Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear spoke with lawyer and activist Mara Verheyden-Hilliard; Michael Prysner, producer for Telesur’s The Empire Files; and Eugene Puryear, host of Radio Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary, about whether Clinton’s claims are legitimate — or a diversionary tactic used to obscure corruption.
The Washington Post recently detailed a memo written by Clinton aide Doug Band, alluding to a quid-pro-quo relationship between the Clinton Foundation, big business and foreign governments. Clinton operative Glen Caplin didn’t confirm or deny the veracity of the memo, but said that the campaign had been “hacked by the Russians and weaponized by WikiLeaks.”
Puryear pointed out that the former Secretary of State has denied pay for play tactics from the beginning of her campaign.
What’s important about this thirteen page memo is that it’s just another confirmation of what we already knew, that clearly people were making big donations and they were hoping for some specialized treatment," he said. He also suggested that there appears to be a power struggle within the Clinton foundation on behalf of daughter Chelsea Clinton to wrest control of the organization from Doug Band.
"What you find out is that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation was operating in a way where, clearly, it was directly susceptible to outside interests donating to the Clinton Foundation as a way to try to influence former President Clinton and almost certainly Hillary Clinton and her team, including her daughter, wanted to push out Doug Band, because they recognize that there is a very serious issue here," Puryear explained.
Prysner noted that the Clinton campaign tends to deflect from definitely acknowledging the content of hacked emails, but instead defaults to blaming the hack on the Russian government, which he offers may be a cover for their own connections.
He said that the emails reveal Clinton campaign chief John Podesta "is actually tied to the Russian government. He’s received quite a lot of money from Russia’s biggest bank, he was receiving quite a lot of money from the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, which is a Russian-linked organization. So he’s lobbying on behalf of the government that they say is hacking their emails."
Verheyden-Hilliard called the Clinton Foundation a "massively corrupt enterprise," whose inner workings were only known to a handful of the wealthy elite. "It wasn’t something operating on the sidelines in secret,” she commented, “it was operating in a large, visible way, but [only] to those operating within that corrupt sphere. So all these other national governments that were donating money, the Saudis, these large corporations that were benefitting so much from this, Coca Cola and others, they all obviously know about it. But the public didn’t know about it."
