Category Archives: Treasury

Ted Cruz Putting DC and IRS Scandal on Notice

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Sen. Cruz Asks DOJ to Preserve All IRS-Related Documents

The IRS targeting scandal is a serious breach of the public trust

November 2, 2015

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch requesting that the Department of Justice (DOJ) preserve all Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents and information for investigation under the next administration. Sen. Cruz’s letter comes after the DOJ recently closed its investigation into improper targeting of conservative groups by the IRS.

“Make no mistake: the IRS’s targeting of ordinary citizens for their political viewpoints under this Administration is not a minor issue, and represents a significant breach of the public trust.  Even a casual observer of the IRS targeting scandal could not help but come to the conclusion that there is a strong appearance that the IRS, under this Administration’s political leadership, used the coercive tools available to the tax collection agency to harass people with conservative viewpoints,” Sen. Cruz wrote. “It is important for you and other officials in this Administration to understand that this Administration’s decisions to neither continue this investigation nor appoint a special prosecutor do not represent the conclusion of this matter.”

Sen. Cruz’s letter can be read in its entirety below and here.

November 2, 2015

The Honorable Loretta E. Lynch
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530

Dear Attorney General Lynch:

I write today to strongly urge you, as head of the Department of Justice, to take specific steps to ensure that the Department preserves all of its Internal Revenue Service-related documents and information indefinitely.  This Administration’s recent announcement that it does not intend to conduct or allow an appropriate criminal investigation of the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party and other conservative organizations has finally made it abundantly clear that the responsibility of ensuring a thorough, fair, and impartial investigation of IRS employees and their potential criminal conduct will fall to the next presidential administration, and relevant materials must be protected accordingly.

On Friday, October 23, the Department stated that it would end its investigation of the IRS and the personnel who were part of the agency’s well-documented targeting efforts, including the former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit, Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself during a 2013 congressional oversight hearing.   Presumably, this latest decision to abandon the investigation required your approval.  This decision also comes in the wake of at least two formal rejections by President Obama’s former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., of requests for the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the investigation.

Bluntly stated, your decision is disappointing but also not surprising, and only confirms suspicions that the current Department is equipped to neither handle an appropriate investigation nor make appropriate judgments regarding existing conflicts of interest,  based on its failure to appoint a special prosecutor.  Despite numerous requests for a fair and impartial process, you, your predecessor, and this Administration generally have been dismissive of congressional and other calls for an appropriate accounting of the IRS’s abusive behavior.

Make no mistake: the IRS’s targeting of ordinary citizens for their political viewpoints under this Administration is not a minor issue, and represents a significant breach of the public trust.  Even a casual observer of the IRS targeting scandal could not help but come to the conclusion that there is a strong appearance that the IRS, under this Administration’s political leadership, used the coercive tools available to the tax collection agency to harass people with conservative viewpoints.  The little information that is available in the public domain about what happened at the IRS also makes it appear that laws, including criminal laws, may have been broken.

That said, as an attorney and former state law enforcement official, I am keenly aware that the facts of a case require objective, non-political review.  That is why I and others have been adamant about the need for the appointment of a special prosecutor, who would be appointed by the Administration in accordance with federal law and afforded the freedom and resources to conduct a thorough, fair, and impartial investigation and, if necessary, prosecution.

It is important for you and other officials in this Administration to understand that this Administration’s decisions to neither continue this investigation nor appoint a special prosecutor do not represent the conclusion of this matter.  Given this Administration’s refusal to conduct itself appropriately, or take the issue of the potential illegal conduct of IRS employees seriously, any subsequent administration should reserve the right to reopen the matter, conduct its own investigation, or appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an investigation.

With that in mind, it is imperative that you, as Attorney General, take extraordinary steps to see to it that the Department preserves all the documents and materials in its possession in relation to its evaluation of the IRS’s targeting efforts, as well as everything in its possession used to evaluate the potential criminal activity of IRS employees.  This request for extraordinary preservation steps is unfortunately necessary, given this Administration’s poor track record for recordkeeping.

I will also take this moment to remind you, your fellow political appointees within the Department, and any other Department employees, advisors, or contractors that destruction of any of the requested documents or information could subject those responsible for such destruction to criminal prosecution in the future.   I have previously warned Treasury and IRS officials that such consequences could also result for any such destruction of records within their control, and those warnings stand.  One’s position as a past or present federal employee does not afford immunity from the federal criminal justice system.  It is my hope that a future administration would pursue justified prosecutions with all due energy.

In accordance with the above, I would request that the Department engage in the following preservation efforts, effective immediately:

1.Preserve all paper-based documents, e-mail-based communications, e-mail-based calendar appointments, electronic documents, electronic communications (including voicemails, SMS (i.e., text) messages, and instant messages), and all other electronic data regardless of format, created since January 1, 2010, that:

a. Are records, regardless of content, that were originally produced or possessed by the IRS or any of its employees, contractors, subcontractors, grantees, subgrantees, or consultants;

b. Are communications, regardless of author, source, or content, that in any way address the IRS or any of its past or current employees; and

c. Include or reference the names Douglas Shulman, John Koskinen, Lois Lerner, William Wilkins, Holly Paz, Judy Kindell, and/or Carter Hull, or any versions of these names, including initials or nicknames.

For the purposes of this request, “preserve” means taking any and all reasonable steps to prevent the partial or full destruction, alteration, overwriting, formatting, deletion, shredding, incineration, wiping, relocation, migration, theft, revision, or mutation of electronic and non-electronic documents, records, and logs, as well as negligent or intentional handling that would make such records incomplete or inaccessible.

2. Exercise any and all reasonable efforts to identify and notify former Department employees, contractors, subcontractors, grantees, subgrantees, and consultants who may have access to such electronic or non-electronic records that these records are also to be preserved.

3. If it is a practice of the Department, any Department component, any federal employee, any contract employee, any grantee or subgrantee, or any consultant to destroy or otherwise alter such electronic or non-electronic records, either halt such practices immediately, or arrange for the preservation of complete and accurate duplicates or copies of such records, suitable for production if requested.

I am also requesting that the Department make additional arrangements with both the Department’s Inspector General and the Archivist of the United States for them to receive copies of all such records.

Please provide a detailed update regarding your efforts to coordinate with the Inspector General and the Archivist no later than 5:00 p.m. on Monday, November 9, 2015.

I look forward to your cooperation.  Please contact Committee staff at (202) 224-5225 if you have any additional questions about these requirements.

Sincerely,

Ted Cruz
Chairman
Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action,
Federal Rights and Federal Courts

Cc:
The Honorable Charles E. Grassley
Chairman
Senate Committee on the Judiciary

The Honorable Patrick J. Leahy
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on the Judiciary

The Honorable Christopher A. Coons
Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action,
Federal Rights and Federal Courts

The Honorable James Comey
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
U.S. Department of Justice

The Honorable Michael E. Horowitz
Inspector General
Office of the Inspector General
U.S. Department of Justice

The Honorable David S. Ferriero
Archivist of the United States
National Archives and Records Administration

Gary M. Stern
General Counsel
National Archives and Records Administration

The Honorable Jack Lew<
Secretary
U.S. Department of the Treasury

The Honorable John Koskinen
Commissioner
Internal Revenue Service

Can FBI Investigate the Director of CIA over Private Emails?

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There have been countless top agency people within the Obama administration that have violated law, procedures and even a White House directive regarding use of private emails and violations of communications security and operational security.

First we came to know about Lisa Jackson, Secretary of the EPA, then there was Eric Holder himself, while he was the top lawyer at the Department of Justice. Hillary and her server operation made an art of violating all protocols, but now John Brennan appears to be the next one in line where the FBI needs to open an investigation case. Is that possible? Has anyone asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about his use of private emails? How about a massive campaign where every administration official has to sign a compliance document, then take a polygraph, then be terminated for violations? Imagine…..just imagine the fallout. If for nothing else, these people should lose their respective security clearances, this is dereliction of duty and malfeasance, much less a violation of Oath.

Hackers release info on Obama’s national security transition team

by: Aaron Boyd 

The slow drip of information allegedly stolen from CIA Director John Brennan’s personal email account continues to find its way onto WikiLeaks, with a list of personal information about 20 members of President Obama’s transition team added to the leak in the most recent post on Oct. 26.

The list — which includes names, personal emails, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and more — was originally posted to Twitter by user @_CWA_ on Oct. 19, however the account was quickly suspended and the post removed.

After the Twitter account was shut down, “Crackas With Attitude” — the duo claiming to have perpetrated the hack — began slowly posting the information to WikiLeaks. The third and latest dump came on Oct. 26, including the list and the dossier of a FBI agent in the counterterrorism division.

The list posted Monday mostly includes names of former intelligence and national security officials, some of whom served under President George W. Bush and some who served or currently serve under President Barack Obama, including Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

The names have something else in common, as well.

All of the people listed were part of the Obama administration’s transition team, with most of them serving on the National Security Team. The team members listed covered the Defense Department, DHS, CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Only three names advised on other aspects of the transition but Federal Times confirmed that everyone whose information was exposed served in some capacity.

The document was created (or most recently updated) on Nov. 16, 2008, according to the associated metadata.

The breadth of the release is minor compared to the high-profile breach of the Office of Personnel Management last year but the implications are still serious, especially as this information was released publicly on the Internet.

“It’s a pretty serious proposition to have any of that information out there,” said Marcus Christian, a former federal prosecutor and current partner with the law firm of Mayer Brown’s cybersecurity and data privacy practice.

While the perpetrators reportedly used social engineering to trick a helpline support employee into changing Brennan’s account password, the subsequent exfiltration of data and postings online still constitute a cyber crime, Christian said.

“Often times we look to the technological solution [for cybersecurity] but often times the problem — no matter how intricate and hardened we think our technology happens to be — there’s always some weakness,” he said, including the human element.

If the perpetrators are caught, Christian expects they could be prosecuted under a combination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and federal Aggravated Identity Theft statutes, with the latter carrying a two-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Refugees in America Before those in Europe

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We watch in horror the refugee crisis in Europe and the stories are terrifying but for a deeper argument, it has been going on here in America for decades so the slow flow of migrants is not a robust as that currently in Europe.

What is more, global leaders are in full discussion on several tracks including how to find housing, medical care, schools, jobs, transportation and more. Additionally, big talks are underway to create a safe zone for Syrians in their home country. Well, the argument can be made there are at least two of them in Jordan and Turkey now….creating one in Syria? How about creating zones in respective countries in Central America?

Refugee crisis grows in Central America as women ‘run for their lives’

Women and children are increasingly fleeing gang violence in Mexico and Central America in hopes of reaching the US, says new UNHCR report

Thousands of women flee their homes in parts of Central America and Mexico each year to escape armed gangs and domestic violence and seek refuge in the United States, a flow that is becoming a refugee crisis, the UN refugee agency says.

The number of women, some with children, fleeing rampant gang violence in parts of Mexico, and the Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, is rising, the UNHCR said in a report published on Wednesday.

More than 66,000 children travelled with their families or alone from the Northern Triangle region – which has the world’s highest murder rates – to the United States in 2014.

More unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle and Mexico reached the United States in August than in the same month last year, the US government said.

“With authorities often unable to curb the violence and provide redress, many vulnerable women are left with no choice but to run for their lives,” Antonio Guterres, head of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said in the report.

While attention is focused on the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Europe from countries such as Syria and Iraq, a new refugee crisis is taking shape in Central America, the UNHCR warned.

“The dramatic refugee crises we are witnessing in the world today are not confined to the Middle East or Africa,” Guterres said in a statement. “We are seeing another refugee situation unfolding in the Americas.“

The UNHCR said it had recorded a nearly five-fold increase in asylum seekers arriving in the United States from the Northern Triangle since 2008. In 2014, 40,000 people from these countries and Mexico applied for asylum in the United States.

The UNHCR report includes 160 interviews with women who had fled their homes in the Northern Triangle region and Mexico and travelled to the United States. After crossing the border illegally, they were detained and placed in detention centres.

All the women interviewed had either been recognised as refugees or been screened by US authorities, “and determined to have a credible or reasonable fear of persecution or torture”, the report said.

One 17-year-old Salvadorean girl called Norma says she was gang raped by three members of the notorious M18 gang in a cemetery in late 2014. She said she was targeted because she was married to a police officer.

“They took their turns … they tied me by the hands. They stuffed my mouth so I would not scream,” Norma is quoted as saying in the report. Then “they threw me in the trash”.

Nearly two-thirds of the women said threats and attacks by armed criminal gangs, including rape, killings, forced recruitment of their children and extortion payments, were among the main reasons why they left their home countries.

“The increasing reach of criminal armed groups, often amounting to de facto control over territory and people, has surpassed the capacity of governments in the region to respond,” the report said.

US government figures show that 82% of 16,077 women from the Northern Triangle region and Mexico interviewed by US authorities in the last year were found to have a credible fear of persecution or torture and were allowed to pursue their claims for asylum in the United States.

Violence at the hands of abusive husbands and partners, including rape and beatings with baseball bats, was another key reason why women were fleeing their homes.

“Unable to secure state protection, many women cited domestic violence as a reason for flight, fearing severe harm or death if they stayed,” the report said.

More than three-quarters of the women interviewed said they knew the journey overland to the United States was dangerous, but it was a risk worth taking.

Some said they took birth control pills before starting their journey to avoid getting pregnant as a result of rape by human traffickers or gangs, the report said.

“Coming here [to the United States] was like having hope that you will come out alive,” the report quoted Sara, who fled Honduras and sought asylum in the United States, as saying.

 

So, the Most Transparent Administration in History, Nah

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Not being timely or responsive to letters or to requests is a means to use avoidance as a weapon and the Obama White House is perfect at this, a lesson used by several agencies.

There are also lawyers that are assigned by the White House that in fact scrutinize all Freedom of Information Act requests before they are advanced through the system.

Obama administration sets new record for withholding FOIA requests

PBS, WASHINGTON — The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.

Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.

The government’s new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The U.S. spent a record $434 million trying to keep up. It also spent about $28 million on lawyers’ fees to keep records secret.

“This disappointing track record is hardly the mark of an administration that was supposed to be the most transparent in history,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has co-sponsored legislation with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to improve the Freedom of Information law. Their effort died in the House last year.

The new figures showed the government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4 percent decrease over the previous year. It more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39 percent of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee’s phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages.

On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper.

The White House touted its success under its own analysis. It routinely excludes from its assessment instances when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law, and said under this calculation it released all or parts of records in 91 percent of requests — still a record low since President Barack Obama took office using the White House’s own math.

“We actually do have a lot to brag about,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Earnest on Wednesday praised agencies for releasing information before anyone requested it, such as the salaries and titles of White House employees. He cited more than 125,000 sets of data posted on a website, data.gov, which include historical temperature charts, records of agricultural fertilizer consumption, Census data, fire deaths and college crime reports.

“When it comes to our record on transparency, we have a lot to be proud of,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “And frankly, it sets a standard that future administrations will have to live up to.”

Separately, the Justice Department congratulated the Agriculture and State departments for finishing work on their oldest 10 requests, said the Pentagon responded to nearly all requests within three months and praised the Health and Human Services Department for disclosing information about the Ebola outbreak and immigrant children caught crossing U.S. borders illegally.

The government’s responsiveness under the open records law is an important measure of its transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas. It cited such exceptions a record 554,969 times last year.

Under the president’s instructions, the U.S. should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing, but federal employees last year regularly misapplied the law. In emails that AP obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration about who pays for Michelle Obama’s expensive dresses, the agency blacked-out a sentence under part of the law intended to shield personal, private information, such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers or home addresses. But it failed to censor the same passage on a subsequent page.

The sentence: “We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH (White House).”

In nearly 1 in 3 cases, when someone challenged under appeal the administration’s initial decision to censor or withhold files, the government reconsidered and acknowledged it was at least partly wrong. That was the highest reversal rate in at least five years.

The AP’s chief executive, Gary Pruitt, said the news organization filed hundreds of requests for government files. Records the AP obtained revealed police efforts to restrict airspace to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In another case, the records showed Veterans Affairs doctors concluding that a gunman who later killed 12 people had no mental health issues despite serious problems and encounters with police during the same period. They also showed the FBI pressuring local police agencies to keep details secret about a telephone surveillance device called Stingray.

“What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years,” Pruitt wrote in a column published this week. “The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.”

The U.S. released its new figures during Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

The AP earlier this month sued the State Department under the law to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The government had failed to turn over the files under repeated requests, including one made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.

The government said the average time it took to answer each records request ranged from one day to more than 2.5 years. More than half of federal agencies took longer to answer requests last year than the previous year.

Hillary Emails: Deeper Fraud/Collusion at Foundation

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There have been calls for an investigative panel to dig much deeper on the Clinton Foundation, but there are many non-government organizations doing that already.

While the FBI is investigating portable devices, metadata and foreign telecom intrusions into Hillary’s server and those at the State Department, the released emails so far tell an additional story that there was a very blurred line between Foundation work, donors and for sure diplomatic agendas.

So, exactly what is this Clinton Foundation about? Well nothing like one would think and the laws broken fall on that pesky IRS division that Lois Lerner (Loretta Lynch, at the DoJ refused to prosecute) where no one seems interested in proceeding on IRS law violations.

Clinton Foundation Faces Revisions–and Possible Reckoning

By Ken Silverstein

The Clinton Foundation has gotten a good deal of unflattering attention as of late, which isn’t surprising given that its best known namesakes are Bill, a former president and Hillary, who hopes to be the nation’s next leader. The foundation portrays itself as do-gooder nonprofit organization but a cursory look reveals questionable and incomplete disclosures of its activities and accounts, as well as misspending of donor money, virtually since its inception.

Those lapses appear set to catch up with the foundation (now formally known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), which has until November 16 to amend more than ten years’ worth of state, federal and foreign filings. According to Charles Ortel, a financial whistleblower, it will be difficult if not impossible for the foundation to amend its financial returns without acknowledging accounting fraud and admitting that it generated substantial private gain for directors, insiders and Clinton cronies, all of which would be against the law under an IRS rule called inurement.

While inurement may sound obscure to the layman, it’s an ancient legal principle and the IRS is very clear that it is verboten. If you are familiar with it, it becomes immediately clear that Bill Clinton – and arguably Hillary and daughter Chelsea as family members and fellow Clinton Foundation trustees – could have big problems come November 16. So, too, could Clinton cronies like Ira Magaziner (see below) and Doug Band, a Clinton administration and former foundation insider who subsequently became a founding partner of a bipartisan business swamp called Teneo Holdings.

The Clinton Foundation’s returns show revenues of $359.3 million between 2001 and 2006 and claim spending of $164.5 million on all program services, which includes its spending to provide relief to victims of the Tsunami in Asia and of Hurricane Katrina. The same pattern of taking in vast sums from donors and spending far less to help victims has continued ever since.

“It’s illegal to set up a foundation whose primary purpose is to create financial gain,” said Ortel – who helped expose massive financial fraud by GE, GM and AIG, thereby helping trigger the 2008 financial collapse. “That’s bright line illegal.” (Ortel wrote an article at Breitbart.com earlier which showed how “associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton may have attempted to monetize their participation in Clinton family philanthropic activities.”)

Ortel, a former managing director of Dillon, Read & Co, said that under New York law tax authorities don’t have to show criminal intent to get convictions against foundation officials, they need only show that the foundation filed materially misleading financial information and kept fundraising nonetheless.

“The essence of what a charity does is take your money and show you how they spend it,” he told me. “The Clinton Foundation takes your money and obscures how they spend it.” (Note that the Clinton Foundation only started disclosing its donors in 2008, following years of pressure.)

Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Ortel is hardly alone in raising questions about the Clinton Foundation’s accounting practices. Earlier this year, the watchdog group Charity Navigator put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” of dubious non-profit groups and politely described its business practices as “atypical.” A New York Post story about the development noted that in 2013 the family’s foundation “took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges…but spent just $9 million on direct aid.”

Charity Navigator is described by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as the country’s “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog and “ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence,” New York magazine reported at the same time. That story noted that Charity Navigator’s new ranking of the Clinton Foundation placed grouped it together with other “scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Red Cross.”

Detailed information provided to me by Ortel – and which I carefully reviewed and confirmed — shows that since its founding, the Clinton Foundation has received more than $1 billion to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs for poor people in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The leading donors to the foundation to support this admirable goal include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNITAID.

However, a unit set up to receive the money – the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc., which was run by Magaziner, a Clinton administration veteran with close ties to Hillary – appears to have spent far less than it took in. The unit’s accounting was so shoddy that in 2008, the state of Massachusetts revoked its license.

Furthermore, the accounting firm that handled much of the paperwork, BKD, has been implicated in a variety of misconduct. For example, last year the Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned BKD for “violating auditor independence rules when they prepared the financial statements of brokerage firms that were their audit clients.”

(As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, BKD was replaced as the foundation’s accountant by – no, I’m not making this up – PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose previous clients included Enron. That firm’s CEO, Kenneth Lay, died of a heart attack before he was shipped off to prison after engineering one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, with the help of accounting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers.)

Ortel has issued two little-read reports that strongly suggest that the New York-headquartered Clinton Foundation has violated federal and state laws that bar charities from enriching board members, officers or donors. “The Clinton Foundation is like a Turkish bazaar,” Ortel told me. “You think you’re going into a carpet shop but you’re really going into the back of a truck.” (Ortel says he is politically closer to the GOP than to the Democrats, but says he mostly hates “crony capitalism” as practiced by both parties.)

Last April, Clinton Foundation acting CEO Maura Pally acknowledged “mistakes” in its tax filings and promised they would be corrected by November 16.

The problem for the foundation, Ortel says, is that filing correct returns is impossible for the Clinton Foundation without admitting to criminal felonies. “The foundation has never filed a legitimate, independently certified and complete audit of their financial statements since it was founded, as is required under state, federal and foreign law,” he said.

In 2001, Bill helped set up the Clinton Foundation within weeks of leaving office – after surrendering his law licenses in January for lying under oath during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. That’s not much of a qualification to help run a foundation since those in charge of charities are legally bound to always make truthful declarations.

Bill clearly was in position to exercise significant influence over the foundation and referred to it publicly as “his” charity on numerous occasions. And even though he was not an officer or director of the main foundation until 2013, he had from the very beginning signed legal agreements on the foundation’s behalf and traveled the globe bragging about its alleged good deeds.

Hillary and daughter Chelsea, whom has accomplished little of note in her life but was made a foundation vice chair, basked in the glory. From a branding standpoint, the foundation has been pure gold for the Clintons.

The Clinton Foundation was initially authorized by the IRS to act as a library and research center about Bill Clinton’s presidency. In apparent violation of IRS rules, the foundation expanded its purposes and began raising billions of dollars for other purposes without asking the IRS for permission to do so.

According to the Clinton Foundation’s website, it started its efforts in the HIV/AIDS arena with the “transformational goal” of helping “save the lives of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world by dramatically scaling up antiretroviral treatment.”

The Foundation geared up to make HIV/AIDS drug purchases beginning in 2002, but its activities in this area were not disclosed in its 2002 and 2003 tax filings, presumably because it was not legally allowed to engage in such activities at the time.

The Clinton Foundation’s website says it is committed to transparency, but the organization omits much key information from its website, including audits for 2001 to 2004. Its application to form the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc. and the IRS determination letter for that entity are also omitted.

Since the early-2000s, the Clinton Foundation has taken in at least $1 billion in donations to fight AIDS — from groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and UNITAID, as well as governments including, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom – Ortel estimates.

The Clinton Foundation’s tax forms are so opaque and convoluted that there’s no way to know the precise figure for sure; Ortel bases this number on his review of statements and filings from foundations and governments that have donated to the Clinton’s charity.

Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation set up a related non-profit — the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, Inc. — to take in cash for its anti-AIDS initiatives. It was an Arkansas non-profit corporation based in Massachusetts and Magaziner – a chief healthcare policy advisor under President Clinton – got paid an undisclosed amount of money to run it out of the offices of his private consulting firm–an arrangement that, Ortel says, crossed the line of legality. In addition to the U.S., the Clinton Foundation set up anti-AIDS entities in at least a score of other countries.

Figures provided by UNITAID show it has given grants to the Clinton Foundation totaling $341.5 million for anti-AIDS drug purchases between 2006 and 2009 (see last page at this link), while the Clinton Foundation claims it spent about $215.4 million.

The fact that that UNITAID apparently donated about $126 million more to the Clinton Foundation for ant-AIDS pharmaceuticals than the Clinton Foundation acknowledges spending on them is alarming enough. And based on this analysis by Judicial Watch, that understates the magnitude of the problem dramatically.

In an emailed statement, Andrew Hurst, a spokesman for UNITAID, said that, “UNITAID is satisfied that the disbursements to William J. Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative/Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. have always been fully reconciled and expenditures made in line with grant agreements. Consistent with standard policy, UNITAID commissions independent assessments, audits and programmatic reviews of its grants. The results of all audits conducted so far have been entirely satisfactory.”

When Massachusetts shut down the HIV/AIDS Initiative unit, the Clinton Foundation simply folded its operations into its own and pretended nothing had happened. All of this was flatly illegal, but the IRS, whose tax-exempt wing was led during most of the relevant period by Lois Lerner, did zero. Obama’s Justice Department investigated Lerner on unrelated charges, but never filed charges.

The general shadiness of the whole Clinton Foundations AIDS initiative may well explain why Sir Elton John turned down without explanation an award for fighting AIDS from Bill Clinton during the recent Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.

“Using a charity that exploits victims of AIDS for your personal gain and advancement puts you in the lower circles of hell, but New York and the IRS haven’t done anything to stop them,” Ortel said.