Last night John Oliver took a little walk through all of the various scandals of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in an effort to contrast and compare their depth and severity.
Needless to say, Trump came out “quantifiably worse” according to the HBO host.
However, Oliver explained, Clinton deserved equal scrutiny in the interest of fairness.
“I do know that even talking about her scandals will irritate some of you, given that her opponent is an unambiguously racist scarecrow stuffed with scrunched-up copies of Jugs magazine, and that’s fair,” Oliver stated. “But not being as bad as Donald Trump is a low bar to clear, and if you focus on nothing but him, you fail to vet a woman who might be president.”
“We’ve spent several frustrating weeks trolling through all the innuendo and exaggerations surrounding Hillary’s email and foundation scandals, and the worst thing we can say is that they both look bad. But the harder you look, the less you actually find,” he maintained. “There’s not nothing there, but what is there is irritating rather than grossly nefarious.”
But when he got to Trump it got really bad.
Yeah, Clinton’s private email server was annoying but she was exonerated of any legal wrongdoing by the FBI and it appears the FBI didn’t even know that those 3 emails marked with (C) weren’t supposed to be due to human error, which means there was only one — ONE — classified email that was marked at the time that Hillary received or sent. That’s a point that Rep Cummings made abundantly clear when he question FBI Director Comey.
Colin Powell used AOL for his personal and work email, and he didn’t save any of them he just closed his account. He figured copies of all his work emails would still be on the state.gov servers which they are, as are the “New” Clinton emails the FBI is releasing soon. Condoleeza Rice’s didn’t use email, but her staff did use personal email accounts and all of them had some information that was deemed classified after the fact, just like Clinton and Powell.
Clinton was also exonerated of any wrongdoing involving Benghazi by a Republican controlled committee. If the system is “rigged” in her favor, exactly why are Republicans like Trey Gowdy and James Comey the ones rigging it for her? How’s that work?
Yes, Bill and Hillary Clinton have made $Millions in paid speeches and book sales. So has George W. Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.
Just about all the allegations claiming “Pay for Play” with the Clinton foundation are essentially bullshit. The Foundation and the Obama Administration had an agreement limiting their foreign donations while she was Secretary of State and no one has proven they directly or deliberately violated that agreement, she wasn’t even on the board of the foundation until 2013, most of the private meetings she had with foundation donors she would have had anyway, and anything they asked from the State Dept they would have probably gotten anyway, many of these issues weren’t all entirely up to Clinton and in about half the cases they didn’t even get anything at all.
In some cases, Band didn’t get what he was after. (Los Angeles entertainment executive Casey Wasserman wanted a U.S. visa for a British soccer player with a criminal record; no dice.) In at least one case, he did – but that was a meeting for the crown prince of Bahrain, a U.S. ally who would have gotten his appointment eventually without the extra help.
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Granted, there’s no evidence that any Clinton Foundation donors got tangible favors in exchange for their generosity. Clinton may have been close to the mark when she said last week, “I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire.”
They even told Bill Clinton and his staff they couldn’t have diplomatic passports on his trip to North Korea to retrieve imprisoned journalists Euna Lee and Lisa Ling (who now works for CNN).
Clinton and her husband Bill haven’t made a dime off their foundation but it’s helped provide life saving medicine to over 11 Million people around the world and positively impacted the lives of 400 Million in 200 countries. They have both promised to leave it — actually Hillary already left the Foundation in 2015 when she announced she was running — and to again limit it’s foreign donations if she’s elected President.
Trump hasn’t put any of his own money into his Foundation in years, he takes money from other people then uses it like a slush fund to pay off debts and legal settlements, bribe politicians, donate to anti-gay right wing churches and buy himself gifts. It’s not even close to the same.
“Bear in mind: we know nothing about Trump’s finances, and that is not good. He’s the first major party nominee since 1980 not to release his tax returns, and his justification is pathetic,” said Oliver, showing a clip of Trump saying he couldn’t release his returns because he’s being audited — which the IRS has disputed saying he’s free to release them at any time. Saying he had barely “scratched the surface” Oliver summed up the preponderance of scandal that dogs the GOP presidential nominee with less than 50 days before the election.
“There is everything, from the ongoing lawsuits against that bullshit university, to the alleged use of undocumented workers when building Trump Tower, to the fact that he received an illegal $3.5 million loan from his father in the form of a purchase of chips from one of Trump’s casinos,” he said.
“The point is this: the campaign has been dominated by scandals, but it is dangerous to think there is an equal number on both sides,” he said before warning, “You can be irritated by some of Hillary’s. That is understandable, but you should be f*cking outraged by Trump’s.”
The ethical implications of Trump’s international business dealings are staggering, and his claim that he’s going to his kids run his business while he’s President is just plain ridiculous. Dick Cheney had been the CEO of Halliburton prior to Iraq War and their contracting with the DoD made them $39 Billion of which he made $13 Million in stock dividends. Cheney, to his credit, signed an agreement to have that money donated to charity.
Trump? Who Knows?
A close examination by Newsweek of the Trump Organization, including confidential interviews with business executives and some of its international partners, reveals an enterprise with deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals, although there is no evidence the Trump Organization has engaged in any illegal activities. It also reveals a web of contractual entanglements that could not be just canceled. If Trump moves into the White House and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.
Trump has hundreds of investments and an estimated debt of $650 Million including money owed to the Bank of China and Goldman Sachs, how could he possibly not know if one of his policy decisions is going to impact that debt or one of his investments? If you think things look bad for the Clinton’s with foreign money going into their foundation Trump business holdings are a fucking ridiculous ethical nightmare.