Stop me if youve heard this one; Hillary took money from more companies seeking influence
So a politician, a lobbyist and a journalist walk into a bar
Legal Insurrection popped up with another tidbit from the recent document dump of campaign finance reports which came out on Friday. This one caught my attention because it involved not only Hillary Clinton, but a company located fairly close to me Corning, a major manufacturer of glass and ceramics located in upstate New York. The company has a keen interest in foreign trade deals and stays involved in lobbying efforts to expand them
But they also keep a close eye on politicians who may be involved in such decisions, or so it seems. During Clintons tenure at the State Department they lobbied the agency heavily regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In what Im sure is a totally unrelated coincidence, they also donated somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Nothing all that unusual there, at least compared to what weve seen from other companies and governments. (And, er journalists at ABC.) But last year it went a step further. Jonathan Allen (yes, I know its Vox, but ) points out the key factor.
[L]ast July, when it was clear that Clinton would again seek the presidency in 2016, Corning coughed up a $225,500 honorarium for Clinton to speak.
In the laundry-whirl of stories about Clinton buck-raking, it might be easy for that last part to get lost in the wash. But its the part that matters most. The $225,500 speaking fee didnt go to help disease-stricken kids in an impoverished village on some long-forgotten patch of the planet. Nor did it go to a campaign account. It went to Hillary Clinton. Personally.
This isnt the biggest speaking fee that Hillary Clinton ever received, nor will it be the last one we hear about in this context, Im sure. But its notable that such an active lobbying entity who had specifically been pushing the State Department on a critical trade issue currently under debate was laying out those sorts of donations to the foundation. When you add in that nearly quarter million dollar speaking fee which went directly into Hillary Clintons purse as opposed to curing AIDS or whatever the the smoke is getting pretty thick on the ground, even if you havent seen the actual fire yet.
As Legal Insurrection asks:
With the added evidence of speaking fees as another form of Clinton payola, Hillary and the Clinton Foundation have some questions to answer. Among them: what did these companies expect in return for the out-sized speaking fees and did they have cause to believe that their investment would pay off in some real way in a Clinton administration?
At this point, since there likely never will be any smoking gun found, its not a question of what did you know and when did you know it. Its more a case of, who did you get paid by and what did they expect?
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/17/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-hillary-took-money-from-more-companies-seeking-influence/