Did you know former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, like the Clinton family, also has a charity? Probably not, because nobody has ever given a damn.
So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.
Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters.
(Side note: I know I'm getting old because I seem to be only one of a handful of people in America who still remember Enron, and why Enron was bad, and who continues to be concerned about the flaws in the American economic model that encouraged what was essentially nothing more than a taxpayer-targeting grift that would foretell the scams that led to the great recession itself; a new Wall Street model that would show contempt for producing things when all the smart top-floor money could be had in making bets about bets about collections of other bets about companies that actually did. But I digress.)
What makes all the talk of Clinton Foundation "scandals" so maddeningly familiar is that for every serious, non-fraudulent story written so far, nobody has ever been able to find a "there" there. Was there any wrongdoing whatsoever? Nobody can find any. Is the Foundation a legitimate charity doing key, worldwide charitable work? Nobody disputes it. Are they good at what they do? Charity watchers say yes. We are nonetheless chained to a news game of Telephone, in which small snippets of fact are rolled and molded into stories that can never produce any actual scandal, but which we are repeatedly told might look bad if you considered only a few snippets here and discounted all the other snippets over there, repeat, and so on.
And it would not be so risible, were it not for The Drudge Effect.
It’s a pattern, very long established, of a right-wing muckraker latching on to a half-story, peddling it through mistruths, marketing it to "serious" reporters as a pre-written story that needs no further thought or legwork, upon which it gets written up as such, upon which the same Republican figures in the House and Senate latch onto the story—which they always appear to know was coming—and wave it around for the television cameras, upon which the rest of the national press scurries to come up with their own stories and punditry and Very Hot Takes, because after all now Rep. SoAndSo is all in a huff about it and it is big news, upon which the story balloons and a whole lot of innocent people who never did anything remotely like the frothing opportunistic stains on humanity have been shrieking about lose their jobs or have their organizing efforts shut down or get summoned into partisan congressional slap-fight hearings over how terrible they must be, all because (and stop me if you've heard this one before) nobody has been able to find a goddamn thing wrong with any of it but it sure looks bad.
A recent example would be Clinton Cash, a poorly-sourced, crap-filled "book" that was dangled in front of the press for a few easy scoops, scoops a certain prestigious news outlet eagerly hugged tight until the book itself was actually produced and proved to be an incoherent smear effort. A more apropos example still would be the ridiculous edited tapes meant to show Planned Parenthood was engaged in all sorts of nefarious acts (they were not, but the accusations resulted in murders, to absolutely no effect on the peddlers), or, especially, ACORN.
ACORN was a group advocating for the poor. They registered voters—poor and minority voters, which is why they were targeted by Republicans in the first place, since poor and minority voters are considered naturally suspicious. After ACORN was swindled by a handful of paid voter registration-seekers who thought they would save themselves the trouble of walking around and just fill out registrations themselves, using fake names because surely they could cash their paychecks before anyone found out—a scam which, it should be said, has targeted Republican campaigns as well over the years—Republicans were insistent that it showed ACORN was malevolent. Serious Republican John McCain even said so, it being an election year and John McCain in the middle of running for something, and the press went along.
But it was not until opponents of ACORN turned from insinuation to outright fraud that they finally got what they wanted. Think about that, and keep that in mind, because it is important. It wasn't the he-said, she-said cycle of the usual easy-to-write news cycle that killed an organization doing good work for Americans needing that good work done. It was the national embrace of an outright fraud.
Conspicuously, that fraud was led by the same collection of conservative "activists" that have continued to fuel fraudulent stories ever since, with the patronage of the crooked site whose head now coincidentally runs the Donald Trump presidential campaign. The activists staged a recorded meeting between themselves and ACORN premised on the notion that well, ACORN must be helping pimps and hookers; when the footage did not show it, they edited the footage to make it look like it did. ACORN did not; the employees not only did not do what they were accused of, but had contacted police and otherwise done all the right things, none of which made a damn bit of difference to conservative politicians who still insisted the fake tape was real, or to the conservative outlets that promoted it even after it was proven false, or even after investigations proved the accusations fraudulent, or after employees sued the conservative activists who faked the interactions and won some money back for being fraudulently depicted as criminals when they provably did no such thing. The falsified and quickly debunked story was enough to make the story a "controversy" to conservatives; the "controversy" was elevated by supposedly more dignified conservative media figures and, especially, conservative politicians eager to delegitimize the black president and anyone seen as assisting in his election. The mere fact that sitting congressmen were saying patently fraudulent things counted as news, and away we went. Again.
By the end of the whole affair conservatives were convinced that ACORN was a secret army of black men working for Barack Obama, and there is no medication that can cure such a belief. It was gospel, and it became gospel because a national press looking for scandals to write about willingly went along with one it knew was false. It didn't speak up. It didn't push back. It helped, because the "scandal" was news, and it was news solely because important Republicans could be continually quoted in televised interviews insisting that it was. ACORN was defunded, because enough legislators claimed to believe the fraudulent story to do it. ACORN was stripped of legitimacy, because a pale white muckraker seeking to prove the inherent illegitimacy of helping low-income voters vote dressed like a 1970s movie pimp on a network dedicated to partisan manipulation of the news and proudly presented: Fake. News.
America does not have the equivalent of a dunce cap to put on these people during their public appearances. We get extremely vexed over the thought that, on a chyron somewhere, a news organization might point out that someone elected to high office, or their underlings, or their mere hangers-on, is demonstrably and conclusively lying. The thing must be a legitimate thing to say, because here is a supposedly legitimate person saying it. We have to leave it at that. Now here is a commercial for tires.
This is the America that led, inexorably, to Donald Trump's campaign. The precise collection of activists that made their name peddling an unending stream of fraudulent stories became not just the base, but the leaders of a campaign premised on repeating those same conspiracies. Donald Trump voters believe the sitting president of the United States is probably a Kenyan citizen—based on no non-fraudulent evidence whatsoever. They believe he is a Muslim, because a grainy picture of a ring on his finger—a ring well-pictured elsewhere, but never mind that—might have Muslimy markings on it if you squint very hard and have a tendency to see Muslimy markings on things. They believe Mexican cartels are beheading Americans in the Texas desert, because they heard it from someone prominent who heard it from some other unspecified place. They believe a monument to 9/11 was a secret arrow to Mecca, because that is the sort of thing landscape designers are always looking to do. They believe ISIS is working with Mexicans, and both are plotting to weaponize Ebola, and the sole evidence for that one is that some twit decided, Alex Jones-style, that any random three things he was afraid of must of necessity be In On It Together.
They believe all the stupidest things that stupid but bigoted people require themselves to believe, every last one of them revolving around the poor, or minorities, or a religion other than their own. To have an entire party and candidacy now revolve around their nonsensical ravings is, to them, evidence that whatever the stupidest among them might claim is probably right, so long as you can get it in the papers.
Why shouldn't they think so? Why should partisans believe the sitting president is not a secret Muslim, if it suits them to say he is? Will they be discredited for believing a lie, or will their advocates be invited onto the very next program to repeat it? If Donald Trump says the government of Mexico is intentionally "sending us their rapists," is that now to be taken as a given? Will there be think pieces examining it as a serious, plausible possibility? Will we be setting our foreign policy up as if it were true, because by golly some fellow once imagined it out loud?
This is the toxic environment in which the Clinton Foundation story slithered out. Conservative websites scream conspiratorial things; Republican politicians seeking to demonize their opponent during an election year wave blank papers in the air and fret about the conspiratorial things; news outlets decide they need to address the conspiratorial thing and so produce thinly or anonymously sourced half-stories demonstrating absolutely none of those conspiratorial things, but obligingly repeating that well, golly, these conspiratorial things are sure being said loudly. Before the Clinton Foundation, it was emails. Before the emails, it was Planned Parenthood. Before that, ACORN. Before that, Vince Foster. And the pattern, every damn time, is the same.
Fake story pushed by partisan hacks with no evidence—or fabricated evidence.
Fake story embraced by conservative politicians as if it were true.
National press picks up story because conservatives demand it be spoken of.
National press amplifies sensationalistic fake claims for months on end, even long, long after journalists not scheduled for interviews on the Sunday shows point out that the claims are vaporous at best, crooked at worst.
Everybody gets a nice pile of easy-to-analyze everyone else is talking about this content, pundits get to pundit, hemmers get to hem and hawers get to haw—and a large percentage of America comes away from their papers and the evening news believing a patently fraudulent thing.
It is not just common. It is, quite literally, Scandal by Script. Only the enemy of the moment need be filled in; all the rest of it takes place in precisely the same way, with the same small set of actors in the same small set of roles, each and every time. Name a pundit wagging about the Clinton Foundation—you can most assuredly find a past column wagging about each one of the previous scandals in similar fretting terms. Go through the website archives for the most fervent promoters of the “scandal.” What else comes up? Rewatch the Sunday shows on those past scandals, and take note of the names that appear. And the things they demand. And what advantage they might seek by demanding it.
The Clinton Foundation, like ACORN, does vitally important work for people in need. If those people receive less help in the future only because men with lofty career goals but cheap ideas believe they can glean a few more dollars from their mailing lists for demonizing it, it will be yet another sin. If any journalist is able to come forward with actual evidence of actual wrongdoing deserving of the current artificially manufactured hype, by all means that person should come forward. All the rest of it has been garbage. All the rest of it has just been the precise same scandal-by-script.