You posted one link. I showed why that link’s premise was wrong.
Feel free to provide actual links to “all the other documentation and journalism”.
Influence peddling and corruption are actual crimes. It is a fact that Hillary Clinton has not been charged with these crimes, much less tried and convicted.
The reason that Hillary has not been charged, tried and convicted of the crimes of influence peddling and corruption is because there isn’t any evidence that she is guilty of those crimes. If you have actual evidence that Hillary committed influence peddling, feel free to post it. Also, call the FBI. I’m sure they will love to hear from you.
Before we go any further - you do realize, right, that the various arms sales were not conducted by Hillary personally? You do know that it wasn’t just Hillary and some Saudi prince sitting alone in a room somewhere, swapping gossip and missiles? You know that dozens of people, none of whom give a shit about the Clinton Foundation, were involved in bringing these deals about?
You do acknowledge, right, that the Obama administration was the driving force behind selling weapons to the various Gulf States, because, like the NYT article I quoted says, they wanted to offset Iran’s reemergence as a regional power?
Can you explain why President Obama was swayed to give approval for selling arms to Qatar because Qatar gave money to the Clinton Foundation?
I’m not interested in arguing with you any more Mernieth, I’m on your side, I want Clinton to win, but I do have reasonable suspicions about her past actions. Frankly I don’t care if she does some soft corruption, she’s still better than Trump.
Your assertion that your suspicions are reasonable is not factually supportable. Therefore it is not reasonable to continue to hold and assert them. K?
Might not the secretary of state have had any influence at all in this decision? If not, why not? Wasn’t that part of her job?
To be clear, like coremelt, I am not opposed to Clinton being elected president, not only because of the awful alternative but on her own merits.
This is one problem with a charge like influence peddling. There isn’t a cash-and-carry transaction to point to, only inference. Qatar contributes; later Qatar gets to buy arms. Who’s to say what happened in between? I would like to say that Clinton is personally above suspicion, but a variety of personality factors, some noted above, make that difficult under the circumstances. It may be harsh, but I think she and her family should have divorced themselves from the foundation while she was serving (somehow separating out the library so that Bill could still be active there) and again as soon as she declared for president. Not doing something like that shows, I think, poor judgment, on a par with the private email server fiasco, a kind of cluelessness about how things look.
Which, now that I think of it, kind of controverts **Jonathan Chance’s **analysis about her acting from fear of bad results. If that was the case, she wouldn’t behave the way she has in these two cases.
Oh, yeah…the guy who stepped on the Democratic Party as a whole in order to get his hooks into some sort of actual publicity for his campaign despite NEVER having been an actual Democrat. That guy.
The Secretary of State’s job is to implement policy - President Obama’s policy. I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that Clinton influenced Obama to do something he wouldn’t have done otherwise because Qatar and other Gulf States.
Keep in mind that I’ve already quoted a Whitehouse official explaining that the arm sales were intended to strengthen regional powers ahead of Iran’s reemergence from isolation. Please explain why that’s the not the reason for these arms sales. Please explain how the donation to the Clinton Foundation were the determining factor in bringing about these sales, and not the President’s plan to strengthen the Gulf States versus Iran.
Don’t forget that half the people on that supposed IBT chart of people who donated money in exchange for sale are folks we’ve been selling arms to for years. We sell arms to everyone, up to and including Iran. It didn’t suddenly turn into a huge scandal just because a Clinton was involved.
That’s nice, but irrelevant to the point I’m making, which is that we are going to spend the next eight years listening to speculation, innuendo, and “everyone knows …” bullshit.
“Everyone knows that Hillary’s a crook” is the new “Everyone knows Obama’s really a Muslim.”
The only solution is to insist on seeing the evidence.
The evidence. The evidence says what happened. If you don’t got evidence, you don’t got squat.
Insisting that we should just take it on faith that Hillary committed a crime is irrational - especially when you’re relying on the insinuations of people who’ve been openly acting in bad faith for twenty years.
Man, half the rich people in the world have “foundations.” The Bush family has the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group has a long standing relationship with the Bin Laden family - not Osama personally, but the bin Laden family members who oversee their money.
Think about that and then think about the Bush White House arranging for the Bin Ladens in the US to all flee the country a few days after 9/11.
Just a big-ole conspiracy theory, right? Nothing to see here? Notice how the Carlyle Group was never an issue when JEB! was running? Notice how the Bushes are never hounded to close their foundation? Notice how all of Trump’s kids have their own foundations? Notice how no one expects them to stop working if their Dad wins the race?
Every politician is willing to step on people in their climb to power. Nobody gets handed an elected office - you have to compete for it. Often against people in your own party. If you’re not willing to push yourself forward at the expense of other people, you don’t win the primaries much less the general election. And that doesn’t come out of nowhere - presidential candidates learn how to do it in campaigns for other offices.
Did Clinton step on Sanders in her attempt to become President? Sure she did - and Sanders tried to step on her in his attempt to do the same. Obama stepped on Clinton in 2008 and both of them stepped on Edwards and Vilsack and Biden and Richardson and Gravel and Kucinich. And after he knocked down all his Democratic rivals, Obama stepped on McCain in order to win the Presidency.
There are no non-competitive politicians. The only distinction among them is how good they are directing attention away from their competitiveness.
I am not insisting on that. I am saying that appearances matter. Appearances always matter, which is why transparency is such a good idea.
What other people did in the past or are doing now has no bearing on whether what Clinton is doing now is good or bad, right or wrong. Double standard, I don’t care, I’m not the one wielding it. You make some very good points in this thread, but I hate this way of arguing. (And no one is suggesting closing the Clinton Foundation, but just sequestering it from the Clintons’ influence for the duration.)
Not really. Jonathan was engaging in analysis at a distance, and I was following suit, while disagreeing.
Having said all that, I concede most of your argument, that there is no hard evidence for influence peddling around the Clinton Foundation. I am frankly glad to be able to say so.
No. The emails are bullshit and we’ve talked about them to death. The main thing to know about the emails is that the FBI and the DOJ don’t believe there’s any evidence of criminal wrong doing.
Just throw another ten million on the fire with all the other money Republicans have wasted investigating the Clintons only to turn up empty handed.
So, do we believe the inference that when Trump gave money to elected officials in Texas and Florida and they decided not to join the suit against Trump University, that he was committing an actual crime? Well, if we can’t believe that, if we think it is just normal politics, then we can’t possibly infer any crimes or misdemeanors against the probable new POTUS, based on ‘suspicions’ that her actions could have been, might have been, if looked at through a cracked hindsight telescope, ‘questionable’.
Merneith, we get it. You don’t agree with one of the OP’s points. You’ve explained why, at length. Regardless, reasonable people disagree with you. That means it fits the OP, and no amount of arguing about it will change that.
In fact, for me, at least, your words are wasted. You aren’t discussing the topic of the thread anymore, so I just skip your posts. I might read them in a thread about why Clinton isn’t influence peddling, but not here.
That habit is annoying. It’s same problem I see on 538. We’re discussing one thing, but someone has to interject something else and get everyone arguing with them instead of sticking with the main topic.
So my offering to this thread is the one about Trump possibly hitting the onset of Alzheimers or at least dementia. The symptoms fit. And, to me at least, he seems worse than he was when we saw him in the past.
And, crucible, you have that exactly backwards. We can do both of those things. We can assume that neither one did anything illegal, while still thinking they did questionable things. Or we can think that one or both did do something illegal.
I suspect that Trump did not do anything actually illegal to deal with the problem, and I suspect Clinton did nothing illegal. But both did go as close to the line as they could.