Hillary announces, Republicans roll out their platform: ATTACK HRC, ATTACK HRC ATTACK HRC....

[Bill USA]

Last edited Wed Jan 27, 2016, 06:26 PM - Edit history (1)

The GOP attacks on Hillary Clinton's family foundation are bogus and bizarre

Hillary Clinton has been in the national eye for almost a quarter of a century. Over that time, seemingly every aspect of Clintonland has been picked over by the national media and the Clintons' conservative opponents. So it's understandable that as Clinton embarks on a second run for president, the Republicans who hope to defeat her next year are looking for some fresh material.

The recent email kerfuffle — as secretary of State, Clinton used a personal email address hosted on a server located at her New York residence, an unusual arrangement to be sure — seems to be fertile ground (though perhaps slightly less fecund if you are/were a governor who doesn't want to release all of your own official emails). There has also been a flurry of criticism over the Clinton Foundation's acceptance of funds from a handful of foreign governments when Clinton was secretary of State and married to the foundation's founder. There were more donations from foreign governments after Clinton resigned from the Obama administration and joined the newly branded Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Foundation funding was the line of attack pursued by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday. "Hillary Clinton has taken money from countries that rape victims are publicly lashed," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "I would expect Hillary Clinton, if she believes in women's rights, she should be calling for a boycott of Saudi Arabia. Instead, she's accepting tens of millions of dollars." Paul went on to call that "a grand hypocrisy."

Paul isn't the first Republican to criticize Clinton for serving on the board (until Sunday) of a family charity that accepted millions of dollars from countries with poor records on women's rights — though most Republicans haven't gone so far as to call for "voluntarily boycotting" America's closest Arab ally. Carly Fiorina, the HP CEO turned Republican politician, made a similar point at CPAC, and the Republican National Committee released a video criticizing the Clinton Foundation's donations from foreign governments.

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The Clinton Foundation has $226 million in assets, and it uses them on an array of health, economic development, and women's issues around the world. It has to get that money from somewhere, and as Hillary Clinton pointed out recently, if the Saudis, UAE, and other countries with poor women's rights records are directly or indirectly bankrolling programs aimed at empowering women and girls, that's their choice: "I think that people who want to support the foundation know full well what it is we stand for and what we're working on," Clinton says.
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