By Rick Manning
The deluge of news reports on Hillary Clinton’s, dubious at best, email and other activities, reminds those old enough to recall the Clinton Administration of the stench of corruption that surrounds the former First Family.
Foreign governments funding the family foundation while the Secretary of State oversees deals with them, lost or hidden records and correspondence, and even the shady enrichment of a ne’er-do-well brother are back in focus.
In the latest hit to the family that would be a dynasty, Breitbart reports that Hillary’s brother, Tony Rodham, sits on the board of directors of a gold mining company that received an extremely rare gold mining exploitation permit issued by the country of Haiti. How rare you might ask? It was one of the first two permits issued in the past fifty years. One might even say it was the golden ticket.
The lucky Tony’s company, VCS Mining, was incorporated in 2010, and its website only lists projects in Haiti, which a reasonable person can infer means they have no other mining interests anywhere else in the world.
But the kicker can be found in their mission statement which proclaims, “Our strength, expertise, and strategic relationships in North America and the Caribbean create a unique ability to have access to and acquire highly attractive properties. These permits contain very attractive return on investment characteristics due to their low initial capital investment, and, in many cases, early time to production.”
Note that this mining company’s expertise is not actual mining, but it is in using their political relationships to get mining permits, and no one has quite the connections that Tony Rodham brings to the table.
VCS Mining is the poster child for the new venture socialist. They make their money by leveraging government contacts to obtain lucrative properties.
Did Hillary use her influence to help Tony? We don’t know. What is known is that this exact type of stench has followed the Clintons throughout their long history.
This story follows closely on the acknowledgment that foreign governments made millions of dollars of contributions to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was the Secretary of State overseeing decisions worth billions to their countries.
And then there is the continuing-to-break story that Hillary created her own private email server as Secretary of State rather than using the government’s email system as required by federal statute. A convenient way for her to be able to purge emails that might shed light on her brother’s Haitian gold strike, the foreign government contributions, or even what she was doing in the late afternoon of September 11, 2012 when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked and overwhelmed, resulting in the deaths of four Americans.
As these murky questions unwind, America is getting a back-to-the-nineties look at life with the Clintons, and it will create a great framework for deciding if our nation wants to go back to a TMZ presidency.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
