More pay to play discovered within the Clinton State Department has been revealed…The Chief of Protocol at the State Department is as much a grifter as the Clintons. Dennis Chang sold seats to White House dinners to donors of the Clinton Foundation! As it turns out, the protocol office was filled with former Clintonites during Bill’s tenure as president…cronyism at its highest level!
A total of 205 Clinton Foundation donors whose corporations and foundations collectively contributed $216 million since 2009, were awarded the most coveted invitations in the nation’s capital: prestigious seats at one or more White House State Dinners.
At least 15 of the Clinton Foundation’s corporate donors — representing $47 million in contributions — were able to win invitations to two or more official state dinners.
Significantly, the decision makers who authorized the special invitations were not at the White House at all, but were ensconced in the Department of State’s Office of Protocol. The protocol office, chosen by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is filled solely with long-time Clinton loyalists.
Despite the Democratic presidential nominee’s departure from the Department of State in 2013, all of the top officeholders in the protocol office throughout Obama’s two terms have been senior staffers who served in either former President Bill Clinton’s White House or in Hillary’s Senate and 2008 presidential campaigns.
Critics of the foundation worry Dennis Cheng — who served as Clinton’s protocol deputy chief and later went directly to the Clinton Foundation as its chief fundraiser — could have “walked away” with valuable donor lists compiled by the office.
After Cheng left the Department of State, he raised a record quarter billion dollars while at the foundation. He is now Hillary’s national fundraiser, leading her presidential bid to raise $2 billion. As a result, The Daily Beast once called him, “Hillary Clinton’s $2 billion money man.”
If Cheng shared confidential information with the foundation, he may have violated a special “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) signed by the foundation and the Obama transition team in November 2008. The MOU warned of avoiding “potential or actual conflict of interest.”
Cheng also could run afoul of a 18 USC 208, a federal statute that “prohibits an executive branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests,” including those of a prospective employer or a family member.
“How much of the mailing list and contact information Cheng got at Protocol, migrated over to the Clinton Foundation,” asked Charles Ortel a Wall Street investor and an outspoken critic of the Clinton Foundation.
Read more: Daily Caller
