This is like Bernie Madoff attacking someone over dubious investments, and it’s not the first time she’s done it this month. She operates a charity that sells influence with the Clintons to wealthy special interests, including and especially foreign governments. Remember the infamous Uranium One deal that saw Russian entities take control of 20 percent of America’s domestic uranium supply? Coincidentally, the owners of those uranium interests poured millions into the Clinton Foundation and made many millions more themselves on the sale once Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved it. The Foundation has also made big bucks from Saudi Arabia, whose views of women are antithetical to everything Hillary Clinton and the United States claim they stand for. Political candidates are barred by law from accepting money from foreign governments but charities they’ve created conveniently aren’t, providing a nice legal workaround for cretins like the Saudis to buy favors from the likely next president. Maybe it’s the comparatively small scale of Trump’s foreign palm-greasing that irritates her. Pros like her know how to play this game at a higher level, with no legal implications.

Here’s the Newsweek story she’s talking about, alleging that Trump’s company spent at least $68,000 trying to drum up business in Cuba in 1998 at a time when the Cuban embargo barred trade there. If you find it odd that the Democratic nominee is rapping a Republican for violating the embargo, well, that is odd. Her party has been anti-embargo for ages; the guy in the White House whom she used to work for went to Cuba earlier this year and vowed that the embargo would end. American public opinion has turned against the policy too. So why scold Trump over it? The answer, I assume, is that Clinton thinks the news about him flouting the embargo in 1998 will damage Trump among Castro-hating Republican-leaning Cuban-Americans in Florida. Florida is the tightest race in the country this year, as usual. Convincing a few thousand Cuban-Americans who were planning to vote Trump to stay home instead could make the difference for her nationally. It’s also a superb wedge to use against Trump and anti-Castro hawk Marco Rubio, who pronounced himself “deeply concerned” over the Newsweek story today. Pitting Trump against Florida’s Cuban-American senator on an issue that voters there pay attention to is a shrewd way to keep the story going. I’m surprised Rubio didn’t dodge it by saying it’s “old business” or whatever instead.

Clinton on Trump and Cuba: Trump "put his personal and business interests ahead of the laws & the values" of the US https://t.co/SvD2tc8z4r

— CNN (@CNN) September 29, 2016