A Washington Post fact-checker managed to ignore numerous inconvenient facts when she awarded four “Pinocchios” on Monday to Donald Trump for his criticism of the Clintons’ self-serving involvement in the Laureate Education Inc. scandal.
The scandal is the cozy business relationship linking then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton’s employment by Laureate Education, Inc. In that relationship, Bill served as the very well-paid “honorary chancellor” of the education company, while Hillary headed an agency in the government which provided grants worth tens of millions of dollars to a non-profit that was tied into Bill’s Laureate employer.
The details were first detailed by Peter Schweizer, Breitbart Senior Editor at Large, in his bestselling book Clinton Cash.
So the Post had to navigate past several unpleasant facts before they could claim to pin their four Pinocchios on Trump’d criticism of Bill and HIllary’s
First, there are the multiple roles played by Doug Becker, the founder and CEO of Laureate. The Post noted that he also headed the non-profit, where his title was “chairman of [International Youth Foundation] 14-member volunteer board of directors. ” But the Post quickly provided an excuse, saying that “Becker’s role is unpaid, and the two organizations are independent of each other.”
The Post failed to mention is that, while independent entities, IYF and Laureate are both based in Baltimore and their offices are less than a mile from one another. The Post fact-checkers also declined to mention that IYF “runs numerous programs through Laureate, including something called youthActionNet” which was announced at a Clinton Global initiative annual meeting in 2010.
While the Post does report that Laureate paid Bill $16.5 million for his role as honorary chancellor — that term ran from 2010-2015 — the paper neglects to point out that Bill resigned his role as chancellor only in the week when the New York Times and the Washington Post published articles based on Clinton Cash‘s reporting.
The Post also failed to mention the sharp spike in funding IYF got from the State Department or The United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
A Bloomberg examination of IYF’s public filings show that in 2009, the year before Bill Clinton joined Laureate, the nonprofit received 11 grants worth $9 million from the State Department or the affiliated USAID. In 2010, the group received 14 grants worth $15.1 million. In 2011, 13 grants added up to $14.6 million. The following year, those numbers jumped: IYF received 21 grants worth $25.5 million, including a direct grant from the State Department.
It’s unclear why the Washington Post failed to included the aforementioned facts in its fact-checking article.
A request for comment was not returned.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson
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