When you put together all the revelations about the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates that have cascaded our way (and continue to arrive), one explanation makes sense.  It was a money-laundering scheme designed to obtain and camouflage foreign money paid to the Clintons to curry favor, including favorable treatment by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Sean David of The Federalist makes the case:

The scheme works like this: collect millions of dollars in foreign money, dump it into a foreign charity, pretend that the law prohibits you from ever disclosing the identities of those foreign donors to the foreign charity, then have the foreign charity bundle all the cash and send it to the Clinton Foundation. Then, when the time comes–whether it be a Clinton Foundation conference or a lavish Clinton Foundation trip overseas–make sure those individuals get some me-time with the Clintons.

As The Federalist detailed earlier this week, the Clinton Foundation spun off the bulk of its charitable medical activities back in 2010. By 2013, the main Clinton Foundation entity — the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation — housed only a handful of charitable initiatives, the largest of which existed solely to serve the Clintons, via their conference series and the Clinton presidential library, rather than truly charitable causes. In 2013, for example, the Clinton Foundation spent less than 10 percent of its budget on charitable grants.

The foreign-to-domestic laundering scheme satisfies a number of key Clinton objectives. First, it gave Secretary of State Hillary Clinton total plausible deniability about the millions in foreign cash that were being funneled into her family’s non-profit coffers. She wasn’t on the board of CGEPartnership, and wasn’t even named to the board of the Clinton Foundation until 2013, so how could she have known about this? Second, it gave Hillary’s allies the ability to claim that wealthy foreign individuals were not sending cash to the Clinton Foundation.

How? Because they were sending cash to the Canadian CGEPartnership. And while Bill Clinton’s name is obviously in the organization’s name, he never actually served on its board while Hillary was Secretary of State. Instead, Clinton retained control of the organization by placing Bruce Lindsey on CGEPartnership’s board. Lindsey, a long-time Clinton confidant and adviser, currently serves as the chairman of the board of the Clinton Foundation. He was also the Clinton Foundation’s CEO for over a decade.

If you look holistically at the entire scheme’s setup, at the massive flow of foreign cash, at the refusal to disclose donors, at the secret (and now destroyed) private e-mail servers, at the blatantly bogus excuses, at the falsified tax returns, everything about it suddenly makes a lot more sense.

From soup to nuts, the entire operation was constructed in order to provide a facade of plausible deniability for Hillary Clinton.

If the standard to be applied to understanding all of this is evidence sufficient to convict in court, then, thanks in no small part to the destruction of evidence, it might be (or might not be, considering the criminal conviction of Bob McDonell) difficult to close the case.  But if the standard is one of whom the American voters will honor with our highest office, then the facts are persuasive.