Clinton Cash: How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich

Peter Schweizer, “Clinton Cash: How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,”  Harper, 2015, 407 pp.

When Harry Truman left the White House he drove himself and his wife to his home in Kansas City.  Furthermore, he refused to use his prominence as an ex-President to serve on corporate boards or give highly compensated speeches.  Gone are those days—the pendulum has swung until the combination of an ex-President with a wife as a senator and then as secretary of state has yielded a true bonanza.  Hillary claims they were dead broke when leaving the White House—but, shortly after she could tell Toto this, ain’t no longer Harry Truman’s Kansas.

The problem with this book is it has an overriding agenda to discredit Hillary.  Yet, it generally sticks to the truth—but, not always:  Several weeks after the book's initial publication, HarperCollins and the author made several corrections to the Kindle edition of the book. Schweizer corrected "seven or eight" passages that were revealed to be inaccurate after the book was released.  FactCheck.org found Schweizer's assertion that Clinton, as Secretary of State, could have stopped Russia from buying a company with extensive uranium mining operations in the U.S. to be false.  PolitiFact found the assertion that Clinton changed her views on a nuclear deal with India in response to donations to her family's foundation to be false.

But Foreign governments did play a large role in the burgeoning finances of Bill after he left the White House; his huge speaking fees from foreign governments especially helped fund the Clinton Foundation as well as their personal wealth. 

The book has eleven chapters. Some chapters focus on particular transactions or deals, such as the creation of UrAsia Energy and Uranium One in Kazakhstan, and the connection shareholders had and have to the Clintons. Other chapters focus on a broader set of relationships, particularly with regard to Bill Clinton’s paid speeches during the years Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, and whether those paying for his speeches had significant business before the State Department. Schweizer dubs the Clintons' blend of government service and private remuneration the “Clinton blur.”

Clinton Cash began at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. In its first week it sold 31,000 copies and was also second on the Nielsen BookScan ranking for adult nonfiction. The book stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover non-fiction for five weeks.  I believe this book and the resulting media hype (few people actually read books nowadays) it generated effected the election.  A later paperback edition of the book released in 2016 made the relevant Times best seller list as well. According to Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the book sold approximately 200,000 copies, in hardcover and paperback as of July 2016.

Writing for The Washington Post, academic and political, Lawrence Lessig wrote "On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption." James Freeman reviewed the book for The Wall Street Journal, writing that "Almost every page of the fascinating Clinton Cash... will be excruciating reading for partisans on both sides of the aisle".

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  While there is still debate on how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions from citizens, there is near-universal agreement that the contributions should be exclusively by citizens.  For this reason, it has long been illegal for foreigners to contribute to US political campaigns and in 2012 the Supreme Court decided 9-0 that the law is constitutional and eminently reasonable.  Nevertheless, the Clintons often take money from foreign entities.  And that money, donated to the Clinton Foundation or paid in speaking fees, comes in amounts much larger than any campaign contribution.  As a result, the Clintons have become exceedingly wealthy.

Pg. 3:  Author Peter Schweizer in his 2011 book, Throw Them All Out, investigated stock trades by members of Congress.  He looked at both parties comparing their stock trades and their official activities, such as voting on certain bills.  He discovered that politicians from both parties had curious patterns in their stock picks often buying and selling at opportune times.  Although his findings did not prove criminal activity, it did result in the passing of the 2012 STOCK Act, which was designed to outlaw congressional insider trading.

Pg. 6:  Hillary famously noted that the Clinton’s were ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House in 2001.  Although the claim was immediately challenged as a gross exaggeration, their means were modest compared to those of other politicians, such as George W. Bush, whose net worth is $20 million, or John Kerry, whose net worth is well over $100 million.  In any event, the confirmed income of the Clintons’ between 2001 and 2012 was at least $136.5 million, according to the Washington Post.  Some of this income comes from book deals.  But the greater part of it comes from Bill’s speechmaking.  Bill has been paid an annual average of over $8 million for giving speeches around the world.  The fees he collects are enormous and unprecedented, sometimes as much as $500,000 or even $750,000 per speech. 

Pg. 9:  During Clinton’s final day in office, he pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, an oil trader and financier who had been indicted on numerous charges by US prosecutors and fled the country.  Rich had business ties with Castro, Qaddafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini (Rich had treaded oil with the ayatollah in violation of US law while Iran held American hostages).  He owed $48 million in back taxes and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The pardon came to Rich after his ex-wife, Denise Rich, donated $100,000 to Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and $1 million to the Democratic Party.  (Don’t forget how in 1994 Hillary turned $1,000 into $100,000 in futures)

Pg. 60:  The nonproliferation treaty (NPT) entered into force in 1970 and recognized five countries as nuclear powers: the US, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China.  If a country signed the treaty, it would be given the benefit of access to peaceful nuclear technology.  

Pg. 80:  The Clinton Foundation is not your traditional charity.  A traditional charity doesn’t have a globe-trotting ex-president, an ex-secretary of state, and their daughter running the show.  The real problem is delineating where the Clinton political machine and moneymaking ventures end and where their charity begins.  While the causes the Foundation promotes are commendable, such as alleviating AIDS suffering, preventing obesity, and promoting economic growth in the developing world, the moral authority of these works seems to provide a screen and pretext for a storehouse of private profit and promotion.

Pg. 106:  The really troubling thing about Bill’s speeches is the apparent correlation between his fees and Hillary’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state.  Bill’s three best years securing speaking fees over $250,000 occurred while Hillary was at State.  In fact of the thirteen Clinton speeches that fetched $500,000 or more, only two occurred during the years his wife was not secretary of state.

Pg. 163: What happened in Haiti following the 2010 devastating earthquake was the Classic Clinton Blur, mixing philanthropy, politics, and business.