Leid Stories – Congresswoman Pushes for Three-Pronged Federal Probe of Clinton Foundation; Bernie Sanders Proudly Capitulates – 07.13.16

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is calling for a federal investigation into the operations of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation—a “lawless, pay-to-play enterprise that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years,” she alleges in written requests to FBI Director James Comey, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, and Federal Trade Commission chairperson Edith Ramirez. The federal agencies’ “public-corruption” probes should focus on the relationships between big-money donors to the foundation and U.S. foreign-policy decisions made during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, says Blackburn.

Charles Ortel, a former Wall Street investor who exposed General Electric’s multibillion-dollar stock fraud in 2007-2008, since February last year has been examining the Clinton Foundation’s global labyrinth of nonprofit subsidiaries. In an exclusive Leid Stories series, Ortel has charged that the Clinton Foundation is “complete and total fraud.” Ortel discusses Rep. Blackburn’s three-tiered probe request and his most recent forensic findings about the Clinton Foundation.

Well, we saw it coming quite a ways back and you were warned: Bernie Sanders will cave to Hillary and the Democratic Party, trading in the 13 million-plus popular votes he got during the primaries for the illusion of more clout when he goes back to the Senate and within the ranks of the increasingly irrelevant Democratic Party. His full-throated endorsement of Clinton yesterday was a fait accompli.

Leid Stories – For the Clintons, Education Pays, And Pays, And Pays – 07.07.16

Within minutes of FBI Director James Comey’s announcement yesterday that the agency’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email/private server/classified information debacle found no evidence of criminal conduct, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee was back on campaign schedule, keynoting a National Education Association event in Washington, D.C., touting her pro-education policies and tearing into Donald Trump’s education agenda.

Trump University, the real estate mogul’s unaccredited, lawsuit-plagued for-profit education company that went belly up in 2010 after five years, came in for blistering attack by Clinton as a harbinger of what a Trump presidency would mean for education: the ultraprivatization of education, the end of “education as we know it.”

Clinton and her husband Bill have traveled this path and have made millions of dollars from it, says our guest, journalist and author Dady Chery, who has chronicled the Clintons’ sordid history of plunder in Haiti. She adds yet another chapter to the Leid Stories series on the Clinton Foundation and its interconnected global subsidiaries that Charles Ortel, the whistleblower who brought down GE in 2007-2008 over the overvaluation of its stock, maintains are engaged in “massive fraud.”

Chery explains the Clintons’ role in one of the biggest scams in higher education—a Wall Street-backed company called Laureate Education.

Leid Stories – Decoding The – 07.06.16

FBI Director James Comey did his best yesterday to convince the nation that the agency’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail debacle was thorough, transparent and completely free of political interference and contamination. We can all rest assured that the matter has been looked into exhaustively, everyone potentially in the prosecutorial cross hairs was completely open and cooperative, and as director of the agency he couldn’t be more proud of the job of the way the investigation was handled and, more importantly, brought to a close.

Clinton got a few slaps on the wrist from Comey for mishandling classified information and for inspiring similar recklessness by staff and, generally, throughout the State Department (when she was secretary of state). But there was no evidence of criminal conduct, and no “reasonable” prosecutor would seek indictments, Comey said.

The FBI director might have been hoping to put the whole sordid matter to rest with his explanatory news conference yesterday—just as President Barack Obama and the presumptive nominee were making their first campaign appearance together in Charlotte, N.C. Instead, Comey unleashed a firestorm, directly contradicting several claims Clinton previously had made about her private server and emails.

Click on this to watch FBI director James Comey press conference.

Leid Stories discusses Comey’s statements yesterday, and how and why President Obama, his administration and the Democratic Party are all shielding Hillary Clinton.