3692 If you don't drain the swamp, the swamp drains you.
If you don't drain the swamp, the swamp drains you. Charles Ortel joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss special prosecutor Robert Mueller, James Comey, Lois Leaner, the Clinton Foundation and other assorted swamp monsters. Charles Ortel is an investor and writer who graduated from Horace Mann School, Yale College and Harvard Business School. Mr. Ortel has been one of the leading voices in exposing the corruptions of the Clinton Foundation. For more from Charles Ortel, please go to: http://charlesortel.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is an investor and writer who graduated from Horace Mann School, Yale College, and Harvard Business School, I guess because he couldn't get into any decent schools.
Mr.
Ortel has been one of the leading voices in exposing the corruptions of the Clinton Foundation, and you can find out more of his work, and I urge you to check out charlesortel.com.
Charles, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh, it's my great pleasure to come back, Stefan.
So we're going into the swamp today.
And I think there's a sense, not just in America, but throughout the Western world, that the government and in particular law enforcement, FBI, Department of Justice and so on, have kind of been infiltrated and almost taken over by a group that serves those in power, particularly have kind of been infiltrated and almost taken over by a group that serves those in power, particularly if those So I think people understand like the media and academia and Hollywood and so on.
They went left decades ago.
But I think people are getting the sense these days that something has also changed in the very way that the government operates in America.
I wonder if you could talk about some of your thoughts about what's changed and I think what the American public is starting to perceive at the moment.
So I think you're absolutely right.
You know, what happened, if you go all the way back to the late 60s, early 70s, that generation of person who fought some good fights over time, in quotes, matured into academia, think tanks, charities, government of course,
and most importantly, into the regulatory apparatus that now, because our government is so big, it spends about six trillion counting all state, federal, local governments, it's so intrusive.
These faceless bureaucrats have enormous power.
To either decide to prosecute you or not to prosecute you.
To let your drugs into the market or not in the market.
To approve this merger or not approve.
And so there's this big network and cabal of people who I would dare to correct you and say that it's not a left-leaning cabal.
It's a uniparty cabal.
It's people who've appreciated that you can buy for a modest contribution to whether it be think tanks or political campaigns.
You can get yourself into a position Where you can get a huge kickback from the government in the form of a no-bid contract, an approval you need, leniency in a prosecution, etc., etc.
Here in New York City, and I'd say in the global capital of the swamp in Washington, D.C., this has been going on for so long that most people would say, well, what are you telling me that's new?
What's new is that in this new millennium, which began with so much hype and hope, About how technology is going to revolutionize our lives for the better.
We've listened to experts speak for 17 years.
We've listened as the tech bubble blew up in our faces.
We listened as Al-Qaeda came out of nowhere, even though we spent a tremendous amount of money on intelligence.
We've listened as the military said that they were winning the battles and the academics said that our children were going to be better educated.
Don't look too closely at how much we're paying ourselves, please.
And I think there's a feeling in many countries, but especially across the heartland of America, that experts, as one famous banker once told me 30 years ago, experts don't know diddly.
And that's been proven in this period from, I would argue, January 2000 to the present.
For all their great talk on the right, the left, the progressives, the talking heads, the university presidents, everybody else, Where's the increase in income?
Where's the job security?
Where's the feeling that costs aren't going to spiral out of control?
Where's the feeling that our leaders on the right and the left really know what they're doing in these troubled regions in the Middle East and elsewhere?
There isn't a sense in this country, which is still, even now, though we're indebted, the richest country in the world, that we've actually been making progress for 17 years.
So, you wouldn't know it amongst the pundits who talk to themselves.
This morning, Joe And his, I guess, fiancee, Mika, were so disgusting and so vitriolic in their attacks against Mike Pence, I will never turn MSNBC or NBC on again until there's a complete change in repudiation in that ridiculous channel.
But we have media platforms in this country that talk to themselves.
They're sure they're right.
They're sure that this is a nightmare and that Trump isn't the president.
And I really do think that Americans and good people in the advanced nations around the world are sick and tired of this BS, and we want to see the one part of the global economy that has not been subjected to a diet, subjected to a starvation diet, and that's government.
We want to see the EU failed experiment broken up, insanity returned to the big markets in Europe.
We want to see the ridiculous course that Japan has been on since 1989 reversed.
We want to see the bloated government at all levels in this country put on a strict diet.
And we want business returning here inside this gigantic economy.
And I think, you know, Trump can get that done if people will let him do it.
Well, I think there has been a sense that there's been a slow turning of institutions that at least nominally used to serve the public and the public interest, that they now serve the interests of power, the interests of political elites.
And I mean, academia at one point was designed to help reinforce traditional American values.
Hollywood, I mean, for those who are younger, they've basically seen Hollywood trash America repeatedly, but it used to be a pretty patriotic institution way back in the day.
And the same thing used to be true to some degree of the newspapers.
And I think people understand those institutions fell to, as you say, the uniparty or the interests of the political elite some time ago.
I think people are a little bit surprised seeing the 180 that's happening in Department of Justice, in law enforcement, and so on.
Whereas under Obama, there was pretty much a free ride.
There was not one single special prosecutor appointed during the entire Obama administration, despite repeatedly highly questionable things that could use some looking into.
But then the moment, you know, Trump gets in, boom, you know, everything turns.
Now he's under intense scrutiny.
Everything he does, he tied his shoelaces the wrong way.
Let's appoint a special prosecutor.
I think people seeing this 180, I think it's really taken a hammer blow to the foundation that people think there's any objectivity I agree.
I mean, if we take two main parts of that argument, on the media side, what's going on And I think we've talked about this a little bit before, is that the mainstream media was gutted, I would argue, by 1999-2002, that timeframe.
The traditional approach of letting editors sit on top of journalists and, you know, have a long lead time between the time a story is conceived and the time it reaches the audience.
The notion that the imprimatur of the Washington Post or the New York Times would be enough to know that it's truth or fiction.
The notion that people really care what's on the 6 o'clock news anymore.
That's dead.
No serious person in the investment world, let's say, cares what airs at 6 o'clock.
They want to see primary sources.
If they have the luxury of time, they want to look at the primary source themselves.
If not, they give it to people to check and cross-check it.
And they don't want to hear about it Monday morning or Monday evening at 6 p.m.
They want the news instantly.
And so I would argue that the mainstream media is living in the horse...
They think that their horse and buggy is going to fly in a spaceship age, and it's not going to.
And that's one set of issues.
On the government set of issues, I take your point, and what really prompted me to start speaking up in August of 2007 to stop being a member of the silent majority and try to be a member of the vocal majority is Was when I began to sense that laws are not applied evenly.
You're not correct because you're rich or wrong because you're poor.
You're correct or you're wrong.
And if you're badly wrong and you break a law, a serious law, you should be prosecuted.
If you're Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, if you're George Bush and George H.W. Bush and their wives, you should be prosecuted, even though you were Especially, I would argue, because you were in positions of such great power.
And I think there's a sense, as you rightly point out, in the Obama era, people basically, death was one big pay-to-play exercise.
You pay enough to pet causes, you don't get prosecuted.
You get on the wrong side and ask what happened to James Rosen.
You know, it was a chilling experience during which, really, I would argue, from September 11, 2001 forward, the tools that the deep state has And the sloppy way, it seems, in which our government is organized, allow a Snowden to, you know, to walk off with how valuable is the treasure trove that he walked off with.
And he wasn't really even a full-time, senior-level employee.
I mean, it's just crazy that we would be living, we would grant such leniency to the deep state, to the government, not even simply the federal government, to state governments and local governments, to behave as if When you win a minor election, you're elected a petty dictator for life.
I mean, this has to change.
One thing that I'm beginning to get particularly exercised about is I see the Republicans in the House, particularly now in the Senate, unfairly slowing down the ability of Donald Trump to actually get these disruptive changes through that will change our tax code for the better, change our health Provide actual health care.
Forget the ridiculous insurance that, in theory, Obamacare was.
He's got some reforms that really need to get put in place.
And if I were Donald Trump, when I got back, or maybe while I was over on this trip, I'd be informing the leadership that there will be no summer vacation.
That we're going to work seven days a week through the summer to perform for the American people and get this legislation into a place where it's debated, perfected, and signed.
So that it can be implemented in 2017.
Those of us who work in the private sector, you have a tough job, you've got a deadline.
You can't go in seven weeks after the deadline and say, oh, you know, I didn't wake up so well, my stomach ache, I need another three years.
I mean, you've got to meet deadlines.
Right.
Well, there's an old military strategy which says that if the enemy pierces your line of defense, let them come in.
Let them come in and then seal them off.
Cut off their lines of supply, and then eventually they're going to run out of ammo, run out of food, and just surrender that way.
And I think that the election of Donald Trump puts him in, quote, the enemy camp, but that's just the beginning.
I think what we're seeing now is what a difficult job it is to try and rein in this power, this influence, this control, this mastery.
of the country and something as simple and as mandated by the people as, let's simplify the tax code.
I mean, who on earth, other than tax lawyers and so on, who on earth would not want that to be the case?
Lower corporate taxes, because the only way for America to survive is to grow its way out of deficit and debt.
Otherwise, it's going to ride itself into a Zimbabwe-style kind of inflation and collapse.
Venezuela, not that far down the road.
So there has to be some mechanism by which the American economy can start to grow.
And seeing the number of spears that are sort of held up at a nasty angle to anyone who tries to advance that agenda is really quite chilling.
It's almost like watching a government literally try to commit suicide by opposing sensible reforms.
You know, I'm glad you brought up an excellent lead.
A number of years ago, I've been spending time criticizing people, and recently Donald Trump called out people who just criticize and don't actually do anything.
And it's a fair point.
You shouldn't just be saying, you know, this is wrong and that's wrong without trying to actually fix something.
So a number of years ago, I forget whether it was 2014 or 15, I thought deeply about this and said, well, why don't I put out a 10-point plan on how to fix this, how to address the structural issues That are holding America back.
Not looked at through a political prism, but through a business-oriented approach.
What is the structure of our government?
What's the competitive position of this country?
How can we remove dead weight from the country?
How can we play to our strengths?
What are our strengths?
What are our weaknesses?
And anyway, one key element of it is, as you rightly point out, the tax code.
There should be, I propose it's even simpler than the Trump one, one rate of tax on everything.
Every dollar from the first dollar of income.
You know, the tax system now, the people on the left have a fair point when they say that the Social Security system is heavily regressive.
I don't like the word regressive-progressive, but I say, all right, with the Social Security tax, as part of a grand bargain that would involve also eliminating public sector unions as a compromise...
We will go to one Social Security rate.
Every dollar of income.
So, you know, these sports stars who make $50 million a year, they pay Social Security at the same rate as you do, all the way up to $50 million.
And, you know, if you were to do that and dramatically lower the rate, the dynamic reaction around the world, not simply in the United States, to people saying, well, all right, America does have things that many other nations don't have.
We have the biggest military defense system in the world, and nobody's going to catch us.
Anytime soon.
We have a 200-plus year tradition of law.
We have an integrated market.
Forget Europe.
We actually are 50 states.
Currency works.
No passport control.
None of that.
We have our differences regionally and ethically and other issues, but we don't have the long-standing inter-nicene battles that still rage across Europe.
You start thinking this way and you say that we have the largest consumer market in the world.
We have a place that could be a safe repository for wealth.
If we moved down into...
If that rate were 12.5% on capital gains and things like that in income, why would you ever put money in Cayman or Bahamas or...
These offshore places when you can have it taxed at that rate and secure in a real country, in a deep country that's not going to be taken over one day.
Well, I think people don't understand just how much the tax code is engineered to keep the rich safe from the competition from leaner and meaner, poorer folk.
And I think that's something that there's a reason why as the tax code gets more complicated, income disparities go up because the rich have access to the lawyers and the accountants and so on to protect their assets, which poorer people don't.
Let's talk just a little bit about some of the details of the swamp monsters that seem to be emerging and slouching their way across the political landscape.
Now, you've written quite a bit about James Comey, of course, who's in the news recently fired by Trump as head of the FBI. Let's get a little bit of the backstory about James Comey and his relationship to the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, and so on, because it seems to me he's been pretty compromised for a long time.
Yeah, it's a great point.
I mean, when I started, one of my friends is this lady, Kathleen Willey, who suffered at the hands of Bill Clinton so grievously and still is suffering.
She's a great lady.
And she was telling me, when we first started discussing a couple years ago about Comey, she was saying, you know, I've got my suspicions about him.
And last year, when you and I were on air a few times, I think between the first time and the second time, Something called the FBI vault file, which is an actual site anybody can look at.
Lo and behold, up came a whole bunch of documents, hundreds of pages, from the period 2001 to 2005.
Where it emerges, there was an investigation launched by the FBI, a real investigation with a grand jury, one that outlived its time and had to be reconstituted.
So two different grand juries, a U.S. attorney going after the Clinton Foundation, the trustees for their paperwork, And the FBI heavily involved.
Well, who was the U.S. Attorney doing this?
It was James Comey.
James Comey was, and you can look at these documents, your listeners can go look at this for yourselves, and you'll see, you have to go way through the first several hundred pages of each of the two dumps, and towards the back, you begin to see they were looking at public corruption.
They were looking at whether or not Bill Clinton, personally, was trading campaign donations for favors.
At a time when his wife was a senator.
And there was a lot of witnesses were called.
There's all sorts of references to what they were doing.
There's a timeline you could piece together.
And I can tell you, just as somebody, now having studied this for two years, that the public record that's out there, not the stuff the FBI team would have gotten and the grand jury, on the public record alone, you can send the trustees of the Clinton Foundation, including Bill, who actually wasn't a named trustee, but Terry McAuliffe, a whole bunch of people should be in prison for decades.
Over the period, October 23, 1997, through the year-end 2004, when the Clinton Foundation never had what was required in the form of an audit financially, never properly accounted for almost $150, $200 million that they declare went through the Foundation.
There are all sorts of questions and suggestions that there may have been bank fraud and wire fraud and solicitation fraud.
And you can see this from the outside.
You can look at the filings that are on the website, the Clinton Foundation, right now for that time period.
Why couldn't James Comey get an indictment and a conviction back in that time frame?
And why, ever since then, has the Clinton Foundation been allowed to do what it's been doing?
And then why, when he was head of the FBI from September 2013 forward, why did he allow the Clinton Foundation frauds to escalate in the way they did?
I mean, it's not as if nobody was talking about it.
He came on board as head of the FBI out of, I want to say, within three weeks or four weeks of that big New York Times article, which actually raised my hackles.
It's one of the reasons I started looking at it when I saw this article, The Times, of all places, being critical of the situation of the Clinton Foundation at a time where it seemed to me Hillary might think about running for president.
So, you know, why couldn't Comey from the inside check all that?
And what about Comey's What about his role as general counsel at Lockheed Martin?
You know, what about his promise to recuse himself from any matter, one FBI director involving Lockheed Martin and all of these problems and suspicions about what the deep state is actually doing with its various databases, one of which may be run by Lockheed Martin?
What about his role as a director of HSBC? You know, that's the place that the Geneva Branch got into all kinds of trouble.
Americans having accounts over there.
Clinton Foundation donors having accounts over there.
Just the whole thing before you get to the question of the various and sundry botched FBI investigations.
And then you turn as well to this issue of Mueller and of Rosenstein.
Oh, the new special prosecutor, right?
Right, because the FBI director prior To Comey was Mueller from September 4, 2001 to September 4, I think, 2013.
And then it was Comey.
So Mueller sat atop the FBI at the time when this Clinton Foundation was maturing, and yet they couldn't bring anything across the line.
What is it?
What kryptonite does the Clinton Foundation have to stop all these superheroes from protecting we the people?
It's so funny to think, sorry to interrupt, but it's so funny to think that this sort of law of eternal recurrence or that deja vu over and over again that, like most people last summer when it seemed like to me at least from the outside, it seemed like the case against Hillary Clinton with the emails and the private server and all that.
that this was open and shut.
And the way he was describing it before he said, well, we're not going to recommend prosecution, which isn't actually his job.
But anyway...
It seemed like, okay, that was a shocking, surprising, it seemed he had them dead to rights, let them go, and then as you point out, it's a replay of what happened in the early 2000s when he was in charge of investigating the Clinton Foundation trustees for what people you have described as numerous, obvious frauds.
Dead to rights, open and shut case, boom!
They get away.
And this, of course, should have been covered ad infinitum by...
The mainstream media, as you point out, the new special prosecutor and his ties to this whole situation as well should be pointed out.
But because they're going after Trump, because they're going after the Republicans, it's all part of the memory hole that generally gets flushed down into nowhere by the mainstream media.
Well, let's take the recent clamor for Trump's impeachment.
And the standard that was immediately floated out in unison by the coordinated talking point wing of the Uniparty Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, as if that's the legal standard.
You look at the legal standard, the legal standard is treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
It's not simply high crimes and misdemeanors.
The important word there is and other, not or other.
You look at what we know of the time when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and her husband was still running and heavily influencing the Clinton Foundation.
We know that hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants for the Clinton Foundation still have not been adequately disclosed under state federal and foreign laws the way they need to be disclosed.
We know that hundreds of millions of dollars are missing, that in grantor financial statements that are out there for the world to see, Mansour said, going towards the Clinton Foundation, that don't show up in the Clinton Foundation accounts.
We know that Hillary, there's no debate that she was Secretary of State.
We know that many, many Clinton Foundation donors got benefits.
We know that when the Clinton-Bush-Haiti Fund was created in January of 2010, we know that Barack Obama contributed out of his Nobel Peace Prize winnings about $200,000 plus to that entity that was not formed properly.
We know that in 2010, the largest donation from the parent Clinton Foundation to any other entity was to this Clinton-Bush entity, and it was sent according to the filings that were issued in November of 2011 and then reissued for this year in November of 2015.
We know that approximately $37.2 million in cash supposedly was sent to a post office box in Baltimore, Maryland for the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
Baltimore, Maryland being the city where the U.S. Attorney in question, Mr.
Rosenstein, served for more than a decade prior to taking his current role as Deputy Attorney General.
How could he have missed this?
I mean, recently, since the last time you and I talked, in recent weeks, Corinne Brown, who was then sitting as a congresswoman down in Florida, she was tagged by the federal authorities last year, I believe it was, last June.
And she was found guilty in recent weeks, and we'll see how long she goes away for, for roughly an $800,000 charity.
They threw the book at her.
Here we have one instance, $37.2 million, supposedly went from the parent company, Clinton Foundation, to this Bush-Clinton thing, to a post office box in a state where there is no record that the Clinton-Bush-Hady Fund had any legal authority to do anything.
And furthermore, the Clinton-Bush-Hady Fund Claims, magically, that it doesn't have any foreign accounts.
You tell me how the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund is distributing anything in Haiti without a local bank account.
They don't use the U.S. dollar down there.
They use a different currency.
And then we've talked before about Laureate.
Laureate is this for-profit educational institution, highly leveraged, deeply troubled, that decided to enter into a joint venture with a piece of the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, It was never lawfully constituted.
The Clinton Foundation was supposed to be not-for-profit.
Laureate is for-profit.
It's very difficult normally to do joint ventures where you have a not-for-profit working with a for-profit.
You're supposed to make sure you comply with state laws.
Donald Trump paid for him not a lot of money, 20-plus million.
These people had to pay for Trump University, which was an analogous problem here in New York.
The difference being...
That Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton received $17.6 million by their own admission for Bill's part-time job.
Now, that's the new rage.
You get a part-time job and you can make $3.5 million a year in a part-time job.
There's no conflict there, nothing to see, nothing suspicious.
And the Laureate is based, headquartered in Maryland, in Baltimore, a place that Mr.
Rosenstein's office should definitely have been noticing.
I think there are great questions that I see from my investing background in the in the ways in which the laureate buyout was structured in two thousand six and seven and the way which attempted to go public in the way it recently did sell equity and then debt securities.
I got all kinds of questions about that.
I got deep questions about why Bill Clinton has still and Hillary not disclosed on the foundation filings their payments from laureate which are material and massive compared to the size of the Clinton Global Initiative University, the joint venture In years 2010 through 2014, when he was getting these massive payments.
So, you know, there's a whole reeking mess here.
Another thing to point out is that Laureate, its legal counsel, was a firm called DLA Piper, and these are big firms, but DLA Piper was the firm trotted out to clear the Clinton Foundation, in quotes, in 2015.
So, you have a conflict there.
Laureate's accounting firm is PwC.
Again, there are very few firms left, but that's also the Clinton Foundation accounting firm.
And I bring that up just to say that those firms should have been able to figure out that A, they had a conflict, and B, because they had a conflict, they better tread carefully and make sure they got everything right.
And they haven't gotten it right.
Right.
Now, another, she's back, another one of these monkey branching, I feel like a guy in a basement with these, like, pictures up on the wall and newspaper clippings and wires and lines and everything going because Lois Lerner shows up back in the day, and you've pointed this out as well.
So how does Lois Lerner, who I guess is back in the sights a little bit now, and how does she fit into all of this history?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so Lois Lerner was an operative.
There's a guy called Wayne Allen Root.
You may know him.
He speaks out.
And he ran for some office somewhere.
And Lois Lerner was then, I think, in the general counsel's office at the Federal Election Commission.
And she tortured him.
So she demonstrated over a career of about 18 years or so at the Federal Election Commission that she could be a partisan administrator of the wheels of the election law.
So, for whatever reason, I suspect it's because people noticed that, once you mentioned sore losers, sore loser man Gore, it was clear that he wasn't going to be president.
Right around that time, a decision was made to insert Lois Lerner into the IRS, into the key position, the Rulings and Agreements Division, that is the one that, that's the division that makes the tough calls on whether a charity Should be allowed to continue as it's constituted, whether it should actually get its determination letter.
She was in charge of that.
Then she was in charge from about July 2001 or so to, I think, January 2006 or so.
And then she was put in charge of the whole department, the whole tax-exempt department.
Now, what we have come to find out, to your earlier point, that we have the appearance of regulation.
The IRS is certainly a fearsome organization.
But it is no match for the 1.4 million charitable organizations that are out there and all the households.
They can't watch everything.
And so in this area of charity, fraudsters have figured out that charities are, in quotes, perfect vehicles for fraud.
Because most people assume that anyone who would spend free time on a charity is not going to waste his or her time.
That they're actually going to find a cause, try to make a contribution, And it's pretty easy these days to put up a website and assert that you're going to help starving African children or something that people will send you money over PayPal or some other means.
So nestled inside the many, many hundreds of thousands of decent charities, unfortunately, there are too many crooked charities.
And if you set up a crooked charity where the trustees are not going to check the books, where nobody's going to check to make sure that the money that was sent towards the charity ends up in the charity's coffers, You have a land office business.
You have a way of getting free money, basically, and doing with it what you want.
You can divert as much money as you want from the charity, and then with the declared funds, you can find friends to give the money to.
You can say that you needed to have some strategic studies, so you hire some firm, and you tell them to send you a bill for a certain number, and you only give them less than that, and you split the...
I mean, there's so many different ways that you can cheat in a charity.
And Lois Lerner was basically put on top of the pile of people who were supposed to watch these things.
And then what we learned, and what really, at the very beginning, when I went to a fellow you may know, Jerry Corsi, back in 2015 with my suspicions, I said, you know, at the root of all this, watching Lois Lerner and her team go to the White House, go to the Department of Justice, share all kinds of taxpayer information, I suspected That there were at least two sides of the coin.
There's the side where the Tea Party people were being persecuted, but there's the other side of the coin where the crooks were being given free passes.
And that, I suspect, is what did happen.
Some of the names who feature in the various suspicious legal documents that I see, including Lerner and others, are the same people who were accused of being involved in the persecution of Tea Party conservatives.
So that really is a very bad piece of our government right now.
And I am shocked, sitting here on May 19th, that John Koskinen, the head of the IRS, who everyone wanted to impeach last year for good reason in the House, he has a free pass.
He's still there.
And maybe the reason is Donald Trump hasn't shown his tax return, so politically they feel they can't fire the IRS guy.
But I think for millions of reasons, John Koskinen, A, should be fired, B, his exit package should be with not physical extreme prejudice, but with criminal extreme prejudice.
And there really needs to be a team of Elliot Nesses need to go into, in particular, the tax-exempt department and figure out what was going on after Bill Clinton left, right the way through to the president.
How did they get away with all this with George W. Bush as president of the United States for eight years?
Well, I mean, if you look at the difficulties he's facing just getting rid of Comey, I think you've got to take on this hydra with extreme preparation and a strong stomach.
Because the major reason is that, as you know with Comey, right?
So you get rid of Comey, and then there are these leaks, and then there's this memo, and then there's this threat.
So, you know, this thing does...
Fight back.
You know, I mean, the president's just a guy.
It's not a dictatorship.
So let's switch to Danielle Stills.
And I like to think of myself as somewhat battle-hardened lo these many years in the public sphere of trying to make the world a better place.
But holy...
Daniel Stills.
Now, as you pointed out, Clinton Foundation has quietly cut its ties.
This was the chief fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation.
Let's talk a little bit about her history, because it leads back to a name we haven't heard for a while, because he's doing quite a lot of time.
Now, remind me, Daniel Stills, Dennis Cheng is the name I remember.
Just refresh my recollection.
So this is a Clinton Foundation spokesman that she said that Stills joined the New York City-based organization in 2012.
Recently responsible for leading the, quote, development department's visions and goals and fostering relationships with individuals, foundations, and corporations to advance the mission of the Clinton Foundation.
That's according to the foundation website.
Visions and goals, all I hear is not specifically measurable.
Now, in a past life from 05 to 07...
She was the chief fundraiser for former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, currently serving out 14 years in Colorado prison on multiple corruption charges.
Are you kidding me?
There's a whole world of people out there who could do a decent, fine, honorable job.
You've got to pick this person?
Well, so here's how I think that may have gone down.
What I... When I look at the record, and on this conversation people who listen to it, they can see what I'm talking about.
When you look at the true state of the Clinton Foundation in 2007, in 2008, when the presidential campaign primary and camp season was in earnest, it was worse than the melting down Japanese nuclear reactors.
I mean, their financials were a disaster.
They were in a lawsuit.
One of their donors apparently was suing them to get money back.
I suspect that was the Children's Investment Fund Foundation out of the UK. Ira Magaziner and another gentleman inside the Clinton Foundation had admitted in one of those WikiLeaks memos that they had, quote, diverted, which I would say is stolen money, to go off and pursue some project that didn't work.
And the reaction in this memo that's there for you to see in WikiLeaks is that, well, we decided to raid our quasi-endowment and cover this up.
There's no such thing as a quasi-endowment.
You either have an endowment or you don't have an endowment.
So you look at it, this is all in 2007.
I just learned today that Maggie Williams, who was very much involved in Hillary's campaign and previously with the Clinton Foundation, she was on the board of a subprime lender that spectacularly went bankrupt in December of 2007.
So you have this gigantic mess.
Obama steals the nomination away from Hillary in a way that Bernie couldn't in 2016.
And now the Clintons are on the outs.
Just at the time prior to the election of 2008, just at the time that the whole foundation, the financials are blowing up.
And then you see, in a matter of days after the election in 2008, You see this memorandum of agreement between the Clinton Foundation and the incoming Obama administration that makes no sense whatsoever.
It's replete with lies.
It characterizes the Clinton Foundation as being something that it wasn't.
It's not forthcoming.
Of course, the Obama team had no clue the true state of the Clinton Foundation because they weren't in power.
But they had a set of problems.
What were their problems?
Before Barack Obama Could actually swear himself and get sworn in.
He had to be interviewed by the FBI over the question of what was his Senate seat actually being sold to the next person.
Valerie Jarrett had an appointment with the FBI. So there was this huge back and forth.
And as a guess what happened, once Obama and Jarrett got in to the White House and got through the period that Trump is going through now and figured out how bad the Clinton Foundation was And what a disaster it was.
A decision was made sort of to bear compromises reach that, you know, look, you have stuff on us.
We have stuff on you.
It would be very embarrassing for you to try to get rid of me right now, Hillary Clinton.
You're going to keep me in here.
We're going to do what we want.
You're not going to look very hard at this.
And the consolation prize is when I leave, you could put your fundraiser in and you could see the access to all these people who are giving us money and you can go off You know, after I win in 2016, Mr.
Obama, you can go off and you can do whatever we were doing with the Clinton Foundation, you know, to the next level up or down, depending on how you look at it, with the Barack Obama Foundation.
That's my suspicion of, you know, looking at the evidence that we see so far, that that's the way I think a kind of a trade was worked out.
And that trade did not assume that Donald Trump would win.
Well, that, I think, is the wild card that everyone's scrambling to kind of cover at the moment.
And so it sort of seems like there's an old movie cliche.
And it sort of seems to me that this is where we are, Charles.
Let me know what you think.
There's an old movie cliche which goes something like this.
You're walking down an alley.
You see a terrible crime.
And you see the faces of the people committing that terrible crime.
You go to the police.
And they say, we're going to put our best detective on solving this crime.
The detective walks in the room and you recognize him as one of the people who is committing the crime.
And so it seems like everyone that they could put in place to deal with this kind of stuff is kind of compromised by this kind of stuff.
Has the deep state been in control of things so long that there's nobody with any relevant experience?
Who's able to be inserted to wrangle the stuff?
You see the Elliot Ness, the guy who can come in and switch the light on in dark places.
Is there anyone left who you didn't see at the scene of the crime who can investigate the crime?
Well, you know, I think Donald Trump has been in office now, I believe it is, what, four months?
So a third of a year tomorrow.
He's been there a pretty short time.
He's accomplished, in my view, a fair amount.
And his biggest accomplishment has been to get serious people, unlike the people in the previous, I would argue, certainly the Obama administration, even some of the Bush administration, he's gotten serious, accomplished people who don't need this aggravation, who are actually serving we the people, and who care deeply about this country, to get in, roll up their sleeves, and try to fix things.
And you can't fix what's going on in this country Remedy eight years or more of disaster in less than a year.
So he's taken some strides.
I think he's made some mistakes.
I think letting his daughter and his son-in-law play the roles that they're playing with as little experience as they have, not simply in Politics, because none of them have much experience in politics, but they really have very little experience in life to give them such big jobs, and then to set his nascent administration up in a place where no one really knows the lines of authority.
If you can go behind some of the cabinet officials back through Ivanka or Jared, that's going to make it tough for these strong, independent-minded and experienced people to actually get everything done.
Now, that said, I think, and I'm delighted that he fired Comey.
I was actually one of the people who probably should have done this, but a number of many weeks ago, I stated publicly on more than one television broadcast that he needed to go.
And I'll say on this broadcast, John Koskinen needs to go immediately.
With those two people out, and then with a motivation discussion with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, saying, listen, we're all in this together.
We have got...
You may not like my ideas, our team's ideas.
The American people need solutions.
So your mission, take what we've done, improve it.
Get your improvements to me, real improvements, measurable improvements to me, in time, so that we can consider this, debate it, and get it accomplished.
While the American people, our charges are on vacation, we're not going to take vacation this summer.
We're going to get the job done for the voters.
If he were to go down that kind of a track, you know, I think he may surprise all of us.
Well, I certainly hope that will be the case.
I've never been a big fan of, Daddy got me a job and I'm suddenly an expert.
That just doesn't make much sense to me.
But I really, really want to thank you for your time today, Charles.
And just remind people, check out charlesortel.com.
You write great stuff.
Your level of insight and knowledge is second to none.
