Clintons Above Review: Therefore Unaccountable

Politico reported:

The foundation has also come under scrutiny for failing to clear all foreign government donations through an agreed-upon State Department vetting process when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and for failing to identify foreign government donations on tax returns.

President Obama's State Department took this position.

"The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure."

This is surprisingly similar to Obama's head in the sand position on fraud leading up the 2008 financial crisis.

The Clintons failed to live up to their proactive commitment and legal obligation, thus there will be no retroactive review.  Typical for the group that makes their own rules (like the Baron Class who wrote the Magna Carta).

Long ago I questioned the sources of Clinton Foundation cash.  I renamed the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) as Conflicts of Global Interest.  Once upon a time the Clinton Foundation released donor names.

Frankly, it's difficult to comply with internal accounting controls and shovel fists full of cash to your friends.  The Foundation itself confessed to operational problems and making mistakes.  NYT reported:

The Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in. 

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

As for how the Clintons play consider this statement:

And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.

Friends won't alienate and officials won't review.  Life as a Clinton means you write your own rules and can change them at a whim.

Update 5-11-15:  Clinton arrogance can be seen in their strong arming a charity rating website.  The rules never apply to Bill and Hillary.

Update 10-28-15:  Accounting restatements may reveal the Clinton Foundation's history of ethical transgressions 

Update 9-19-22:  The Clinton Global Initiative is back.  Fall needed a Davos type gathering for deals to get done.