Just when I thought I would write a story about Hillary’s private server and why she really had it, this story came out on Thursday which dovetails perfectly with the original story I planned to emphasize from the Wall Street Journal.

Just when you think it can’t become more egregious — it becomes more egregious.

What?  What are you saying, you ask?

Roll with me here.  Give me a minute or so to ramp things up.  Let’s start at the start.  Remember this?

But wait.  Didn’t the Clintons “liberate” some items from the White House?  Why, yes, they did.  From — of all places — the LATimes.com:

Clintons Began Taking White House Property a Year Ago

WASHINGTON, Feb 10, 2001 — President Clinton and his wife started shipping White House furniture to the Clintons’ newly purchased home in New York more than a year ago, despite questions at the time by the White House chief usher about whether they were entitled to remove the items.

The day before the items were shipped out, chief usher Gary Walters said he questioned whether the Clintons should be taking the furnishings because he believed they were government property donated as part of a White House redecoration project in 1993, during Clinton’s first year in office.

The Clintons came under strong criticism after disclosing that they were taking with them $190,000 in gifts received over the last eight years. GOP lawmakers and others criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton in particular for accepting many presents just before she joined the Senate and became covered by strict ethics rules that prohibit accepting gifts worth more than $50.

Bowing to such criticism, the Clintons decided Feb. 2 to pay for $86,000 worth of gifts given them in 2000. This week, they agreed to return another set of gifts, including the four items questioned by Walters, and $28,500 more in furnishings identified by the Washington Post this week as having been legally designated as White House property by the National Park Service.

Isn’t in convenient that people don’t remember the Clintons were forced to pay for and return property they should not have removed or taken?  Further, but upon that, Hillary had the temerity to say they were “dead broke“?  Let us not forget that less than a week before the Clintons left the White House in 2001, they bought a replacement house 15 minutes down the road for $2.85 million.  Ahem.  $2.85 million dollars.  Could you have done that?

With this in mind, stay with me please.  I’m laying the foundation for a story that is going to send the average American Taxpayer into orbit.  That would be you.  And me.  You’d best sit down right about now.

From Politico.com:

Bill Clinton aides used tax dollars to subsidize foundation, private email support

by Kenneth P. Vogel

Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Oh my gosh.  But wait.  There’s more.  You have no idea.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Are your eyes beginning to open?  Are you starting to understand the implications of what Vogel is writing here?

The thousands of pages of newly uncovered records reveal sometimes granular detail about how Bill Clinton’s representatives directed the spending of taxpayer cash allocated by the GSA under the Former President’s Act.

The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”

Let’s review some history at this point.  Harry Truman, Democrat, who dropped two atomic weapons on Japan (because it was the proper thing to do in an historical context), had to move into his mother-in-law’s house when he returned to Missouri because there was no such animal as a presidential pension when he left in 1953.

He had no personal savings. He decided that he didn’t want to be on any sort of corporate payroll, because he thought it would “diminish the integrity of the nation’s highest office.” He also turned down numerous offers for commercial endorsements.  As a result he was, essentially, fiscally destitute. Once Truman left the White House, his only income was his old army pension of $112.56 per month.  There was no “benefits package” for former presidents or former Senators.  He received $37,000 from a book deal.  He sold property that he’d inherited.

The Clintons did not have this problem.

After leaving the White House “dead broke”, in the words of Hillary Clinton, they quickly raked in tens of millions of dollars from book deals, speaking fees and consulting gigs. At the same time, Bill Clinton was relying on his connections to some of the world’s deepest-pocketed donors, corporations and governments to seed a global philanthropy operation that overlapped with his consulting work and speaking fees and his wife’s work as secretary of state — and served as a jumping-off point for her presidential campaign.

Bill Clinton would customarily receive fees per speech ranging from $100,000 to $300,000.  The Clintons received more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until spring 2015.  And in terms of cash post-presidency, please note this:

But even as the Clintons got rich and grew their foundation into a $2 billion organization credited with major victories in the fights against childhood obesity and AIDS — while paying six-figure salaries to top aides — Bill Clinton continued drawing more cash from the Former President’s Act than any other ex-president, according to a POLITICO analysis. The analysis also found that Clinton’s representatives, between 2001, when the Clintons left the White House, and the end of this year, had requested allocations under the Act totaling $16 million. That’s more than any of the other living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush — requested during that span.

There you go.  $16 million dollars of your money to the Clintons.  Taxpayer money.

Your taxpayer dollars supplemented the wallets of Clinton staffers, their medical benefits.  You also paid for their computers.

Here’s another lovely little tidbit:

An analysis of the records provided by GSA, combined with Clinton Foundation tax returns, found that at least 13 of the 22 staffers who have been paid by GSA to work for Clinton’s personal office also worked for the Clinton Foundation.

But using the GSA records, POLITICO pieced together a list of Clinton loyalists who at various times have had their earnings supplemented by federal payments of about $10,000-a-year using funds from the Former Presidents Act.

The list reads like a field guide to Clinton World.

Ah yes, the Clinton Foundation steps up to bat.

It includes longtime Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper, who despite not having a security clearance, any apparent training in cybersecurity or a job at the State Department, in early 2009 helped set up the private email account that Hillary Clinton would use to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. Her use of that system has been dubbed “extremely careless” by the FBI director. Cooper continued working to maintain Clinton’s private email system — including advising her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, on attempted hacks — through at least 2012, according to emails released by the State Department.

Correct.  Your taxpayer cash helped set up Hillary’s private server.  And Justin Cooper, a very good Clinton “friend,” set up the private email account for Hillary despite having no cybersecurity training and no security clearance of any kind or, for that matter, a job at the State Department.  Cooper was paid, however, between 2011 and 2013 by your taxpayer dollars.

At the same time, though, Cooper was working with Doug Band, a trusted Bill Clinton lieutenant, and Declan Kelly, a top Hillary Clinton fundraiser-turned-State Department official, to launch a global consulting firm called Teneo. It did lucrative work for foundation donors and entities with business before Clinton’s State Department. And it signed a contract reportedly worth $3.5 million with Bill Clinton to serve as a “honorary chairman” (though the former president ultimately kept only $100,000 of that, according to his tax returns and a source familiar with the arrangement). Teneo also paid Abedin as a “senior advisor.”

As if it didn’t yet sufficiently stink of fish, here’s where we get to the “pay for play” aspect:

All the while, Band and Abedin were working together to broker meetings between Secretary of State Clinton and donors to the foundation, where Band served as an official until 2012, drawing an annual salary that in some years exceeded $111,000.

There you go.  Dots connected.  Thank you Kenneth Vogel.  Please read the rest of his article.

$16 million dollars in FEDERAL GOVERNMENT money from the American taxpayer — that was seed money from you and me to create the Clinton Foundation.

They needed a server for that, so we paid for the server and its maintenance, the software bleach, we paid for Huma, tech support, all as delineated above.

The Clintons haven’t even paid for one bad Tandoori takeout since leaving the White House.  But they were “dead broke,” you see.

Let’s make it plain, plain, plain: the AMERICAN TAXPAYER PAID for her “personal” server.  The American Taxpayer PAID for her server, we PAID for Doug Band, we PAID for the programs she used to wipe her servers, we PAID for her to write those emails.  So, with the logical extension, those emails are NOT hers, they belong to us.

There are 4,000 pages of documents that show precisely what the Clintons have done.  There is no “click-bait,” there is only the truth.

A $400,000 per year salary plus a $16 million slush fund after leaving office? Such a gig!

But wait, there’s even more. 

Here’s where I tie things up for you quite nicely.  It all dovetails.

Want to know why Hillary had a private server?  To keep thing occluded, of course, because she operates in secret and does not want to be held accountable or responsible — but mostly she wanted it to conduct private business for the Clinton Foundation and bill you, me, for it all.  Security was, at best, an ancillary issue.

From the WSJ.com:

The U.S. Department of Clinton

by Kimberly A. Strassel

The latest emails show that State and the foundation were one seamless entity.

This is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.

In March this column argued that while Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information was important, it missed the bigger point. The Democratic nominee obviously didn’t set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons’ private life—a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.

Please read the rest of Strassel’s excellent article.

It took me a while to assemble, but there you have it in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.  Corruption of the highest order by the Clintons — an ex-president and a presidential candidate — that makes Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed, Hoffa, Daley, Trafficant, Blanton and Dwyer all look like, well, the J.V. team, to coin a phrase.

Your federal tax dollars hard at work.

For the Clintons.

BZ

P.S.

Chelsea’s got some big shoes to fill.