on.
So the problem is taken care of.
So there's no one else who particularly steps in and says, okay, we've got it because people think, you know, if someone in the baseball team catches the ball, nobody runs to catch the ball because it's been taken care of.
And it's not just that they divert the money, but in a sense, they prevent people from going in to solve the problem because they think the problem is already solved.
And how incredibly frustrating that must be on the ground.
It's sort of like, there's a phrase, moral hazard, and this is an immoral hazard.
I mean, this is immoral behavior.
I mean, what kind of a ghoul operates a charity, allows his family name, his whole family name, it's still called now the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, his whole family name is on the door here.
His reputation and legacy as a president.
His wife's now running for president.
Some polls suggest she's a shoo-in to be the next president.
Hillary, when asked what Bill was going to do if she went, said he's going to revitalize the American economy.
Lord help this economy.
We know how he revitalized this economy.
Take a look at 80.
What kind of a ghoul goes around the world to desperately poor places?
This isn't the only country where they've done this.
They've done this in Papua New Guinea.
They've done this in Mozambique.
They've done this in portions of India.
You go to places that are horribly afflicted, that are notoriously corrupt, you stand between these incoming aid flows and the desperately poor people with your foot, your boot on the neck of the downtrodden, and you divert sums away from these people, and then you come back home and you get your PR arm and the corrupt mainstream media to incuriously accept the view that this is actually a charity.
I hope, thanks to you and others, this does get exposed.
And I hope it causes a period where the supposedly responsible members of the mainstream press go back and look at what they've done.
Because they are enablers of this.
If you had a real Woodward and Bernstein approach, if you had some tough investigators looking at this, then maybe the people of Haiti would not be today where they are.
And, you know, maybe the correct remedy here is that, you know, once we fully get into this, once the public gets engaged, and especially if Hillary does not win, we have an inquisition, literally an inquisition, not we're putting people on a cross and burning them at the stake or anything,
but, you know, when we go into this really tough, go back and recreate the history, find out where these monies went, If monies were diverted, we'd get them back with penalties, and we'd put them into a real plan to help the people of Haiti and other places where the Clintons screwed up, and we'd severely punish anyone associated with this charity.
That means all the trustees, all the executives, while giving incentives to people who've been involved to come forward and tell us the truth, tell us what really happened.
I mean, when you go back to 2010 as an example, the main books of the Clinton-Bush-Haiti Fund show That of all the cash that was sent and declared into the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, I think less than $10 million was spent on charity, on charity grants inside Haiti.
Now, why the delay?
It should have been possible to get real money working quickly.
Why was money sent to this interim step the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund and held in cash?
Why didn't it go as soon as possible down to the afflicted people in Haiti?
And why was so much effort spent on economic projects tied to various Clinton cronies?
Were those involved, like Dennis O'Brien and this Korean firm that was thinking it would do some kind of textile manufacturing business and veil itself as special deals on tariffs into the U.S.? Why all those projects?
And why weren't roads built and hospitals built and things that could actually help the suffering people of Haiti?
And what grown-ups were looking at this?
You know, it's as if it's, you know, a big game.
And maybe that's what happens when you let politicians get involved in charity.
Because, you know, you could argue that a lot of political activity down in this country is empty promises made to gullible voters because, you know, the politicians understand that the voters are never going to go to the polls and make the kind of change that is required to upset the status quo.
Didn't Hillary's brother end up with a gold mine in Haiti?
This is one of those stories that I had to read it three times to try and figure out the what?
How did he end up with a gold mine?
Right.
I mean, I'm sorry to be so brutal as I'm about to be here, but it's like in the Holocaust.
You're mining the poor Holocaust victims' teeth for their gold.
I mean, it's just...
What collection of ghouls would decide that here's a country flat on its back after centuries of problems, and what we're going to now do is enter into an off-market contract to give some new company the contract to exploit the precious remaining natural resources of the country in the form of this gold deposit?
I understand that after the deal was struck, It was subsequently rescinded, but at the time it was struck, it was ridiculous.
Let's go and let's take victims, and they have a resource here that if we had a real team that was interested in helping Haiti, could get a fair deal.
No, no, no.
What we'll do is we'll screw the people of Haiti yet again, and we'll give a nice little benefit to the Secretary of State's brother.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's as if the people around this project A, they must have no shame.
They don't understand the word shame.
And B, they have no sense of morality whatsoever.
It's just atrocious behavior.
Well, the tragic thing is they have a sense of morality insofar as they know what other people consider moral.
Like, let's go help Haiti.
So they kind of understand morality insofar as they know how to manipulate other people's generosity to get what they want.
And that really is the most dangerous form where you understand it but don't share it.
I agree.
I agree.
So it's, you know, it's a sad tale, but, you know, thanks to you, Stéphane, and thanks to, there's a great woman whose name is, I'll spell it, D-A-D-Y and then C-H-E-R-Y. She's a Haitian biology professor who also operates a news service called News Junkie Post.
And if you Google it, you'll see she's written extensively about Haiti, trying to help in Haiti.
She works with a man, a Frenchman, called Gilbert Mercier, M-E-R-C-I-E-R, in that project.
And then there's a fantastic lady who's had me on her progressive radio called Eutrice Lied, L-E-I-D. That's the chain that's owned by Pacifica, and it's a very big progressive show.
And I've been on there for hours talking about this, and there's a big Haitian diaspora that's getting interested and spreading the word As we think through in this transition, not if Hillary wins, because we know it's going to happen to all of us if Hillary wins, but should Trump win, one of the things on our foreign policy that we should get accomplished is we need to do right by the people of Haiti.
We really need to try to help these people out once and for all.
And we owe them a massive debt of gratitude.
As you rightly point out, Stefan, people around the world in Haiti, You know, countries that, let's say, are not exactly that friendly with us at the moment, like Russia, or rivals like China, suspect that our charities are up to no good.
And when you see this kind of a case study, you know, run by a former president, and you can't claim that he's an idiot.
I mean, he's a smart guy, and she's supposedly a smart lady, and they've got supposedly a smart daughter.
How in the heck does the American government let this team get away with this type of behavior in a manner That so debases America's standing in the wider world.
This is not a small, irritating misstep.
This is an incredible belly flop that is going to take decades to recover from.
We really need to expose it fully, punish those responsible, And then, you know, get back into the business of really trying to help around the world.
We have a lot of money devoted to this task all over the world.
There's so many great people who don't preen in front of cameras, who are not looking to get any attention for their donations.
They're just trying to actually help people.
And they're trying to do it and get people who are afflicted back up on their feet.
And many of them like to be anonymous.
This team is taking credit in advance For something they actually didn't accomplish, and now thinks they can get their hands on the cookie jar of the American Treasury.
It's really...
If I hadn't been studying this for months, I wouldn't believe it myself.
And they, of course, trying to Trying to get the Clintons for illegal activity seems to be a rather slippery game and has been for many decades.
And the cynical part of me, I'm sure there's no proof of this, Charles, but the cynical part of me says, okay, well, the reason they got the Bushes roped in is that if Republicans get in power and start investigating, they might hesitate to go after a former Bush who might be implicated in any of these It's tough to go after Hillary for her emails because you've got the president emailing her back and forth, which would implicate him in whatever security breaches she might have been subject to.
And so, this kind of bipartisanship where it's like, okay, sometimes the Republicans will go after a Democrat, sometimes the Democrats will go after a Republican, but if you have a bipartisan charity, then it's tough for either to go after that charity, and I think they're well-protected that way.
That's just my cynical side.
I know there's no proof for it, but that's what I would think in the wee hours of the morning.
Well, I mean, as usual, you hit the nail on the head here.
I mean, what we have in this country with the Bush wing of the Republican Party and the Clinton party, Obama wing of the Democratic Party is we have a uniparty.
We have a political system that feasts off the apathetic voter to use its political connections to access the vast amount of money, and I mean the trillions of dollars of money that can be accessed for projects that are never appropriately scrutinized, where the lawyers and the consultants and the accountants and the promoters can skim Hundreds of billions of dollars collectively from the body politic.
And the problem with this is it's so corrupt because the mainstream media feasts on the advertising revenues and requires access to all these political figures so they can't go after them too aggressively.
Everyone is guilty, you know, both the people actually doing it and the public for being lazy and not standing up and going to the polls and voting these people out and insisting that they get punished.
On the Clinton-Bush ties, you're absolutely right.
This goes all the way back, in my thinking, you know, before we start thinking about what may have happened while Bill was president and before in Arkansas involving the Bushes, if you just focus on the period 2000 forward, you have the Clinton-Bush tsunami fund, which in my way of thinking was a fraud involving the elder Bush.
The Katrina thing is certainly a fraud.
The Bush-Clinton-Katrina Fund, when you look at their papers carefully and the laws and the rules.
Then there's something called the Gulf Coast Recovery Fund that was, flip of the tongue there, that was in fact also likely a fraud.
And then the Haiti thing.
So these people have been doing this kind of stuff sloppily for years and, you know, they're dirty as a result.
And you're right.
I'm sorry, finish your thought and I'll ask my next question.
Sure.
So the, you know, elements of the Bush wing of the Republican Party remain powerful.
The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party for the moment seems ascendant.
So the mainstream media is, you know, very reluctant to go in and look at this.
But this is a tale that needs to be told.
I mean, I remember, actually, as a child, I went to nice schools.
My parents, you know, avoided most luxuries, but one of them was private school for three boys.
And they were really generous with that.
And I remember in my little private school, I switched schools, and there was some assembly where we were told that we had to either, I forget if it was UNICEF or Save the Children or whatever, and I took this thing back to my parents, and everyone else was doing it, and I said, why shouldn't we do it?
And my parents said, because there's no guarantee that that money is actually going to go for the purpose.
One of the kids had to go back to class and say, my parents won't let me do this.
It was drilled into me at a young age that if you're going to get involved in charity, you better make sure that it's charity.
This is not charity.
Now, one of the great, glorious gifts of the recent weeks has been the WikiLeaks dump, a steady stream of information that converts what were formerly called conspiracy theories to relatively proven facts.
And have you been following what's been coming out of WikiLeaks and the Podesta emails and other information that's coming out?
Does it have any bearing on how it is, the tools that you have, the information you have available to look into the Clinton Foundation?
Just a little bit, Stefan.
Just a tiny bit.
I wake up every morning and I start searching to see what I found at WikiLeaks.
In fact, today I found some new things.
Absolutely.
There are some fascinating vignettes that have already come.
I'll give you the most interesting and the most telling first to me.
As in anything else, there are world experts on charities.
And one of the world's experts The team of the world's experts for charity, particularly with a focus on New York law, is Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett.
I actually worked there briefly as an 18-year-old young man, as a proofreader, years and years ago, obviously.
I know the firm.
It's a fantastic firm.
They're really good at what they do.
It seems that through the intercession of Chelsea Clinton, who there are some emails you can read prior to WikiLeaks from her to her parents following a visit to Haiti saying, whoa, you know, we got some serious problems in Haiti.
And it would seem, weaving things together from the emails, that she induced a friend of hers she'd met from McKinsey, Eric Braverman, to start taking a look at this.
And the more they looked, the more concerned they became, which culminated with October 27, 2011, we learned through these WikiLeaks that Simpson Thatcher was hired.
And we get a request list, October 28, 2011, of what they demanded or requested from the staff and the trustees of the Clinton Foundation.
And with that information in hand, by December 3, 2011, there's a 22-page memo, I think, 22, 23-page memo, that...
is devastating because what it shows is it shows with access to information the public cannot yet see Simpson Thatcher and a team led by acknowledged experts Victoria B. Bjorklund is the co-author with two others of the leading textbook that's first published I think in 1997 New York Nonprofit Corporation Law I mean it just takes you through the requirements And
the author of that, I mean a reader of that book, would be able to see in 30 minutes that this has been a fraud since inception, a serious fraud.
And when you look at the December 3 summary, by page 20, I think, they have a section on the internal controls.
Now, you don't know how far back they've looked from the summary.
They requested three years of financial information.
The three years that would have been available in 2011 by October 28, 2011, would have been the calendar years 2007, 8, and 9.
So we don't know if they went further back than their original request October 28, 2011.
But just from what we see there, Victoria Bjorklund and her team of lawyers, without any accountants, would have been able to say right away this was a fraud.
A serious fraud.
And when they got to When they got to page 20, they say that they've had access to the accountant's letters.
Accountants write side letters to the board of the charity that explain all their concerns and ask the management and the trustees to represent to the accounting firm that everything's all right.
They would have seen these side letters and they would have seen the concerns of the management and they say it appears that even though the public account's Well, under New York law, and under many state laws, unlike Enron, unlike corporate fraud, fraud in a charity is when your books and records that are in the public domain are false and materially misleading.
But to be false and materially misleading is really two broad concepts.
One, are there mistakes, material errors, in what the public can see?
And then the second side of it is, have you omitted crucial material information that the public ought to be able to see?
If one or both of those planks of the coin, sides of the coin are present, and if you are soliciting, not necessarily receiving, but soliciting donations under New York law, you are guilty of fraud.
You don't have to prove intent.
You don't have to prove harm.
You just have to show that the solicitation...
Then other publicly available materials are false and materially misleading, and you have to show that the charity solicited.
Well, it's crystal clear to me that that was the case, and it must have been crystal clear to Simpson Thatcher that that was the case as of December 3, 2011.
So what do we know that happened next?
Following that December 3 written memo, there are multiple email communications back and forth, and the decision the group takes is not To expose it, not to correct it, but instead to complete the filings of false and material new reports concerning 2010 for the Clinton-Bush-Hady Fund,
for the main charity, for a new thing called the Clinton Global Initiative, Inc., and another new thing called the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc., and another new thing called the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Inc., all of which compound It compounds the grave legal jeopardy that the trustees have, assuming people, the public really continues the process, which seems to be ongoing, of diving into what really happened here.
This is a massive case of charity fraud that needs to be prosecuted.
In quantum, we're talking billions of dollars.
We see how Eric Schneiderman has thrown the book at Mr.
Trump over a $1.5 million solicitation.
This is, you know, billions of dollars have been solicited here and are being solicited while you listen to this podcast.
And a reputable firm, Simpson Thatcher, must have voiced some concerns, and the decision the trustees took was to override these concerns.
Now, one of the reasons they may have made that decision is that when public foundations make contributions to a fraudulent charity, the donors have problems.
Is that right?
So if you haven't done due diligence, you may actually be on the hook for nefarious actions within a charity just as a donor?
If you are what's called a private foundation, which for example the Gates Foundation is, and I believe they have exposure here, it is the duty of the donor to make sure that diligence is done on the recipient charity If you characterize your donation as having been made to a charity, it better well be a charity.
In this case, the Gates Foundation, to pick one, did in fact, looking at their books, make sizable donations, multiple donations over numerous years to Clinton charities when they were neither organized nor operated properly, and therefore when they are not actually charities.
And if this were a normal charity, State of Affairs, where everybody, no matter how powerful they were or how weak they were, were treated the same under the law, then the IRS would throw the book at the Gates Foundation because there are serious penalties.
You can exact, I think, for failures to correct donations characterized as being to a charity that in fact are not a charity, for one failure, uncorrected failure, you can levy a tax Equal to the value of the donation.
The IRS could do that.
For repeated and willful violations, you can shut the Gates Foundation down.
And that would entail assessing billions of dollars in taxes against the Gates Foundation.
Let me just pause here for a sec, Charles.
I mean, that's The octopus goes even wider and even into more and bigger and deeper pockets and more and bigger and deeper centers of power.
So the question then comes to me, thinking about any of these donors, why, why, why would you bother donating to a sketchy foundation that has problems and so on?
Like I fully understand these outside lawyers do their audit, so to speak, and they give these recommendations.
Once people ignore it and just plow on, that seems to me to add intent to malfeasance in my view.
But why would places like the Gates Foundation donate to this Clinton Foundation if it gave them legal exposure?
I mean, it's not like people aren't going to take their money who aren't the Clinton Foundation.
So the next part, and again, this is the cynical part of me that looks at the world rather squinty-eyed.
But part of me says, okay, well, why would you want to give to the Clinton Foundation if it might expose you to fines or negative repercussions?
Well...
The theory is, or the theory that floats around is that you're buying protection in some form or another.
You're buying positive influence in some form or another.
Because I've seen some arguments that there are negative patterns that occur to people who decide not to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
So do you think there may be some answer that way, that you're either trying to avoid some sort of negative or you're in pursuit of some political positive, and that's why you'd expose yourself to this kind of risk?
Well, now I'm speculating, but I'm happy to speculate in this case.
You know, I suspect that it went something like this.
If you go back into the history, there's an excellent book.
I'm actually looking at it right now.
I'm looking at the title of it.
It's called No Such Thing as a Free Gift, The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.
It's by an academic lady named Lindsay, L-I-N-S-E-Y, M-C-G-O-E-Y. And But if you go back into the history of Microsoft and Gates, Bill Clinton's administration went after Microsoft for antitrust.
And that case, I think, from memory, I don't have my facts in front of me, but from memory, that was settled somehow.
But Bill was taking a lot of heat early in the 2000 period because here he had all this vast wealth.
He was a young guy, and he wasn't All that well known for charity.
So in addition, Europe, you know, the European Union happened, and Europe started taking a look at this, and Europe started going after Microsoft over antitrust.
So there are cynics who believe that the Gates Foundation was not all that charitable to begin with.
I mean, here, I'm not sure if Bill Gates, he may have done this, I doubt he did this, Whether he sold stock in Microsoft, paid his capital gains taxes, and then donated the residual to the charity.
I don't know that he did that.
He may well have just given the stock to this new charity.
And whether he pays capital gains taxes or not, he very much is in control of the Gates Foundation.
His father, I think, is the chairman, but he and his wife are very much involved, as is his close friend Warren Buffett.
So did he, in an argument, a tough Jesuit priest-style argument, might be to ask the question, did he really make a donation when he merely transferred ownership of these shares into another entity that he still controls?
And let's take a look at the other side of the coin here.
By doing this, he's still controlling the stock.
The stock can appreciate tax-free.
How much has he really given up And what might he have gotten?
I mean, he has appreciated stock.
The basis and the original cost of his stock at Microsoft has got to be, you know, not even pennies.
And so by making a gift of stock, if that's what he did, he could take a massive slew of deductions off his federal taxes.
I believe, from memory, there's no state income tax in Washington.
So economically, it's a pretty sweet deal.
And, uh, you, you could then say, all right, now I've accomplished this deal.
I'm, I'm running a model charity.
Uh, he begins to make noises about taking donations from others.
Warren Buffett starts to give him money.
Now he's a young guy, a little young guy.
And, you know, suddenly he's perhaps an incoming, uh, target for, you know, tons and lots and lots of more gifts.
That's kind of a sweet deal.
And, you know, you can get in trouble as a big actor around the world, so it's nice to have protection.
And then the Clintons come along.
There's never been a case before of a former president operating a charity this way, this as a rogue charity, with a wife who has political aspirations and indeed is a leading candidate to become president for another maybe four or eight years.
So, you know, people in Canada and the U.S. have pretty high ethical standards.
You can argue there is corruption in both countries, but It's not on the scale of, let's say, Papua New Guinea, or for that matter, Haiti, and other places.
So around the world, there are lots of people who think nothing of bribing political officials.
So you start looking at this, and I come at it kind of from a different standpoint.
I will concede willingly that Bill Gates, if he's not the smartest human being on the planet, he's in the top 100.
So he's not stupid.
He's not poor, so he's got people around him who can do the work and check the rules.
Why would he allow this foundation of his, which he's trying to set a world standard for philanthropy, to make so many obvious errors contributing money to the Clinton Foundation up through December 31st, 2009, to fight HIV AIDS when the Clinton Foundation was not authorized for that purpose?
Why would he ever do that?
And perhaps it is, Because, you know, in cooperating and helping the Clintons and providing cover for them, he felt he'd get something in return.
If one or more of his business interests got into trouble, that he could, you know, at least get lenient treatment.
And then another thing I would just point out that I think is all linked in here, the entity within the IRS that is responsible for regulating charities is a tax-exempt organization's department.
That's the...
You know, the piece of the IRS that sits over this whole area.
The person who was in charge of that area from 2006, January or so, until the time she was forced out of office, was Lois Lerner.
And the Clintons, you know, the notorious Lois Lerner, who decided with her group, it's alleged, to go persecute right-lining groups that operated charities.
So the Clintons probably...
Are smart enough to have figured out what are the important departments within our sprawling federal bureaucracy?
And also, what are the important departments in multilateral aid organizations around the world?
And it sure looks to me like what they've done here is used the cover of charity to create a gigantic business development, political patronage, and wealth aggrandizement vehicle operating here in my home city of New York.
To apply its trades around the world.
I mean, it's like it's Tammany Hall on steroids.
It's Robin Hood in reverse.
I mean, it's just, it's really just, it is not charity.
And in fact, there was an article in the Atlantic Magazine titled, This Is Not Charity, published in 2007.
That article is right then and it's right now.
Okay, so two quick questions, then I want to get you to comment on a statement you made recently that to me is fairly jaw-dropping in terms of its implications.
The first is, of course, when this topic came up in the third presidential debate, she immediately went to, well, you know, the Clinton Foundation has been Highly rated by charity rating organizations.
It gives, I think she says, something like 90% of its revenue goes to charity.
And then she said something odd about how not we got AIDS medicine into Africa, but we facilitated, and I'm not sure exactly what that means.
So the first question is...
Has the foundation been highly rated by charity rating organizations?
And what does it mean when she says 90% of the money we collect goes to charity?
When I go and look online and I say 6%, 7%.
How are we going to square these circles and bring these desperate numbers and perspectives together?
Well, I think Hillary in that performance was just auditioning to do a sequel to the great film by Jim Carrey.
And that film will be called Liar, Liar, Liar, because all three of those statements are lies.
In the first instance, rating by a highly rated charity organization, there is no serious, resourced organization that can devote the time and attention to this type of a charity.
They're all very, very small organizations that depend upon contributions, that don't have the staff To look as hard as they need to look.
And the one in particular she's talking about from memory spends very little looking at its books on accounting and legal fees on its own operations.
So they can't possibly have the team required to really study all these papers.
So yes, they were able to persuade one or two of these very small, and I would argue compromised, firms that themselves are charities operating on fumes, basically.
To state that most of their ratings are A's.
It's like grade inflation.
There are very few examples that these rating services have they'll point to, because they can't.
They don't have the resources to really study it.
Sorry to interrupt, but also if we remember from the 2007-2008 financial crisis, there were independent bond rating agencies that rated all of these toxic mortgage securities as AAA and perfectly fine.
The rating agencies can themselves be compromised, and we've seen that in the financial industry repeatedly.
Well, I was going to say that myself.
And in fact, when I exposed GE back in 2007, 8, and 9, that is one of the specific things that I urge people to bet against Moody's.
Moody's at that time had about a 20% ownership position held by Warren Buffett for just that reason.
Now, Moody's and S&P are gigantic compared to these tiny little charity rating agencies.
So that's the first lie.
The second lie is 90% of the money gets spent on charity.
Says who?
There's never been an independent audit of any part of the Clinton Foundation, as is required by state and other laws.
There never has been.
You can go for yourself and look in the Clinton Foundation website.
Try to find the audits for 1997 to 2004.
You won't find any.
You'll find them for 2000 to 2004 on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Attorney General charity site.
And they state flatly that the accounting principles used in these, in quote, audits are not Allowed inside the United States of America.
So they are illegal.
The facility in Little Rock was built in that time frame.
So if the numbers aren't right, the way audits work, for those of you who don't necessarily understand them, you can't start from scratch in the middle of a charity's life and fix an audit.
If the audit isn't right in day one, it's never going to be right.
And So the crucial period when this thing was supposed to be exclusively a Little Rock, Arkansas-based presidential archive and research facility, in this crucial period through December 31st, 2004, the books were cooked.
And people with a little bit more training, people like me, will tell you that substantial sums, I estimate a minimum of $60 million, was stolen from the Clinton Foundation in this time frame, looking at the books rigorously.
And then you carry on.
If they're not right by December 31st, 2004, they're never right afterwards.
So there's never been an accounting firm that has done the work that is required.
Hillary's statement that 90% went to charitable work has never been tested by any credible outside person.
And mathematically, it's wrong.
When you look, what they do is they say that any expense they characterize as being what's called a program service expense Is necessarily charitable activity.
Well, you know, if you have a crooked set of accountants and a gained set of trustees who are all in on the game, you know, they're going to lie.
And nobody's calling them out on them, except recently we've seen and mentioned that Simpson Thatcher comment.
Simpson Thatcher in that December 3rd report says, look, this thing has no controls and it's not using the right accounting stuff.
So, just, you know, there's, no one really knows is the answer, but it's certainly not 90%.
And if you're just looking at how much money they gave to other charities, so-called grants, it's more like 5%.
Now, that's 5% or 6% or 7%.
Now, that's of what they declared.
But the key trick in a crooked charity is that, as we were discussing earlier, you assert that you're engaged in charity.
Lots of money comes your way, but you don't declare all the money.
It comes your way, and you divert some of it.
So the upper end, maybe 7% went to other charities.
But, you know, let's say, as I suspect, that the real amounts of money that were sent towards the Clintons and all of its affiliates were more like $100 billion, then it's a minuscule amount.
And then, finally, on the question of HIV-AIDS, that is really nonsense.
There's a great report by Marsha Blackburn's staff, the congressperson from Tennessee-Nashville area, who's done a lot of work on this.
There's a tremendous amount of hard evidence out there Showing that the price of HIV AIDS medicines were already on their way down well before Bill Clinton had anything to do with the effort.
And by the time he did get involved or at the time he did get involved asserting he was doing so in the name of the charity, the charity wasn't authorized for that purpose.
So there's no causal link that says the Clinton Foundation or the various bits and pieces that they said are parts of the Clinton Foundation, which I don't believe ever legally were.
Can be said to have themselves brought the price of HIV AIDS medicines down.
In reality, what was going on is the generic manufacturers of HIV AIDS medicines looked at this and said, you know, the price is really high that the branded pharmaceutical Western companies want to charge.
We can make the same thing much cheaper.
Let us do that.
And so these these generic firms had an economic interest and felt they could make a profit and did make a profit.
Selling generic drugs at much lower prices than the branded drugs.
Being a business development arm for Indian generic pharmaceutical companies that want to enter the market for HIV-AIDS drugs and for other drugs is not a charitable activity.
Hillary Clinton is not much of a math student because the annual cost of treating an HIV-AIDS HIV patients, depending on whether it's a child, an adult, there's two broad categories of these drugs, what are called first-line and second-line.
Second-line are much more expensive than first-line, so it's tough to do a simple average, but let's use $200 a year.
The math doesn't work.
When you look at the amounts of money that are laid out in the 990s, the annual reports of the Clinton Foundation Charities, The amounts of money they claim they spend on pharmaceuticals, and they provide no supporting detail, neither by geography nor by brand name or anything, or by supplier, they just don't square with this figure of 11.7 million people helped.
So no part of that analysis is correct.
And shame on an entity that I call politifraud now, or politifiction, because they assert that they went and looked at this But they clearly do not have an independent team that understands math.
They may understand words, but they don't understand math because there's no evidence in the Clinton filings that they ever helped that many people directly.
There's no causal link.
And as I say, her statement is a great audition for Jim Carrey's next film, Liar, Liar, Liar.
Wow.
So I guess it sort of falls into the same category where she says, oh, 17 security agencies have verified that Russia hacked America, and it's not the case at all.
So let's just close off with the statement that encapsulates the scope of the challenge.
And, you know, in talking with you and reading about this, Charles, I think I'm starting to get a sense of how the Clintons amassed close, like they left in debt from the White House and have accumulated a fortune close to a quarter of a billion dollars, despite not really having jobs or offering services to the public or Or products or anything, but this is what you said, and I just want you to give the closing statement on this.
You said, an educated guess based upon ongoing analysis of the public record begun in February 2015 is that the Clinton Foundation entities are part of a network that has defrauded donors and created illegal private gains of approximately $100 billion in combined magnitude and possibly more since 23rd October 1997.
It's a jaw-dropping statement.
It's a huge sum of money.
And this is money that otherwise might have gone to more legitimized charities, to charities that have better track records and more transparent, more open, and better filings and so on.
So it's not just the money that was put into the Clinton Foundation.
You look at the opportunity cost of everywhere that money wasn't put and all the good it might have done elsewhere.
That really is the scope of what we're talking about here, right?
Well, I'm going to up the game.
And since I made that statement, I'm going to up my game and say that the real number is likely denominated in the trillions of dollars.
And the reason I'm going to up it is because of these WikiLeaks emails, they confirmed my suspicion that the Clinton Global Initiative, which began illegally in 2005, to assemble people in New York and elsewhere,
ultimately, To gather around and talk about projects that supposedly were charitable, but seem to have run the gamut and involve massive projects all over the world.
Energy projects, infrastructure projects, business deals, investment funds.
You think about, for example, the stimulus program, the almost $1 trillion stimulus spend that didn't create a job in this country.
You think about the various bills that were cobbled together and, you know, Obamacare and all these gigantic projects around the world that have been financed starting in January of 2009 in an environment where central banks have suppressed interest rates.
What you have are politicians, global leaders, getting together with...
I'm just going to pick on a few firms here.
There are many others involved, but we've financed by the geniuses from Goldman Sachs, Legal work with firms like WilmerHale, consulting work with firms like McKinsey, accounting work with firms like Pricewaterhouse.
You have this gigantic flow of projects around the world that seem to get cobbled together and concocted with help from the Clintons via the Clinton Global Initiative, via their foundation.
And because there are no independent trustees who are really engaged, there's no tough accounting, there's no regulator competent to look out over and go through all this, there's a hilarious email string from this guy, Doug Band, who seems to have been somebody who's profited off all this, creating a firm called Teneo, where, remember I told you about the Simpson-Thatcher thing and that coming together in the November 2011 period, I think it is, it's an email saying, Why is everybody picking on me?
Bill Clinton is more conflicted every day of the week than I am.
And he goes through a list of, you know, this guy's doing that, and Chelsea's doing this, and so-and-so's doing that, and the guy running the Clinton Global Initiative is doing that.
We still haven't had competent people who could spot the trouble.
Look at the real books of this thing.
Look at the true value of all these projects.
I'll give you another example.
There's an entity called, which we'll be focused on in coming weeks, It's called the C40 Large Cities Charity, and that is a complete scam.
What it is, it sounds great.
A bunch of big city mayors get together, because big cities are where big populations are, so big emitters of carbon.
Let's figure out how to lower the carbon footprint of these cities.
In reality, what it is, it was never organized properly, it was never operated properly, and it became excuses.
For Siemens and General Electric and the big banks and the big law firms to get together in these conferences and put together retrofitting deals and other deals that would have been done anyway without the charity and the many tens of billions, if not more than that.
You know, so when you really look with a jaundiced eye at what was going on here, this is a charity in name only.
You know, I mean, it is in reality a business development exercise, unregulated, Out of control.
And as you rightly point out, I mean, there is a very serious risk that, you know, it will just continue.
The new world will be this kind of behavior.
But there's another scenario, and I don't know what percentage probability we will apply to it, where, you know, frankly, the people rise up and say, enough of this.
We are sick of these experts who have been talking to us since, say, 1998, saying that All these grand ideas are going to work, and when they're not working, when our incomes are going down, our debts rising, geopolitical instability is everywhere, maybe there will be a moment shortly here in America where we throw off the yoke of this establishment,
this corrupt establishment, figure out what really happened, and, you know, exact some justice here and get back to a sensible life where people take their duty seriously and work hard, And, you know, work hard at charity and actually do charity instead of do business development and call it charity.
Well, and I think that really does come down to Donald Trump.
I mean, Donald Trump has said in the second presidential debate that he wants to appoint a special investigator with regards to the security.
I think he's talked about investigating the Clinton Foundation.
So if you do want sunlight to be poured into these rather dank cracks, I think it comes down to the choice for Donald Trump.
Because he, of course, as an outsider, is not going to be implicated in these schemes in general, and therefore is going to be able to run full-tilt boogie at these questions without fear that the grenade's going to go off in his own hand.
To mix my metaphors terribly, but thanks so much, Charles.
Always a great pleasure.
Please, please, everyone, go to charlesortel.com.
Again, we'll link to that below to follow your work.
I know that now the WikiLeaks stuff is out, that your work is accelerating.
I appreciate everything that you're doing so much to bring light on these issues because this is the kind of person that if you elevate to the presidency of the United States, all of these habits are going to go up with her and I would argue are going to escalate because there's really no more powerful position that she could possibly get.
So thanks again, Charles.
A great pleasure.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
My pleasure.
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