H4a news Clips [May 1, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


Hillary Clinton welcomes Sanders into the race [Alexander Jaffee, CNN, April 30, 2015]



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Hillary Clinton welcomes Sanders into the race [Alexander Jaffee, CNN, April 30, 2015]
Hillary Clinton played down tensions with her first rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a tweet welcoming him into the race Thursday.
Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton played down tensions with her first rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a tweet welcoming him into the race Thursday.
"I agree with Bernie. Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race," she tweeted, signing the post "-H" to signal it was sent by Clinton herself and not an aide.
t was the first acknowledgment from the former secretary of State of the challenge since Sanders announced Wednesday night that he would be entering the contest. And it was a marked effort to downplay the divide within the Democratic Party that contributed to Sanders' decision to launch a bid, between progressives clamoring for a challenger to Clinton and the large majority of Democrats who support her for the nomination.
Clinton has maintained a decisive, double-digit lead in every survey of the prospective Democratic presidential field, drawing from 50-70% support among Democrats. But progressives remain wary of her candidacy, as they see her as too close to Wall Street.
While Sanders isn't their first choice — progressives have expressed a strong preference for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who remains adamant that she won't run — he offers the movement a useful foil for Clinton who could force her to the left on a number of key issues, including his pet crusade, big money in politics.
But his entry into the race poses risks for the Democratic Party as well, if the party infighting overshadows the contrast with Republicans that Democrats are hoping to draw in the race. Sanders, for his part, has indicated he has no intentions to pull punches in the race. During an interview with ABC News, Sanders called foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation a "very serious problem."

"It tells me what is a very serious problem," he said. "It's not just about Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton. It is about a political system today that is dominated by big money. It's about the Koch brothers being prepared to spend $900 million dollars in the coming election."


Sanders has promised to eschew any donations from billionaires, and during a later interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, said it was "vulgar...that we're having a war of billionaires."
He also highlighted his opposition to the Iraq War, which Clinton voted to support. He said he'll make his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and his intense focus on climate change key issues in his campaign.

National Coverage – HRC AND DEMS


National Stories

Crime, Clinton and a New Era [Amy Chozick, NYT, April 30, 2015]


Hillary Clinton delivered a rebuttal of her husband’s 1994 crime bill, which flooded America’s cities with more police officers, built dozens of new prisons and created tougher penalties for drug offenders.
It was a favorite riposte of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s in her 2008 presidential campaign: “I always wonder what part of the 1990s they didn’t like,” she would say about critics who brought up her husband’s administration, “the peace or the prosperity?”
Now, as the streets of Baltimore erupt in protests, and questions about race, poverty and the prison population suddenly tower over the political landscape, the halcyon years of the tough-on-crime Bill Clinton administration look less idyllic.
Mrs. Clinton delivered a poignant assessment of the cycle of poverty and incarceration on Wednesday in addressing the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers. But the most striking part of her speech was the unsaid but implicit rebuttal of her husband’s 1994 crime bill, which flooded America’s cities with more police officers, built dozens of new prisons and created tougher penalties for drug offenders.
Indeed, in her call to “end the era of mass incarceration,” she appeared to take an important step toward redefining what it means to be a Clinton Democrat.
If the centrist policies of the Bill Clinton years were known for stepped-up policing and prison building, deficit reduction, deregulation, welfare overhaul and trade deals, Mrs. Clinton is steering her early candidacy in the opposite direction, emphasizing economic populism, poverty alleviation and, in the criminal justice system, rehabilitation over incarceration.
Two decades ago, Mr. Clinton urged the poor to take personal responsibility and embraced wealthy corporate leaders, who create jobs, as an important part of the solution to poverty. Now, Mrs. Clinton wants government to help working families with everything from child care to college debt. And though she has long been attacked from the left as overly solicitous of Wall Street, she has not minced words of late in blaming the wealthy for an economy that, she says, has left too many people behind.
“How many children climb out of poverty and stay out of prison?” she asked Wednesday. “That’s how we should measure prosperity.” She added: “That is a far better measurement than the size of the bonuses handed out in downtown office buildings.”
How Mrs. Clinton will define her political philosophy is still very much an open question — not only because she is not her husband, as her supporters note, but because the times, and the country, have changed.
When Mr. Clinton first ran for president, Democrats had lost five out of the previous six presidential elections. Crack cocaine was ravaging American cities, and Democrats were freshly scarred by the Willie Horton ad with which the elder George Bush portrayed Michael Dukakis as soft on violent crime.
Today, an attack ad seeking to touch an emotional chord with voters could conceivably feature a rogue police officer victimizing a black man.
Then, the electorate was more than 80 percent white, and Democrats battled a reputation as soft on crime and too willing to give “handouts” to welfare recipients. Mr. Clinton, calling himself a “New Democrat,” promised to put more police officers on the streets and end a cycle of government dependency associated with the poorest Americans.
“The distance between 1968 and 1992 is the same distance between 1992 and today,” said Matt Bennett, a former Clinton administration aide and a senior vice president at the centrist Third Way think tank. “Would Bill Clinton do what L.B.J. did?”
Still, Mrs. Clinton confronts the delicate task of distancing herself from policies that as first lady she either supported or dutifully stood behind.
In 1996, for example, Mrs. Clinton angered activists including her friend Marian Wright Edelman, with whom she had worked at the Children’s Defense Fund, when she stood by her husband’s overhaul of the welfare system, which cut federal assistance to the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years.
But while Mr. Clinton’s brand of politics was closely associated with the strategist Al From and his centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Mrs. Clinton’s economic approach in 2016 has tilted discernably to the left. Whether she is being pulled there by Senator Elizabeth Warren and others, or is following her own natural inclinations, Mrs. Clinton is steeping herself in liberal thinking, thanks to advisers like the progressive economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alan B. Krueger.
“You’re seeing a wide group of prominent Democrats more or less articulating this question” of economic inequality, said Felicia Wong, president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank with which Mr. Stiglitz is affiliated. “Whether they’re collectively the new Democratic Leadership Council, I don’t know.”
Still, Mr. From argued in an interview that, though the circumstances had changed, Mrs. Clinton’s underlying goals were no different than those of her husband’s administration.
“The context was different on poverty and crime in the cities,” he said. “But the central tenet of our philosophy was that nobody in America should work full time to support a family and be poor.”
Bruce Reed, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser, said centrism on crime and welfare, in a word, worked: “It was more important to make progress than to just have a debate that went nowhere.”
Both the poverty rate and violent crime rate fell significantly during the Clinton years. But as the crisis in Baltimore has laid bare, some policies that showed success at the time have since had an adverse impact. And Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say she will not shrink from acknowledging as much — on crime, the economy, or a range of other issues.
“They understand what has been happening in this country, not only in the lead-up to the financial crisis in 2008, but the causes of that bubble,” said Ms. Wong, who was a fellow in Mr. Clinton’s White House. “She and her team really recognize that some of those policies just didn’t work out.”
Al Sharpton's Silence [Annie Karni, April 30, 2015]
When asked for his reaction to Clinton's pledge to 'end the era of mass incarceration,' Al Sharpton gave a surprisingly tepid statement that doesn't quite pass for support: "America needs to have the hard conversation about the underlying problems, inequities and injustices in our criminal justice system."
Rev. Al Sharpton was uncharacteristically silent after Hillary Clinton's high-profile speech Wednesday on criminal justice reform. When POLITICO asked for his reaction to Clinton's pledge to 'end the era of mass incarceration,' he gave a surprisingly tepid statement that doesn't quite pass for support: "America needs to have the hard conversation about the underlying problems, inequities and injustices in our criminal justice system,' Sharpton told Politico. 'I appreciate Secretary Clinton devoting her first major policy speech as a candidate for president to these issues because the time has come for significant, meaningful reforms to our broken criminal justice system." He declined to elaborate on what he thought of the content of her speech.
Sharpton and the Clintons haven't always seen eye to eye on criminal justice issues. Back in the 1990s, Sharpton was part of a meeting of black leaders who condemned the solutions to a crime wave offered in Bill Clinton's crime bill, which included building more jails and issuing harsher prison sentences. And he has said in the past that he tried and failed to get Bill Clinton to issue federal guidelines around police accountability and brutality cases.
Clinton charity never provided foreign donor data [Anne Linskey, Boston Globe, April 30, 2015]
The Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013.
WASHINGTON — An unprecedented ethics promise that played a pivotal role in helping Hillary Rodham Clinton win confirmation as secretary of state, soothing senators’ concerns about conflicts of interests with Clinton family charities, was uniformly bypassed by the biggest of the philanthropies involved.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013, Maura Daley, the organization’s spokeswoman, acknowledged to the Globe this week. She said the charity deemed it unnecessary, except in one case that she described as an “oversight.”
During that time, grants from foreign governments increased by tens of millions of dollars to the Boston-based organization.
Daley’s acknowledgement was the first by the charity of the broad scope of its apparent failures to fulfill the spirit of a crucial political pledge made by the Clinton family and their charities. The health initiative has previously acknowledged failing only to disclose the identity of its contributors, another requirement under the agreement.
The failures make the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is headquartered on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston, and goes by the acronym CHAI, a prominent symbol of the broken political promise and subsequent lack of accountability underlying the charity-related controversies that are dogging Clinton as she embarks on her campaign for president.
The charity defended the lack of some disclosures on the grounds that the donations in question were simply passed through the charity to fund an existing project. Previously, it has acknowledged that mistakes were made.
But loopoholes and legalistic explanations about what new foreign donations should be excluded from disclosure were not publicly discussed in the initial deal. In 2009, the incoming Obama administration, Clinton, and then-Senator John F. Kerry all publicly touted the Clinton charities’ “memorandum of understanding’’ as a guarantee that transparency and public scrutiny would be brought to bear on activities that posed any potential conflicts of interest with State Department business.
‘I took her at her word. Maybe I was wrong to do that.’
“Transparency is critically important here, obviously, because it allows the American people, the media, and those of us here in Congress . . . to be able to judge for ourselves that no conflicts — real or apparent — exist,’’ Kerry said during a Senate floor speech on Jan. 21, 2009.
The memorandum, which did not outline a penalty for failing to comply, was signed in December 2008 by Valerie Jarrett, co-chairwoman of the Obama transition team, and Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton aide who at the time was CEO of the Clinton Foundation and sits on the board of the CHAI.
Jarrett and Lindsey declined to be interviewed about CHAI’s repeated failures to disclose major increases in foreign grants.
The White House and the State Department also declined to take a firm stand on the apparent violations of the agreement. The White House press office declined to comment in any specific way. The State Department released a brief statement in muted tones that contrasted starkly with Kerry’s defense of the agreement in 2009.
“We would have expected that CHAI identify for the department the foreign country donors that elected to materially increase their donations and new country donors. The State Department believes that transparency is the critical element of that agreement,’’ said Alec Gerlach, a Kerry spokesman.
With a budget of more than $100 million a year, the CHAI makes up nearly 60 percent of the broader Clinton charitable empire, which includes the Clinton Foundation and several offshoots. Government grants to CHAI, nearly all of them from foreign countries, doubled from $26.7 million in 2010 to $55.9 million in 2013, according to the charity’s tax forms.
A Republican senator on the Foreign Relations Committee who voted in favor of Clinton’s confirmation in 2009, John Barrasso of Wyoming, said the lack of adherence to the basic terms of the agreement raised questions about her promise.
“I took her at her word. Maybe I was wrong to do that,” he said in an interview. “Because now the evidence shows that she didn’t disclose any of these things. The interesting part is you would think that for all of their time in the White House and time in the Senate, that she would want to be very far away from the hint of this kind of problem.”
Dan Diller, a member of the committee’s Republican staff when Clinton was confirmed, said it was difficult to comprehend why the Boston charity didn’t disclose its foreign grants to the State Department.
“If it is just a pass through to do good works that the whole world is cheering, then what could possibly be the harm in disclosing the donations?” Dillon said. “The administrative burden of disclosing such donations is negligible. I don’t understand why they would not trumpet their success and get credit for transparency in the process.”
Scrutiny of the family foundation shouldn’t be a surprise to the Clintons or their allies running the various pieces of the family’s charitable network. The phrase “Clinton Foundation” came up by name 75 times during Clinton’s confirmation hearing — demonstrating the significant concerns among lawmakers about potential conflicts of interest and a need for transparency.
At the hearing, then-Senator Clinton batted down questions by pointing to the highly specific contents of the agreement and the broad pledges for disclosure.
The agreement said the Clinton charities and the Obama administration wanted to “ensure that the activites of the [Clinton Foundation and its affiliated organizations], however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as secretary of state.’’
All donors were required to be disclosed. Existing streams of donations from foreign countries did not have to be submitted to the State Department for possible ethics reviews. But it required that Clinton charities disclose to the State Department when foreign nations “increase materially’’ their commitments to the charities. But the specific amount of increase that triggered such reporting was not defined.
Clinton said at the time that the agreement went “above and beyond the requirements of the law and the ethics rules” to “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest” between the foundation and her role as secretary of state.
Kerry’s Senate speech in her defense help clear the way for an overwhelming confirmation vote, 94-to-2.
“All contributions by foreign governments will be subject to a review process by the State Department’s officials,’’ Kerry said on the Senate floor. “This review will occur prior to the receipt of any such contribution, and Senator Clinton has made clear that the process has been designed to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.’’
Kerry played a key role in brokering the disclosure agreement as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Over the past several months, various news organizations have reported that individual parts of the memo were disregarded by the Boston charity. However, it has never before been clear that the memo was bypassed entirely.
Reuters reported in March that the organization didn’t disclose any donors to the public while Clinton was secretary of state. The Washington Post reported that a donation from Switzerland to the Clinton Health Access Initiative was not reviewed.
The charity declined until this week, when it responded with an e-mail to repeated questions from the Globe, to answer the question of whether it had ever initiated State Department review for any of its foreign donations. The answer was no.
The violations to the agreement went beyond the CHAI, and included the broader Clinton Foundation network. The foundation, an umbrella organization that operates as a separate charity, failed to comply with some portions of the agreement. It didn’t activate the State Department ethics review process for new donors or for existing foreign-government donors that expanded their support.
That wing of the charity, which is based in New York City, did regularly disclose donors to the public. The New York Times reported last week that people involved in a series of Canadian uranium-mining deals sent money to the Clinton Foundation while the firm, Uranium One, had business before the State Department.
Another arm of the Clinton charity, based in Canada, failed to disclose donors, the Washington Post reported.
The Boston charity’s CEO, Ira Magaziner, has responded to some of these omissions, but has declined to explain why no part of the pact was ever activated. The charity has cited affordable real estate for basing its operations in South Boston.
After the Globe and others wrote about problems with the charity’s transparency, it adopted a practice of disclosing donors on a quarterly basis. New countries that want to support the organization will be voted on by members of the board of directors.
Daley said the charity “didn’t think” that tens of millions of dollars of increases to grants from donor countries needed to be reviewed by the State Department. She said the failure to report the new donation by the Swiss government was an oversight. Magaziner has said that the charity didn’t publicly disclose its donors because it believed the broader Clinton Foundation was doing so; there is considerable overlap in givers to the two entities.
Among the foreign governments that started giving money to the charity while Clinton was secretary of state were Rwanda, Sweden, Papua New Guinea, and Flanders. Daley offered various explanations for why the new money wasn’t reported.
Rwanda, she said, paid the Clinton Foundation $300,000 to implement a medical system and the charity viewed the payment as a “fee” rather than a contribution. “Since it was not a grant or donation, we did not think it needed to be submitted for review,” Daley said.
The charity didn’t view Flanders as a “foreign government” because it is part of Belgium, Daley said, and therefore didn’t disclose funds from the Flanders International Cooperation Agency.
With Swaziland, Daley said the cash the charity received had originally had been given to the African nation by The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in order to buy AIDS medicine, but the country wasn’t set up to make the bulk buy. The Clinton charity took the money from Swaziland and then used it to buy drugs for the country, she said. “Since it was pass through of Global Fund money, we did not think it needed to be submitted for review,” Daley said.
The reasoning is similar for money from Papua New Guinea. In that case, additional funds from the Australian government, a preexisting donor, were given first to Papua New Guinea and then to the CHAI. The charity also didn’t disclose a bump in giving from Australia.
Vast increases in grants also came in from Sweden, which had supported the CHAI before Clinton was secretary of state. The country didn’t give any money in 2009, 2010 or 2011, then started giving again in 2012.
“We did not think this agreement needed to be submitted because it was from an existing donor,” Daley said.
She said increases in grants also came from the United Kingdom and Ireland, and weren’t submitted for review to the State Department for the same reason.
Hillary Clinton: Congenital Rule-Breaker. [Ron Fournier, National Journal, April 30, 2015]
Clinton has a reputation as a rule-breaker.
That's not a partisan attack. It's not a talking point. It's not a fantasy. It's a fact—an agonizing truth to people like me who admire Clinton and her husband, who remember how Bill Clinton rose from a backwater governorship to the presidency on a simple promise: He would fight for people who "work hard and play by the rules."
The evidence is overwhelming and metastasizing: To co-opt a William Safire line, Hillary Clinton is a congenital rule-breaker.
In the three days since my last column on Clinton, the headlines are revealing:
"More than 180 Clinton Foundation donors lobbied her State Department." "That's not illegal," writes Vox reporter Jonathan Allen, "but it is scandalous." The coauthor of a fair-minded Clinton biography, Allen notes that while there's no evidence of illegal corruption, "The size and scope of the symbiotic relationship between the Clintons and their donors is striking." He adds, "The Clintons have shown they can't police themselves."
"Clinton Foundation failed to disclose 1,100 foreign donations." The cofounder of the Clinton Foundation's Canadian affiliate revealed to Joshua Green of Bloomberg Politics that 1,100 donors to the foundation had never been disclosed. "The reason this is a politically explosive revelation is because the Clinton Foundation promised to disclose its donors as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of State," writes Green, a widely respected political reporter.
"Clinton charity never provided foreign data." A spokeswoman for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which makes up nearly 60 percent of the Clinton charitable network, told The Boston Globe that CHAI never submitted information on foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton's tenure as secretary of State. The reviews were required as a condition of her joining President Obama's Cabinet, the Globe reported.
In March, Reuters reported that CHAI didn't disclose any donors to the public, as required. The Washington Post reported that a donation from Switzerland to the group was not reviewed. While digging deeper into the review process, the Globewas told by a Clinton spokeswoman, "The charity deemed it unnecessary."
Just like that, the Clintons deemed an ethics rule unnecessary.
This was not an insignificant mandate. It was part of a "memorandum of understanding" between the White House and Clinton to soothe senators' concerns about known conflicts of interest within the Clinton family charities.
"Transparency is critically important here, obviously, because it allows the American people, the media, and those of us here in Congress ... to be able to judge for ourselves that no conflicts—real or apparent—exist,'' John Kerry said during a Senate floor speech on January 21, 2009, according to the Globe.
Kerry replaced Clinton as secretary of State. Clinton is now the likely Democratic presidential nominee. She spoke with great passion Wednesday about the importance of institutional integrity in the wake of Baltimore's riots.
"We must urgently begin to rebuild the bonds of trust and respect among Americans—between police and citizens, yes, but also across society. Restoring trust in our politics, our press, our markets," she said. "Between and among neighbors and even people with whom we disagree politically."
Restoring trust in our politics? Let's remember who and what's behind this controversy:
Hillary Clinton seized all emails pertaining to her job as secretary of State and deleted an unknown number of messages from her private server. Her family charity accepted foreign and corporate donations from people doing business with the State Department—people who hoped to curry favor.
She violated government rules designed to protect against corruption and perceptions of corruption that erode the public's trust in government. She has not apologized. She has not made amends: She withholds the email server and continues to accept foreign donations.
It's past time Clinton come clean. Return the foreign donations. Hand over the email server. Embrace an independent investigation that answers the questions and tempers the doubts caused by her actions. Repeat: Her actions.
This is not the fault of a vast right-wing conspiracy, sexism, or unfair media coverage. It's the result of actions taken by an experienced and important public servant whose better angels are often outrun by her demons—paranoia, greed, entitlement, and an ends-justify-the-means sense of righteousness.
Can she still be president? Absolutely.
Even if she continues to duck and dissemble? Perhaps. But only because somebody has to win—and the GOP might nominate a candidate even less trustworthy.
But why be president, if only by default?
Clinton should rather be totally honest and transparent, true to her word, and a credible force for restoring trust in our politics.


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