Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s new book, Clinton Cash, calls into question and makes bombshell allegations about the financial practices of the Clinton Foundation. This article was originally published by the Economist:
IN AMERICAN public life, surprising angst is generated by the task of finding private jets for political bigwigs to borrow. The chore is easy when a big corporation makes a plane available. Some billionaires relish flying political chums around, which is even handier. But sometimes, when all else fails, flights end up being cadged from frankly unsavoury jet-owners. This does not matter much once a political leader has left office and hit the global-grandee circuit—a lucrative world of paid speeches, charity work and discreet consulting gigs. But it does if a politician still has campaigns left to run.
The private-jet conundrum sheds light on a challenge facing Hillary Clinton. Her husband Bill long ago passed through what might be termed the “money door”, cashing in his celebrity, eloquence and connections to become a rich man. Fair enough; he is a private citizen and a brilliant speaker. Unlike the Brits, who treat Tony Blair as a pariah these days, Americans do not necessarily think it outrageous that a former head of government should become rich. Mr Clinton’s allies add that personal wealth holds little interest for him. Given a pile of money, he might buy an expensive watch but that is about it, admirers maintain.
His wife’s relationship with big money is more complicated. Mrs Clinton is described—to put it politely—as intently focused on her family’s financial security. She, too, has given lots of speeches for six-figure sums. But unlike Bill, she is now attempting something hard: to reverse her passage through the money door, quit the life of the global grandee and reinvent herself as a tribune of the people. Instead of jetting to Iowa to start her campaign, she trundled from New York in a van. Even her friends thought this an unconvincing show of solidarity with the working stiff. Barack Obama joked that the economy had got so bad for some people that: “I have one friend, just a few weeks ago, she was making millions of dollars a year, and now she’s living out of a van in Iowa.”
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