According to the below statement from the WikiLeaks Twitter account, a state party has intentionally cut off access to the Internet for Julian Assange, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks. This happened after the ninth consecutive day of releases of emails from the hacked account of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign committee. It also comes on the heels of a potentially serious campaign finance problem for the Hillary for America committee, the primary fundraising vehicle for Clinton, according to an email released by WikiLeaks just yesterday. This would be the second time in less than six months that the Clinton campaign’s finances have come under scrutiny.
In April and May of this year, Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign charged the Clinton campaign with serious violations of campaign finance law, including “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”
The prior allegations play into the hands of the Trump camp which has consistently portrayed Hillary Clinton as someone who doesn’t care about fellow Americans but only herself and getting rich. The release of an email yesterday by WikiLeaks, together with others over the prior eight days, are making those charges harder to refute.
Robby Mook is Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager. According to numerous leaked emails, over many months in 2014 Mook was consulting and coordinating elaborate professional services for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Unfortunately, there were three major problems with this. Hillary Clinton had not told the Federal Election Commission that she was running a campaign; she wasn’t reporting contributions and expenditures; and Robby Mook, during this time, was being paid by Common Good PAC at the rate of approximately $10,000 per month. Common Good PAC is a Virginia Political Action Committee set up by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a long time Clinton loyalist. (The PAC had already been the target of negative publicity for offering private dinners with Governor McAuliffe and his wife in exchange for $100,000 donations, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.)
The deterrent for Hillary Clinton to set up the normal exploratory campaign vehicle was that throughout 2014 and into the spring of 2015, both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were making millions of dollars giving paid speeches to global banks, corporations and corporate trade associations according to her financial disclosure report. Each of the Clintons received personal fees of typically more than $200,000 per speech. In an email dated November 18, 2014, long-time adviser to Clinton, Huma Abedin, wrote to other members of the Clinton camp: “We ended up locking in ALL her remaining paid speaking offers a few weeks ago. She reviewed them all with you at meeting so you know everything.” Those paid speeches for Clinton stretched into March of 2015, preventing her from declaring her candidacy without the need to dodge embarrassing questions on pay-to-play.
An October 7, 2014 speech that Hillary Clinton delivered on behalf of Deutsche Bank in exchange for a fee of $260,000 was particularly dicey. Just three months prior to this speech, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had conducted a hearing into how Deutsche Bank had engaged in a scheme with hedge funds to cheat the Internal Revenue Service out of billions of dollars in taxes. Just six months later, a unit of Deutsche Bank entered a guilty plea with the U.S. Justice Department for wire fraud and engaging in a price-fixing conspiracy.
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