Now this is proper grifting.
Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The Clintons raided government money to set up a fake non-profit to solicit money for a future presidential campaigns. They really missed their calling as mob accountants. This is really brilliant. One can almost imagine what they would do if they got their hands on the national budget one more time.
The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”
The Clintons did not have this problem.
But that didn't stop them from drawing mountains of money out.
The analysis also found that Clinton’s representatives, between 2001, when the Clintons left the White House, and the end of this year, had requested allocations under the Act totaling $16 million. That’s more than any of the other living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush — requested during that span.
Because none of them were plotting to get back in the White House.
The program supplemented the income of Clinton’s staff, while providing them with coveted federal government benefits, alleviating the need for the Clinton Foundation or other Clinton-linked entities to foot the bill for such benefits. Similarly, Clinton aides got the GSA to pay for computer technology used partly by the foundation.
An analysis of the records provided by GSA, combined with Clinton Foundation tax returns, found that at least 13 of the 22 staffers who have been paid by GSA to work for Clinton’s personal office also worked for the Clinton Foundation.
And then Hillary began having them draw salaries from State even as they were really working for her.
The aide added “there is no legal prohibition that would preclude the former president’s staff from receiving compensation from other sources or doing personal work for the former presidents. We are unaware of any legal prohibition that would preclude these activities.”
There's no legal controlling authority. This is the Clinton defense for everything. Sure there's smoke, but you can't prove we knowingly started the fire.
But using the GSA records, POLITICO pieced together a list of Clinton loyalists who at various times have had their earnings supplemented by federal payments of about $10,000-a-year using funds from the Former Presidents Act.
The list reads like a field guide to Clinton World.
It includes longtime Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper, who despite not having a security clearance, any apparent training in cybersecurity or a job at the State Department, in early 2009 helped set up the private email account that Hillary Clinton would use to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. Her use of that system has been dubbed “extremely careless” by the FBI director. Cooper continued working to maintain Clinton’s private email system — including advising her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, on attempted hacks — through at least 2012, according to emails released by the State Department.
So taxpayers funded Hillary Clinton's efforts to evade taxpayer oversight. This is the Clintons in a nutshell.