Jack Kelly Sunday

Today in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, conservative columnist Jack Kelly continues his attacks on Hillary Clinton - this time going after the Clinton Foundation.

He begins:

The Clinton Foundation is “the largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever,” says the renowned investigator who uncovered the financial discrepancies at General Electric before its stock crashed. Charles Ortel went on to say that it “wasn’t organized lawfully and it isn’t operating lawfully. There’s never been a legally compliant audit.”

“Any nonprofit professional in the U.S. can look at the [Clinton] Foundation’s own statements, tax filings and financial reports and see there is something wrong,” agreed longtime charity worker Amy Sterling Casil. “The organization does little to nothing with measurable outcomes or deliverables. Reported revenues are wildly at variance with what it says it does.”

I am sorry to disagree with Amy Sterling Casil (and, I suppose, Charles Ortel), but some nonprofit professionals have looked into the foundations statements/tax filings and so on and don't see anything wrong.  In fact they give glowing reviews:

• Charity Watch - "A" Rating
• Charity Navigator - Four Stars (Out of Four) 

Heck, even the Better Business Bureau - which failed (if that's even the right word) the Clinton Foundation overall - says the foundation met the BBB's financial standards for a charity.  These are the standards that the BBB says the foundation does not meet:

• The organization states that the current chair is compensated as an employee of the organization.
• It does not have a written board policy that commits the organization to complete, no less then every two years, an assessment of its performance and effectiveness and of determining future actions required to achieve its mission.
• The organization reports that it has not completed an effectiveness assessment but indicates it plans to do so,

You'd think that if the Clinton Foundation was "the largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever" that's "not operating lawfully" with "[r]eported revenues wildly at variance with what it says it does" then that information would show up in at least one of these charity watch reviews - even the one that says the foundation failed to meet all of its standards, right?

Or maybe they're just in on the conspiracy to silence dissent on anything Clintonian, right?

So on Jack Kelly's side of the argument there are two writers critical of the Clinton Foundation (for example, how the foundation deals with money) and then on the other there are two non-profit charity review organizations that come to a completely different conclusion (the third has no problem with the foundation's finances).  So where do you think the truth lies?

To see how badly Jack's doing with this story, let's look at this paragraph:

After a devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Bill and Hillary Clinton controlled dispersal of more than $10 billion in aid funds. Very little of it ever got to the poor, noted Haitian journalist Dady Chery. She called Clinton disaster fund-raising “predatory humanitarianism.”

The phrase actually comes from Dady Chery's interview with our old friend Charles Ortel.  In it we get Jack's source of the above charge.  It's a questions posed to Ortel from Chery:

Within two months of the earthquake, Clinton got the Haitian parliament to vote an emergency law that allowed his Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) to run the country for 18 months. The IHRC raised at least $9.5 billion from the international community. There were fundraisers in New York and other cities. Haitians have searched through the rubble and demanded to know where this money went, because the IHRC did not reconstruct anything. Some Haitian lawyers think that Clinton, in his role as director of the IHRC should answer to Haiti and not benefit from UN immunity in this matter. What do you think, Charles?

So right from the start, Jack's misleading.  Nowhere in the Chery's description of the IHRC is there any mention of Hillary Clinton.  But what of this IHRC?  What was it?  How did it operate?  Regardless of Hillary's absence, did a Clinton really have that much control over that much money?

Let's see.  The State Department describes the IHRC this way:

The Government of Haiti created the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission to ensure the planning and implementation of the recovery efforts are Haitian-led; involve and coordinate the donor, civil society, and private sector communities, promote performance towards Haiti’s development goals; ensure accountability and transparency; and to communicate clear outputs desired by the Haitian people.

The IHRC is co-chaired by the Government of Haiti and the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. In addition to representatives of the Haitian and donor governments, the IHRC Board of Directors includes voting members from Haiti’s legislative branch, judicial branch, labor and business communities. All major projects, those worth 10 million U.S. dollars or more, must be approved by the IHRC Board of Directors. [Emphasis added.]

Note: The UN Special Envoy to Haiti is Bill Clinton.

Patrick Rouzier, who was actually a former member of the IHRC has more:

President Clinton and Jean Max Bellerive, the then Haitian Prime Minister, co-chaired the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which approved projects for consideration that aligned with the Government of Haiti’s action plan for recovery. The projects then went to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF), which was responsible for disbursement of project funds. The HRF, which was chaired by Haiti’s Minister of Finance and administered by the World Bank, made the decisions on how to fund projects, along with partner entities. One of the three partners — the World Bank, United Nations, and Inter-American Development Bank — partnered with each approved project.

The IHRC did not enter into contracts with recovery projects, and it did not disburse money collected by the international community to these projects. Funding decisions were made by the HRF, and did so in a fully transparent manner that included a public audit of the decision-making process. [Emphasis added.]

Take a closer look at the emphasized parts.  Didn't Jack say that Bill and Hillary Clinton controlled the dispersal of those funds?

Jack then reuses some old material from August, and goes, yet again, with the already debunked Peter Schweizer.

In fact, the whole Skolkovo Innovation Center stuff at the end of Jack's column is from this "report" by the already debunked Peter Schweizer.  You'd think that anything from someone so discredited would more or less be deemed untrustworthy from the start, but this is Jack Kelly and the rest of the right wing media we're talking about so we already know that Breitbart editor Schweizer is going to be very well known for the next 4 (or possibly 8) years from now - If you know what I mean.

But let's get back to Jack's column.  I'll end with some questions.

Why are we not surprised when reality is much much different than what Jack says it is?  Why do I have to do point this out every week?  Why can't someone, anyone at the Post-Gazette check these things before publication? 

I mean, if only to spare the paper the inevitable shame and embarrassment of realizing just how much BS gets crammed into a Jack Kelly column.