End of an Error: The Clinton Global Initiative Shuts Down

Over at Fox News, the headline blares: "Clinton Global Initiative to lay off employees, shut down amid dwindling donations." Let's pause for a moment and contemplate why donations to the overarching Clinton Foundation would be dwindling. It's almost as if it were really a vehicle for influence peddling that had outlived its purpose, rather than a noble dispensary of 'watered-down' AIDS drugs in Africa.

Setting aside the schadenfreude—surely CGI supported some legitimately charitable works—the truth is that shuttering CGI around this time was the plan all along. What was not the plan, however, was shuttering the initiative, a program of the Clinton Foundation that "convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world's most pressing challenges," so the Clintons could spend more time photo-bombing the social media accounts of random New Yorkers.

Of course, if the Clintons are not moving back into the White House, their handling of CGI was a non-trivial part of the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election. It was obvious that their ostensibly charitable foundation was a big part of the reason the Clintons went from leaving the White House "dead broke", according to Hillary, and became worth tens of millions on their ill-fated trip back to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Among other things, the Wikileaks release of John Podesta's emails showed there was much internal vexation about the foundation taking in huge numbers of foreign donations. At the moment, everyone is trying to decide just how insidious Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia are, but—so far!—there's no evidence of anything so tangible and damning as CGI hosting a gathering in Morocco after its king pledged $12 million to support the meeting and the endowment. (A state-owned Moroccan mining company accused of "serious human rights violations" by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice paid $1 million to help host the May 2015 event.) This is just one disconcerting example; you could write a bestselling book on the subject of Clinton Foundation corruption. (And with Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, my former WEEKLY STANDARD colleague Daniel Halper did just that.)

Of course, President-elect Trump also has his own charitable foundation that did such benevolent things as purchase yuge portraits of the man himself. But his foundation, such that it is—he announced in December he would shut it down—has been comparatively small potatoes next to the significance and reach of CGI. Even Trump's brazen lies about his operation were so bad and easily verifiable that it was a paragon of transparency compared to the Clinton Foundation. That was the point, I suppose: To conflate the Clintons' self-interest with charitable works so that attacking the former could be defended by the latter.