Favors to Foundation donors date back to Hillary's

Posted: Jun 11, 2015

Hillary began helping Bill's fat cats in the US Senate. Earmarks and legislative action benefited Clinton Foundation benefactors. Then Sen-Clinton’s efforts to provide favors to major donors......and to advance her own political ambitions.....stretch back far earlier than the avalanche of news reports about her tenure as America’s top diplomat at the US State Dept. Records show her efforts date back to the time she served as a US senator. She used US govt power to earmark federal funds and influence legislation for donors. Mrs. Clinton introduced a bill when she was New York’s junior senator that allowed a donor to the Clinton Foundation to use tax-exempt bonds to build a shopping center in Syracuse, New York, public records show. She also went to bat for Freddie Mac, working to defeat legislation that would have subjected the mortgage giant to tougher regulations before the housing bubble burst and led to a major recession. That same year, Freddie Mac donated $50,000 to $100,000 to her husband’s charity, originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation. Then-Sen Clinton also used her leverage to help persuade the Chinese government to reduce tariffs on Corning Inc.’s fiber optic products. The central New York company’s employees and executives contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns and political action committee. Analysts on political money have said the pattern of Mrs. Clinton’s intervention on behalf of donors to her husband’s charity raise troubling ethical questions. "It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group, told the New York Post in April after conflict-of-interest reports started surfacing between the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s political work. Washington Times ;