Bill and Hillary’s Multi-Million Dollar Shell Game

“The newly released financial files on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s growing fortune omit a company with no apparent employees or assets that the former president has legally used to provide consulting and other services, but which demonstrates the complexity of the family’s finances,” notes the Associated Press.

Really, AP? Running a shell company to hide their shadowy millions merely illustrates the “complexity” of Clinton finances? That’s actually the title of the post, unless growing ridicule from gobsmacked readers across the Internet shames them into changing it: “Bill Clinton Company Shows Complexity of Family Finances.”

This comes on the same day we’ve learned that Bill and Hillary’s “complex family finances” included some very cozy arrangements with arms dealers. What is it with liberals and their gun-running schemes? Barack Obama had his Operation Fast and Furious, and now we learn dumping bales of money into the Clinton Foundation money laundry was highly useful to closing hundred-billion-dollar weapons sales.

No doubt that’s all just a remarkable coincidence, and it will be accompanied by a freakish outbreak of amnesia, just like all the other Clinton Cash scandals. Really, the Centers for Disease Control should establish a quarantine zone around the Clinton Foundation and begin intensive testing of the food they serve at their diamond-studded soirees, because it’s amazing how many people have just plumb forgotten about five-, six-, and seven-figure checks written to the Clintons. Even professional journalists like George Stephanopoulos (stop laughing!) claim they forgot about multiple $25,000 donations.

Here’s the quirk of Clinton syndicate – er, excuse me, “family” – finances the Associated Press found so intriguingly complex:

Because the company, WJC, LLC, has no financial assets, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was not obligated to report its existence in her recent financial disclosure report, officials with Bill Clinton’s private office and the Clinton campaign said. They were responding to questions by The Associated Press, which reviewed corporate documents.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide private details of the former president’s finances on the record, said the entity was a “pass-through” company designed to channel payments to the former president.

Under federal ethics disclosure rules, declared candidates do not have to report assets worth less than $1,000. But the company’s existence demonstrates the complexity of tracking the Clintons’ finances as Hillary Clinton ramps up her presidential bid.

That’s the second time in four paragraphs the AP claims the big takeaway from this story is that the Clintons have “complex finances.”

Later, the report allows that “little is known about the exact nature and financial worth of Bill Clinton’s non-speech business interests,” and “the precise amounts of Bill Clinton’s earned income from consulting have not been disclosed, and it’s not known how much was routed through WJC, LLC.”

That’s what we’d call a feature, not a bug in the computer world. Although it’s been around since 2008 and has been reincarnated several times, WJC LLC “did not appear among holdings in the Clintons’ financial disclosure released last week or in previous Hillary Clinton disclosure reports between 2008 and 2013, when she resigned as secretary of state.”

As the AP report rather grudgingly concludes, this is all a hell of a lot more suspicious than a private equity holding Mitt Romney disclosed in 2012 after failing to list it on a previous statement, leading to a conniption fit about “shell companies.”

Of course, even though their shell company is obviously designed to conceal sizable amounts of money from possibly controversial sources, the Left will suddenly decide pass-through financing is completely unremarkable when the Clintons do it. They’ll say it was all perfectly legal, which of course means nothing when they want to make hay about a Republican’s legal-but-supposedly-outrageous finances. (And when that didn’t get the job done in 2012, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid simply made up stories about Mitt Romney being a tax cheat.)

Liberals won’t even bat an eye when Hillary resumes bad-mouthing corporate CEOs, shrieking that there’s “too much money in politics,” and complaining about how every millionaire except herself, and her favorite donors, got rich by unfairly winning the lottery of life.