The Hillary UBS Scandal

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “This is key here, that this occurred at a time when Mrs. Clinton was in the Secretary of State’s office.  That’s what makes this all the more dastardly.  When you enter into public life, you’re supposed to divest yourself of anything that can cause or become a conflict of interest.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  “Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons – The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.”

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The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world . . .

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Mike:  This is key here, that this occurred at a time when Mrs. Clinton was in the Secretary of State’s office.  That’s what makes this all the more dastardly.  When you enter into public life, you’re supposed to divest yourself of anything that can cause or become a conflict of interest.  It’s not to say that no one does it, because there are those that take it very seriously and they do do it.  You would think at the highest levels of power – just imagine if President Bush, who was once a partner / owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, just imagine if President Bush, when he was elected, decided that the was going to still manage some of the affairs of the Texas Rangers.  Imagine the hysteria that would have thrown the media-industrial complex into.  I can.  As a matter of fact, it’s so easy to imagine that I don’t even have to imagine it because it came up.  [mocking] “Are you going to leave all your oil and baseball interests on the side?”  Of course, I believe he had left most of those prior to becoming governor.  You can imagine what would have happened and what would have transpired and how that would have sounded.

Why wouldn’t Mrs. Clinton have been required then – this goes back to the obedience to the unenforceable.  Why would she have to be asked to do these things?  The Clinton line is, the Dumbocrat line, the lib line is that she cares, she just loves those people so much.  She just wants to serve Americans.  If you’re going to duplicate this behavior that was shown in the Secretary of State’s Office, if you’re going to duplicate this and then move it over down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and move it into the White House, ladies and gentlemen, the office of the presidency, whether you like it or I like it or not – and I don’t like it.

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I intend to try and convince my fellow citizens here in Louisiana that we should break away from it, that we should be the free and independent republic conducting our affairs under the flag of the Le Carillon-Sacre-Couer.  You would think that you wouldn’t even have to be asked these things.  If you’re going to be Secretary of State, if you take a job like that, if you take a position – that’s not even a job; that’s a position.  At that point in time, or at that juncture of your career, are you doing this as an occupation or are you doing it as a service?  It’s supposed to be done, we are told, as a service.

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The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. [Mike: This is where it gets unacceptable. The fact that we know about this and nothing was done about it is equally shocking.] “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million.

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Mike:  Let that sink in for a moment.  The Secretary of State of the United States made a deal with a private corporate entity in Switzerland.  After the intervention that prevented it from turning over the names of Americans that were doing business with it, after this intervention, the initiative or the slush fund run by Bubba – this is just shocking.  The fact that it’s not shocking is what’s shocking.  Then in the aftermath, UBS just all of a sudden says: Yeah, we have some money.  Yeah, we’d like to help the Clinton Global Initiative start to fund to help those in the inner city.

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And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

But even that wouldn’t make accepting the $1.5 million excusable. [Mike: In other words, why is the husband of the secretary of state accepting speaking fees that are shady from the beginning but then become even more shady because they come from international mega corporations?]

If you’re Bill Clinton and your wife has recently intervened, in her capacity as a cabinet secretary, to help a giant corporation avert a significant threat to its bottom-line, the very least you could do, if only to avoid the appearance of impropriety, is to avoid negotiating seven-figure paydays with that same corporation.

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Mike:  Folks, this whole thing stinks.  A third grader could figure out this corruption.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  That’s the point.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  As I told Mark earlier, either, A, people are unaware of this and can be excused for being willfully ignorant; B, they know about it but nothing to see here so therefore have no concept of what is ethical and what is not; or C, they know about it, know that it’s a violation of ethics, and don’t care.  They just want to see the first female elected president, even if the female comes in the form of Ursula the sea witch from The Little Mermaid movie.  Is any of this sinking in?

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This is particularly jaw-dropping because ultra-wealthy Bill Clinton has virtually unlimited opportunities to give lucrative speeches to any number of audiences not directly implicated by decisions that his wife made as secretary of state.

But maximizing the Clinton family’s wealth and power requires him to speak before the very wealthiest paymasters. And that’s exactly what the ex-president has done.

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Mike:  In other words, in order to maximize the influence of the Clinton Global Initiative, deals have to be made through the Secretary of State’s Office, and then Bill has to carry them into fruition because Mrs. Clinton can’t while she’s in the employ of the federal government of the United States.  Any of this now sinking in?  And it’s not as though this is new news.  This is actually old news from last year.  As I said, maybe the story was a big story in July of 2015 specifically so it would not be a big story in July of 2016.  Get it?

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As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions—including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs—have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation—the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

One needn’t believe that there’s ever been any quid pro quo to see that this matters.

“Any suggestions that Hillary Clinton was driven by anything but what’s in America’s best interest would be false. Period,” a campaign spokesman told The Guardian. Oh, come on. Clinton may well have thought that intervening on behalf of UBS was good for the U.S. There are reports that the Swiss helped our government in various ways in exchange for shielding the bank from a worst-case scenario.

But this campaign flak cannot possibly know––or expect us to take on faith––that Clinton was not at all influenced by knowledge that acting to benefit the bank could mean seven figures for her family and more for their foundation, whereas advocating against the bank would more than likely eliminate the chance of either. Any normal person would be influenced, if only in spite of themselves, unless they resolved from the beginning that having made a decision in government that directly affected a corporation, they’d never take money from it later even if it offered.

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It is a discredit to Bill and Hillary Clinton that they behave as if they believe otherwise.

Why are they indulged in doing so?

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Mike:  I won’t bore you with the rest of what Conor Friedersdorf, who is not a “conservative” wrote about this but I will – here’s his conclusion:

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Even Democrats who aren’t concerned about the agenda of Big Finance ought to ask themselves if America is best served by a president and first spouse who care so little about preserving the confidence that the public can reasonably have in the integrity of their actions. They are far from the only members of our elite who’ve put a payday ahead of the common good, but it’s hard to think of a more flagrant example.

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End Mike Church Show Transcript