All of a sudden, the Clinton Foundation's not drawing the revenue it used to draw.

And the difference is staggering.  

According to Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton:

When one of the most recognizable nonprofits in the world loses 75% of its contributions over a four-year period, there are typically investigatory reports written into what has gone wrong. That isn't the case with the Clinton Foundation. The Foundation received $62.9 million in 2016 but only $16.3 million in 2020, and very few people seem to have notice[d].

That is because most Beltway insiders know the Clinton Foundation's primary purpose: to serve as a platform for Hillary Clinton's political operation while lining the Clintons' pockets by trading influence for money. That is why donations spiked when Hillary was secretary of state and most of the world thought she was destined to become president — and why they cratered after she lost.

How the Ozymandias has fallen. And more to the point, this pretty well leaves the purpose of the operation butt-naked.

It's always been a political influence-peddling operation.  As Fitton notes, donations spiked when Hillary Clinton was riding high on the hog as President Obama's secretary of state.  After she left office and lost the 2016 presidency to Donald J. Trump, she got "defunded," big.  Trump cost the harridan a lot of baksheesh she had been counting on.  Issues & Insights has an excellent chart here demonstrating the trajectory along with a good editorial to go with it.

The Foundation, laughably enough, attributed the drop-off in donations to the pandemic.  Fitton shot that down with this:

This argument doesn't explain the tens of millions the Foundation lost between 2016 and 2019 and ignores that charitable giving was up by 5.1% in America last year.

Axios actually seemed to buy into the baloney in its original report, rather than roll around on the floor laughing as consummate Washington insiders would do.  Their report was here.

What's interesting to me is who the dead-enders were, who the donors were who just kept donating to the obviously sham foundation even as there was absolutely no reason to do so. 

According to Axios:

Some large donors of prior years continued giving in 2020, including the government of Norway; the Walton family, founders of Walmart; and longtime Clinton supporters Haim and Cheryl Saban, according to disclosures on the foundation's website.

One wonders what they were buying, given that Hillary Clinton seems to have lost influence in the Democrat party.  Maybe they needed the tax break?  On the other hand, with such donations coming in, albeit on a much lower level — maybe she hasn't lost influence.

I dug around to get a more complete list but did not see anything on the link that Axios posted.  It may be that I need to click more links, but I think I got them all.

I did find this one, though, below, which is pretty interesting: a list of all the big-dollar speeches the Clintons — Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea — gave on behalf of the Foundation, along with the dollar-amount range they got from these money-for-nothing speeches.  Bill's speeches are marked with a hashtag, Hillary's are marked with a plus, and Chelsea's are marked with a caret.  

It's a doozy.  Huge cash for speeches is a well known vehicle for disguised bribery, which among the Clinton set seems to be still going on.

Here's a screen grab from just a segment of that list, and not the biggest in dollar terms:

Excuse me — did I just read the word "Xinjiang"?  Bubba Clinton is out collecting paychecks from the people who recrudesced the idea of concentration camps and slave labor?  Even actor George Clooney turned such money down, from what he said was a human rights–violating hellhole with a lot of money to fling around which could have been China, though there are other candidates.  They wanted him to do an airline ad for $23 million, and Clooney said he turned them down and walked away contented.  Say what you will about Clooney's politics, but if the story he is telling is true, and I think it is, he made the ethical man's decision.

Not so with the Clintons...

Xinjiang is far from the only red flag on that small segment of big-dollar speech payers.

What about "Global Artist Co., Ltd." which somehow couldn't get enough of Bill with those four big dollar speeches?  Who the hell is that?  Seriously, I Googled, and not even Google knows.  I didn't come up blank on that properly quoted string — I got a slew of irrelevant results, as if someone had manipulated the system.  I did find one indicator — a Korean K-Pop promoter here in a seriously buried reference.  There are a lot of Korean names on that Clinton list, so it may be the right group.  One of the K-Pop groups this group promotes sings a song called "Billionaire," so it sounds like Clinton family values.  But what on Earth was this no-name group buying for that $200,000 to $400,000 they shelled out to that Clinton foundation?  That remains a mystery.

What it tells us is that some kind of game is still going on among the Clintons.

Nevertheless, the overall fall has been steep.  The Clintons were always just a cash-corruption operation, weren't they?

Image: Steve F-E-Cameron (Merlin, U.K.) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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