Saturday, September 17, 2016

DEPLORABLES NOT INVITED TO BILL CLINTON'S 'PRIVATE' BD PARTY

Unless, of course, they have thousands of dollars to throw at them.


Clinton Foundation officials confirmed that the fundraiser is the final one planned before the Nov. 8 election, and that Bill Clinton planned to attend.

Hillary Clinton, who is recovering from a highly scrutinized case of pneumonia, is not planning to attend the party, her campaign said.

Foundation officials also would not say how much money has been raised for the Rainbow Room fundraiser or from whom.

But they pointed out that former President Clinton had parties marking past milestone birthdays that also doubled as fundraisers for his foundation, which raised $12.6 million from his 60th birthday bash, and said everyone set to attend Friday’s party was aware that it was a fundraiser for the foundation.

The foundation has pledged to enact a series of reforms if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, including having Bill Clinton step down from the board, and no longer accepting foreign or corporate donations.

The reforms are part of an effort to tamp down concerns about potential conflicts of interest that have dogged Clinton during her presidential campaign. Her campaign has spent considerable time responding to questions about whether foundation donors got special access to the State Department when she was secretary of state.

And those questions are sure to be raised anew in the coming days.

Not only are major foundation donors gathering at the Rainbow Room on Friday, but on Monday, they’ll convene again five blocks away for the final three-day gathering of the Clinton Global Initiative, which typically concludes with a gala dinner.

Some Clinton supporters have been grumbling for months that it was politically unwise to hold a CGI meeting seven weeks before the election, but they at least conceded that it was a justifiable sendoff for a program that engaged global business leaders in noble humanitarian pursuits.

The Rainbow Room party, on the other hand, induced cringes among some Clinton supporters, who cast it as an unnecessary show of excess at a sensitive time in the presidential race. Clinton’s campaign is scrambling to deal with questions about her health, her transparency, the efficacy of the foundation reforms and her declaration — for which she has since apologized — that half of the supporters of her GOP rival Donald Trump are “deplorables.”

The Rainbow Room party is a “bad idea,” said one Clinton supporter who has worked with the foundation, who predicted that the fundraiser would call even more attention to the Clintons relationships with their donors.


Clinton Foundation won't disclose donors for Bill Clinton's party | Washington Examiner

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