Yet another scandal – can Hillary shrug this off too?
Just when you thought Hillary Clinton had the race for president sewn up, said Bob Unruh on Worldnetdaily, along comes what Rudy Giuliani is forecasting to be one of America’s biggest political scandals. “It’s going to be bigger than Watergate,” the former New York City mayor told a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Tampa, Florida.
It all has to do with the Clinton Foundation, a public charity set up by Bill Clinton in 2001, which works on issues of global health, climate change and economic development – providing HIV/AIDS medication at low cost, helping East African farmers get better seeds and fertilisers... that sort of thing. But a new report by Associated Press suggests that while she was secretary of state, Clinton gave special access to many of the Clinton Foundation’s big-dollar donors. Indeed, emails released by the State Department show that at least 85 of the 154 non-governmental individuals who met or spoke to her over the phone had given or pledged money to the charity.
The revelations are shocking “even by Clinton standards”, said the Boston Herald. Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain, a $32m donor to the Clinton Global Initiative, wangled a last-minute meeting with “HRC”. Slimfast tycoon S. Daniel Abraham, who has given up to $10m, “wanted 15 minutes of the secretary’s time. No problem, even if her plane had to be kept waiting.” Bill Clinton has now pledged to ban corporate and foreign donations, but it’s not enough. “Nothing short of closing up shop will do.” But there’s no scandal here, said Michael A. Cohen in The Boston Globe. Mostly, these emails show foundation donors “requesting favours that were repeatedly denied”. Then again, for Bill and Hillary’s enemies, “evidence has never been the key ingredient of a Clinton scandal”. That misses the point, said Josh Voorhees on Slate. “You don’t need to believe the Clintons orchestrated some sort of pay-for-play scheme to know that there’s something wrong with a dynamic where it is nearly impossible to prove whether they did or did not.” Still, I don’t suppose this latest bit of shadiness will hurt Clinton in November, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. Those supporting her are Democratic diehards and/or are convinced “Trump is nuts and a danger to the republic”. In other words, “she has already nailed down the segment of voters who prefer ‘corrupt’ over ‘unhinged’”. Yet despite running a campaign with no serious fundraising or national campaign organisation, and despite myriad “selfinflicted wounds”, Trump is still within “striking distance” of Clinton, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review. She, after all, is a weak and widely disliked candidate, and this scandal will only make her weaker. If Trump can rein himself in – he is even now toning down the rhetoric, dropping his pledge to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants – he may yet pull off an upset. The trouble is he can’t, said Ben Collins on The Daily Beast. Far from being less offensive, his campaign now claims that Clinton suffers from Parkinson’s disease and a brain tumour as a result of a concussion she experienced in 2012. The fact that her doctor has officially stated that she’s in excellent physical condition makes no difference to Trump. The gall of it is astonishing, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post: the guy making the sexist attacks on Clinton’s “stamina” is an overweight 70-year-old who “would be the oldest president ever”, if elected. Don’t take it seriously, said Michelle Goldberg on Slate. All this nonsense proves is that Trump and his minions know he’s doomed, and they’re hoping “for a deus ex machina to save them from a Clinton presidency”.