E.L.D. Cornerstone.  Life in words & pictures

April 21, 2014

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is questioning whether donations are her family foundation is undercutting Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s message on the campaign trail.

“I think it's going to destroy her message because I think it's going to be hard for her to go around saying she's going to be a champion of women's rights when she's taking money from countries that abuse women's rights,” Paul, who is running for the GOP nomination, said late Monday on Fox News’s “Hannity.”

“In Brunei, for example, the punishment for adultery is death by stoning.”

Paul also told Hannity that he’s been briefed by Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, which questions Clinton’s conduct in light of certain donations. Paul called the new book’s contents “alarming.”

“It reminds me of people using the system to enrich themselves, and I think it looks unseemly. And I think a lot of Americans are going to agree with me,” he charged.

“That's what voters are going to have to look at and wonder: Can we trust someone to be the president of the United States who's involved with so much money changing hands from foreign countries, foreign entities?" he asked.

Clinton has been dogged by two major questions regarding donations to the Clinton Foundation: did contributions influence her decision making while secretary of State and should the foundation have accepted money from countries that had questionable human rights records.

Schweizer writes that his book details “a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” according to The New York Times. Those charges include payments by a shareholder in the Keystone XL pipeline as State weighed the pipeline’s future and a shift in U.S.- Colombian trade policy that allegedly benefited a major foundation donor.

Correct the Record, a Democratic rapid-response group that backs Clinton, bashed its findings in a statement, calling it a “political hatchet job masquerading as a book” and framing it as another “anti-Clinton conspiracy theor[y]” that will be debunked.

“The Clinton Foundation is a philanthropic organization that funds programs to help people throughout this great nation and all over the world,” Correct the Record’s communications director Adrienne Watson said in a statement, noting that Schweizer has ties to a number of Republican politicians.

“If Rand Paul and Marco Rubio think attacking the Foundation for its work to stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa is an electoral strategy, then bring it on.”

While Hillary Clinton hasn't addressed the controversy in significant detail, President Clinton pushed back on accusations of impropriety at a speech March. He framed the donations as essential to the foundation's humanitarian efforts and said that disclosure should quell concerns.

“You got to decide when you do this work whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country,” he said, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“My theory about all this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments.”