"....the FBI is investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for granting favors to her family’s foundation donors and for its systematic accounting fraud.
To take one of so many examples, there’s the case of Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio — who is now housed at a federal prison serving twelve years for fraud — who in 2010, with Hillary’s help (and Bill’s too), won a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
T
he loan was granted to an Osorio firm called InnoVida, which was supposed to build houses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Instead, Osorio pocketed the money and used it to underwrite his lavish lifestyle and to pay off politicians.
And that leads me to another Clinton Foundation donor Hillary helped out who happened to use Mr. Mantz (who now runs Hillary’s presidential campaign Super PAC) as well, and apparently with the same great effect: Gonzalo Tirado, a crooked Venezuelan financier.
Tirado was president of and ran Venezuelan operations for the famously corrupt Stanford Bank, which was headquartered in Antigua and was named for its American founder, Allen Stanford. He and Stanford came to be extremely close, and “were like father and son,” one well-placed source told me.
Stanford’s name may ring a bell as he was sentenced to prison for 110 years for committing an $8 billion Ponzi scheme .In 2006, the Hugo Chavez government was asked to investigate Tirado by scandal-plagued, pro-Wall Street New York Congressman Gregory W. Meeks, a member of the House Committee on Financial Services and a major recipient of cash and perks from jailbird Allen Stanford. Tirado was charged with tax evasion and theft, The Hill newspaper has reported.
(Tirado, who did not reply to a request for comment, has kept a low profile as of late. His last reported sighting came in 2014, when he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, or at least claimed he intended to kill himself.).
Incredibly, the Obama administration not only failed to help the Chavez government investigate Tirado, but it also indicted a legendary former DEA agent named Tom Raffanello, a one-time head of the DEA’s Miami office and the agency’s chief of congressional affairs during Bill Clinton’s first term as president.
Raffanello’s subsequent prosecution, which ended in abysmal failure, almost surely was prompted and abetted by Tirado, a secret FBI informant. Unsurprisingly, the vindicated Mr. Raffanello had few kind words for Tirado or Hillary during a recent interview.
“Tirado believed in buying influence,” Mr. Raffanello said of the crooked financier. “He wouldn’t give away ten cents that he didn’t think he’d get back a dollar on. That was his entire philosophy.”
As for Hillary, he said that during her years in the Obama administration the “prevailing wisdom in Miami at the time, among people in high profile civl and criminal defense circles, was that giving money to the Clinton Foundation was very helpful. She was secretary of state and a potential future president. I’m sure that’s the same thinking now.”
(Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign did not reply to a request for comment.)
Up until 2006, life was cushy for pampered, wealthy, jet-setting Gonzalo Tirado, who was running the Stanford Bank’s Venezuela operations. Events took a turn for the worse when an internal Stanford Bank audit discovered that he had fleeced about $5 million from the company.
Tirado’s actions did not sit well with Stanford and the Venezuelan beat a hasty exit from his job. He soon opened a bank of his own and lured in a few local investors. His new enterprise went down the tubes and the defrauded locals, who were very close to the Chavez government, looked to it for help, leading to an investigation of Tirado.
(See this Wikileaked cable for more on the topic and on Tirado’s feud with the Venezuelan government.) That led to the filing of criminal charges against Tirado, as noted above. (The Venezuelan embassy in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.)
Mantz went to work lobbying Hillary’s State Department to let Tirado stay in Miami. Meanwhile, the crooked Tirado donated between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. As is its custom, the foundation does not state when the donation was made and declined to answer questions about the money it took from Tirado.
To sum up here, a corrupt Venezuelan banker hired a lobbyist close to Hillary Clinton, made a donation to her family’s foundation, and has been allowed to live in the United States without fear of prosecution in his homeland." Observer
To take one of so many examples, there’s the case of Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio — who is now housed at a federal prison serving twelve years for fraud — who in 2010, with Hillary’s help (and Bill’s too), won a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
T
And that leads me to another Clinton Foundation donor Hillary helped out who happened to use Mr. Mantz (who now runs Hillary’s presidential campaign Super PAC) as well, and apparently with the same great effect: Gonzalo Tirado, a crooked Venezuelan financier.
Tirado was president of and ran Venezuelan operations for the famously corrupt Stanford Bank, which was headquartered in Antigua and was named for its American founder, Allen Stanford. He and Stanford came to be extremely close, and “were like father and son,” one well-placed source told me.
Stanford’s name may ring a bell as he was sentenced to prison for 110 years for committing an $8 billion Ponzi scheme .In 2006, the Hugo Chavez government was asked to investigate Tirado by scandal-plagued, pro-Wall Street New York Congressman Gregory W. Meeks, a member of the House Committee on Financial Services and a major recipient of cash and perks from jailbird Allen Stanford. Tirado was charged with tax evasion and theft, The Hill newspaper has reported.
(Tirado, who did not reply to a request for comment, has kept a low profile as of late. His last reported sighting came in 2014, when he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, or at least claimed he intended to kill himself.).
Incredibly, the Obama administration not only failed to help the Chavez government investigate Tirado, but it also indicted a legendary former DEA agent named Tom Raffanello, a one-time head of the DEA’s Miami office and the agency’s chief of congressional affairs during Bill Clinton’s first term as president.
Raffanello’s subsequent prosecution, which ended in abysmal failure, almost surely was prompted and abetted by Tirado, a secret FBI informant. Unsurprisingly, the vindicated Mr. Raffanello had few kind words for Tirado or Hillary during a recent interview.
“Tirado believed in buying influence,” Mr. Raffanello said of the crooked financier. “He wouldn’t give away ten cents that he didn’t think he’d get back a dollar on. That was his entire philosophy.”
As for Hillary, he said that during her years in the Obama administration the “prevailing wisdom in Miami at the time, among people in high profile civl and criminal defense circles, was that giving money to the Clinton Foundation was very helpful. She was secretary of state and a potential future president. I’m sure that’s the same thinking now.”
(Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign did not reply to a request for comment.)
Up until 2006, life was cushy for pampered, wealthy, jet-setting Gonzalo Tirado, who was running the Stanford Bank’s Venezuela operations. Events took a turn for the worse when an internal Stanford Bank audit discovered that he had fleeced about $5 million from the company.
Tirado’s actions did not sit well with Stanford and the Venezuelan beat a hasty exit from his job. He soon opened a bank of his own and lured in a few local investors. His new enterprise went down the tubes and the defrauded locals, who were very close to the Chavez government, looked to it for help, leading to an investigation of Tirado.
(See this Wikileaked cable for more on the topic and on Tirado’s feud with the Venezuelan government.) That led to the filing of criminal charges against Tirado, as noted above. (The Venezuelan embassy in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.)
Mantz went to work lobbying Hillary’s State Department to let Tirado stay in Miami. Meanwhile, the crooked Tirado donated between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. As is its custom, the foundation does not state when the donation was made and declined to answer questions about the money it took from Tirado.
To sum up here, a corrupt Venezuelan banker hired a lobbyist close to Hillary Clinton, made a donation to her family’s foundation, and has been allowed to live in the United States without fear of prosecution in his homeland." Observer
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