Willie Brown: ‘Clinton Cash’ Could Be ‘Fatal’ to Hillary

On Saturday, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who warned in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 6 that Hilary Clinton’s early announcement of her 2016 presidential candidacy invited danger, posted another article in which he noted that his warnings had proven accurate because of the Clinton Cash scandal, which he called potentially “fatal.”

Brown wrote:

My prediction that Hillary Rodham Clinton was inviting nothing but trouble by announcing early that she’s running for president is starting to come true. Stories are popping up left and right about the millions of dollars from foreign powers that went to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. This has the potential of being a bigger liability than the e-mail affair or Benghazi because taking money from a foreign government when you hold a Cabinet job is a potential conflict of interest that everyone can grasp.

Brown did not mince words about how much the scandal could cripple a Clinton candidacy, writing, “It could even be fatal to Clinton’s candidacy, if it balloons into an ongoing story and the Republicans open a congressional investigation.”

After advising Clinton to come clean with a reckoning of “every dime that came into the foundation and every dime that went out, along with as many photos as she can find of the foundation’s work in Haiti and Africa,” Brown warned again, “If she can make the Clinton Foundation look like the Red Cross, she can survive this. If she can’t, look out below.”

Brown has been moving away from Clinton’s candidacy for months. After the beating the Democrats took in last November’s elections, he penned a column in the Chronicle in which he predicted that Clinton “is going to lose” in 2016 “[u]nless there are some serious readjustments to the Democratic operation,” adding, “Hillary Rodham Clinton must be wondering whether she really wants to run for president. Unless there are some serious readjustments to the Democratic operation, she is going to lose.”

As late as July 2013, Brown was ebullient over Clinton’s 2016 chances, asserting, “…[A]ll she has to do is continue to breath[e] and in 2016 she’ll be elected to the presidency of the United States.”