IBT: Hillary's tight with the same banks she's slamming, you know

Actually, we do know, but it’s interesting to see David Sirota and Andrew Perez at International Business Times jump on this as well. Hillary Clinton ramped up the populist rhetoric by slamming the Obama administration over its failure to prosecute banks that conduct corrupt and other “criminal behavior,” specifically slamming HSBC:

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Stories of misconduct by individuals and institutions in the financial industry are shocking. HSBC allowing drug cartels to launder money, five major banks pleading guilty to felony charges for conspiring to manipulate currency exchange and interest rates? There can be no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior.

As I noted at the time, Hillary and Bill Clinton not only tolerated it, they profited off of it, long after it was known that HSBC had been involved in money-laundering schemes:

One potential reason that HSBC didn’t get punished too severely may be because of its political connections — something that the Clintons know all about. As the pro-GOP America Rising PAC quickly pointed out in a blast e-mail, HSBC is a major Clinton Foundation donor, noted as corporate partners in several foundation projects. HSBC also put $200,000 into the Clintons’ pockets in 2011, the year after the US began its second probe of HSBC’s involvement in money laundering.

Today, Sirota and Perez find a lot more connections between Hillary, her foundation, and the banks.  It’s not just HSBC, but a whole raft of the world’s largest institutions:

But in 2014, two years after HSBC admitted to major violations of U.S. laws, the firm was the top sponsor at a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) event, paying at least $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Earlier, in 2011, HSBC paid former President Bill Clinton $200,000 for a speech he gave in Florida.

The HSBC relationship — taking money from a bank after the firm admitted wrongdoing — was not unique. In 2009, UBS avoided prosecution by the Justice Department when it agreed to pay a $780 million fine and admitted to defrauding the United States by allowing American citizens to hide income from the IRS. The Swiss bank has since entered into two more agreements with the Justice Department — one for rigging the municipal bond market and the other for manipulating global interest rates. UBS has paid former President Bill Clinton more than $1.5 million for speeches since 2009, and the firm has given more than $550,000 to the family’s foundation.

In 2010, the British banking firm Barclays entered into a settlement agreement with the Justice Department, and admitted to violating U.S. sanctions by making transactions for customers in countries such as Libya, Sudan and Myanmar. Weeks later, Barclays was a sponsor at the annual CGI event. Barclays has remained a CGI sponsor in the years since, even after the bank paid more fines under a new agreement with the Justice Department for manipulating worldwide interest rates. Barclays has paid the Clinton family $650,000 for speeches since 2009. The firm has given at least $1.5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

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Sirota and Perez list nine banks that have entered into the kinds of settlements with the Department of Justice that Hillary finds so distasteful. The speaking fees alone, paid to the Clintons personally, from these nine banks comes to almost $4 million ($3,965,500). That’s not far from the $5.025 million that these banks have poured into the Clinton Foundation’s coffers.

If the DoJ’s settlements ignored corruption and “criminal behavior,” as Hillary alleges, then why did Hillary and Bill partner with eight of the nine banks in their family foundation?  And if they should be prosecuted for those criminal actions and would be by a Hillary Clinton administration, shouldn’t the Clintons return the $4 million they received from these banks personally? Or does Hillary believe that she and Bill should personally profit from their corruption, while insisting that she’s the one person who will hold these banks accountable for whatever crimes she claims to know they’ve committed?

This is sharp investigative work by Sirota and Perez. Will the rest of the media start demanding answers from Hillary on these connections to banks she’s already accused of corruption and criminal behavior? Or will they be more interested in the next Taylor Swift concert?

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