#clinton foundation

[reality-detective]

Part 2

Clintons’ Secret Pedophile and Cannibal Club in Haiti Exposed By Locals.

The Clintons have long considered Haiti to be their personal playground where they can indulge in their wildest fantasies with close friends from the global elite, according to Haitians who allege the Democrat power couple are involved in a Satanic cannibal club in which children are ritually abused and their flesh eaten.

According to multiple eyewitnesses in Haiti, the Satanic club has become the new Bohemian Grove for the jetsetting globalist elite, with private jets regularly landing in Port-au-Prince before the passengers are whisked away to their secret hideout in the jungle where unspeakable horrors involving children have been documented by local investigators.

The locals call this place “Clinton’s den” and generations of local children have been taught to be terrified of Bill and Hillary who are viewed as evil incarnate due to the depraved nature of the company they keep, as violent cannibals and pedophiles stalk the island with impunity. 🤔

[dosesofcommonsense]

Jennifer Garner seems like the girl next door. Maybe she is if you’re living next to a family who wants to imprison you and take away your family before ending your life.

90% of Hollywood is Hollyweird. They look pretty on the outside and are black as night with Hells flames licking their insides.

Buyer beware.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Look who flew into DC for an early Halloween.

Blake Wolf Thursday, September 26, 2024

Hillary Clinton continued to demonize supporters of former President Donald Trump this week, arguing that the term “deplorables” is actually “too kind” of a characterization for the Republican voter base.

Clinton released an op-ed in The Washing Post on Wednesday. She described how difficult it was for her to empathize with “radicalized individuals,” reflecting back on her “basket of deplorables” phrase from 2016, when she lost to Trump in the U.S. election.

However, political strategists highlighted how Clinton’s use of that phrase greatly damaged her political campaign, as she continued to openly insult a demographic comprised of working class, blue collar voters, the same group that many Democrat politicians claim to want to benefit in their campaign messaging.

“In 2016, I famously described half of Trump’s supporters as ‘the basket of deplorables’. I was talking about the people who are drawn to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia – you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to Jan. 6,” Clinton wrote in the piece.

She continued on, stating, “The masks have come off, and if anything, ‘deplorable’ is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.”

In contrast, Clinton attempted to compare and integrate the “expertise” of Shannon Foley, a former white supremacist, who has changed her life and now “works to deprogram and rehabilitate people leaving hate groups,” to reigning in Trump supporters. Clinton added that she “marveled at the empathy Shannon managed to summon for even the most (yes, let’s say it) deplorable bigots.”

However, The Denver Post outlet previously noted that “when Clinton aides speak in private, their basket of ‘deplorables’ includes faithful Catholics and evangelicals who believe in the sanctity of human life.”

Clinton continued in the op-ed: “I wondered whether Shannon’s thoughtful, empathetic approach could offer lessons not just for rescuing radicalized individuals but also for healing our wounded country. What will it take to pull us out of the madness? Is there any way to drain the fever swamps so we can stand together on firmer, higher ground.”

Although she believes that her “deplorable” characterization holds true, Clinton claimed that she would strives to look at the Republican base with more empathy.

“Talking about the ‘deplorables’ in 2016, I said, ‘Some of those folks, they are irredeemable.’ Part of me would still say this is objectively true. Just look at the lack of remorse from many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who’ve been convicted of sedition and other crimes. But another part of me wants to believe something else. I’d like to believe there’s goodness in everyone and a chance at redemption, no matter how remote,” she concluded, presenting herself as taking the moral high ground.

[wontgetfooledagain]

[reasoningdaily]

The Clinton Foundation faces accusations it mishandled funds intended for Haiti earthquake relief, as the Justice Department investigates whether the Clintons gave or promised policy-related favors to foundation donors. (Photo: Current Affairs)

As a result of the recent comments by President Donald Trump — in which he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” and said, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out” — the issue of the Haiti’s plight has resurfaced, but within a different context. The Clinton Foundation has been accused of corruption and misuse of funds, including allegations the foundation committed fraud in Haiti.

As The Hill reported this month, the Justice Department is conducting an investigation in Little Rock, Ark., into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in “pay to play” politics while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State under Obama. Specifically, the FBI is investigating whether the Clintons promised or fulfilled any policy-related favors to foundation donors, or if donors gave to the charity for the purposes of receiving access to Clinton or particular outcomes from the government. Trump, whose campaign and supporters adopted the phrase “Lock her up!” has called for investigations into his former political rival. When he was on the campaign trail supporting Trump, now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused Hillary Clinton of using her position leading the Obama State Department to extort foreign governments to benefit the Clinton Foundation.

A November 2, 2016, report from the BBC immediately before the election noted that Trump has criticized the Clintons’ work in Haiti. “I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida. And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons because what’s happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace,” Trump said in the final presidential debate with Clinton. In the 1980s, Haiti accused former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier of laundering money he stole from Haiti by purchasing an apartment in Trump Tower. Trump sold the Trump Tower apartment to Duvalier through a Panamanian shell corporation in 1983, a practice which hides the finances and identities of buyers.

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed an estimated 220,000 people. International donors pledged an estimated $13.3 billion in aid to the Caribbean nation in the wake of the devastation. Along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, former President Bill Clinton, who was UN Special Envoy to Haiti, became co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). From January 2010 through June 2012, $9.04 billion in international funding was raised — $3.04 billion from individuals and companies, and $6.04 billion from bilateral and multilateral donors. Of the $6.04 billion, 9.6 percent, or $580 million went to the Haitian government, while 0.6 percent or $36.2 million went to local Haitian organizations. The lion’s share, 89.8 percent of $5.4 billion went to non-Haitian organizations, including private contractors, international NGOs, and military and civilian agencies of donor countries, including the Pentagon, which charged the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars.

Critics have pointed at the Clinton Foundation, alleging the charity had control over the billions of dollars in aid to Haiti. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Clintons’ involvement in Haiti translated into mixed feelings in the Haitian-American community about Hillary Clinton, ranging from low enthusiasm to disappointment and anger. As secretary of state, Clinton supported the presidency of Michel Martelly, intruding into Haitian electoral politics by flying to Haiti in 2011 to pressure President René Préval to allow Martelly to participate in a two-person runoff. Martelly won. As president, Martelly selected Special Envoy Bill Clinton’s chief of staff as prime minister, and gave important positions to people with criminal backgrounds, and was known for corruption and violent government repression, and attempting to install his successor. Mrs. Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, became a member of an advisory board of a mining company that owns a gold mine in Haiti and was introduced to the company through the Clinton Global Initiative arm of the Clinton Foundation. All of this fueled speculation that the United States and the Clintons were installing a puppet government and engaging in profiteering and drew the ire of Haitians and Haitian-Americans.

According to right-wing commentator and financial analyst Charles Ortel in an interview with journalist H.A. Goodman in Huffington Post, the hurricane created an opportunity for the Clinton Foundation and its allies to raise considerable resources, but with little accounting of these funds. “The Clintons seem to be ‘merchants around misery’, operating as a kind of ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’ — there are many disasters that they seem to have exploited,” Ortel said. “In brief, the Clinton Foundation solicited massive sums to ‘fight HIV/AIDS’ but did not check carefully enough to ensure that these drugs were supplied in intact form, and neither adulterated nor watered-down,” he added. The Nation also reported the “hurricane-proof” classroom trailers the foundation used in Haiti were structurally unsafe and laced with formaldehyde, a product of the same company sued by Hurricane Katrina victims.

Reflecting the anger against the Clintons among the Haitian-American community, on January 12, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti (Komokoda) held a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in New York City. Speaking at the protest was Dahoud Andre, president of Komokoda and a radio host.

The organization says it continues to protest the Clintons because “there is still no justice despite the billions they have stolen through Bill Clinton’s position (as) UN Special Envoy to Haiti in March of 2009 in the aftermath of 4 major storms which devastated parts of our country; through the post 2010 earthquake Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission; through foreign governments and corporations funneling hundreds of millions (most of them undisclosed) for favors from then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Clinton Foundation under the guise of helping Haiti; and through the Clinton-Bush Fund,” Komokoda said in a press statement. In light of the announcement by the Justice Department, the group says it remains vigilant and demands a serious investigation, and that any crimes are fully prosecuted and punished. “It is itself a crime that this Justice Department prosecuted and got a conviction against Corrine Brown, Florida’s first African-American Congressperson since Reconstruction for corruption related to $800,000 from her ‘One Door for Education’ charity and yet it took them this long to even start an investigation of the Clintons,” the statement added.

Komokoda’s claims of the Justice Department’s tardiness in looking at the Clintons notwithstanding, Bill and Hillary Clinton have together and separately weathered multiple federal and congressional investigations ranging from Whitewater in the 1990s through the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers as secretary of state that wrapped up in 2016 during her campaign for president. The latest probe, a renewal of an investigation that began under the Obama administration, has found the Clintons prepared to respond.

The Clinton Foundation told Atlanta Black Star that it raised $30 million for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts, and did not have control over the bulk of the $9 billion raised for Haiti. “Overall, we’d point out that many of the claims about the Clinton Foundation and Haiti have been found to be flat-out false,” the Clinton Foundation press office said in a statement. “All funding collected by the Clinton Foundation for Haiti was distributed in full to aid groups on the ground, and we have documented which groups received this funding and what it was for. The Clinton Foundation did not take a penny in overhead for our work.”

The foundation also pointed to various refuted claims, including Trump’s assertion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did favors for Clinton Foundation donors, and that “Hillary Clinton set aside environmental and labor rules to help a South Korean company with a record of violating workers’ rights set up what amounts to a sweatshop in Haiti.” Politifact depicted his claim as “mostly false.” BBC reported that the foundation and the State Department arranged with the Haitian government for a $300 million, 600-acre factory to produce clothing for retail giants such as Target, Walmart and Old Navy. Several hundred farmers were evicted to clear the land, and the South Korean textile company Sae-A Trading Co. later donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the foundation. While Clinton said the facility would produce 100,000 jobs, only 8,000 were created.

The Washington Post rebutted another allegation, that Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation raised hundreds of millions of dollars for a hospital that was never built. Further, Jonathan Katz, who was the Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake, wrote a piece in Slate stating that “neither I nor anyone else has found the coveted evidence of either Clinton making off with vast sums of money from Haiti or the relief effort.” Katz offers the historical backdrop of U.S. intervention in Haiti and elsewhere, and the failed earthquake recovery in Haiti, which led to spiraling inflation and spikes in violence. “No two individuals, including Haiti’s own leaders, enjoyed more power and influence than the Clintons in the morass of the failed reconstruction following the deadly Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, when a troubled country managed to go from catastrophe to worse,” he said, arguing that there is no proof the goal was to financially benefit the Clintons.

Katz did find fault with Hillary Clinton for pursuing “badly flawed” vision of prosperity for Haiti focused on “foreign investment in tourism, construction, and low-wage garment factories” which would mean low wages and little money flowing in the local economy, rather than the stated goal of reliving Haitians from poverty and preventing future refugee crises. That model, he argued, has been pursued by the U.S. since the 1960s. “The system isn’t designed for them; it’s for us. The low wages that the U.S. embassy helped suppress are the reason we can enjoy a steady stream of $9 Mossimo camisoles and $12.99 six-packs of Hanes T-shirts. Even U.S. military uniform parts get made in Haitian sweatshops,” Katz added.

Snopes has debunked two conspiracy theories that have circulated in conservative circles and among misinformation news sites, specifically that former Haitian official Klaus Oberwein died of a suspicious suicide days before he was scheduled to testify against the Clinton Foundation or Hillary Clinton, and that a “U.S. surgeon who exposed ‘Clinton Foundation corruption in Haiti’ was found dead in his home under suspicious circumstances.” And Bill Clinton denied any claims that the Clinton Foundation used money designated for Haiti for personal means.

While there is disagreement over the role of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti, it is certain that billions of dollars were raised for Haiti.

The American Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti, spent one-quarter of the funds on internal expenses and only built six houses. The people of Haiti, the first Black republic, have suffered and continue to suffer. Everyone has failed Haiti.

[archiveofkloss]

the clinton foundation asked karlie kloss how she manages to choose optimism in the face of today’s challenges: this is her answer 🤍

[ridiculouspickles]

[gettothestabbing]

“Upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence information from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately. Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump.”

“The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information. Further, the FBI did so without (i) any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typicallv employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence,” the report concluded.

“Had it done so … the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials, nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject. In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials,” it said.

“In the eighteen months leading up to the 2016 election, the FBI was required to deal with a number of proposed investigations that had the potential of affecting the election. In each of those instances, the FBI moved with considerable caution. In one such matter… FBI Headquarters and Department officials required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference,” it said. “In another, the FBI elected to end an investigation after one of its longtime and valuable CHSs went beyond what was authorized and made an improper and possibly illegal financial contribution to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign entity as a precursor to a much larger donation being contemplated.”

“And in a third, the Clinton Foundation matter, both senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how those matters were to be handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election. These examples are also markedly different from the FBI’s actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server,” it said.

“Within days after opening Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI opened full investigations on four members of the Trump campaign team: George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. No defensive briefing was provided to Trump or anyone in the campaign concerning the information received from Australia that suggested there might be some type of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, either prior to or after these investigations were opened. Instead, the FBI began working on requests for the use of FISA authorities against Page and Papadopoulos.”

“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting. Nor was Steele able to produce corroboration for any of the reported allegations, even after being offered $1 million or more by the FBI for such corroboration.

“The FBI learned that Steele relied primarily on a U.S.-based Russian national, Igor Danchenko, to collect information that ultimately formed the core allegations found in the reports. Specifically, our investigation discovered that Danchenko himself had told another person that he (Danchenko) was responsible for 80% of the ‘intel’ and 50% of the analysis contained in the Steele Dossier.”

“In December 2016, the FBI identified Danchenko as Steele’s primary sub-source. Danchenko agreed to meet with the FBI and, under the protection of an immunity letter… the FBI conducted multiple interviews of Danchenko regarding, among other things, the information he provided to Steele,” it said. “Danchenko was unable to provide any corroborating evidence to support the Steele allegations, and further, described his interactions with his sub-sources as ‘rumor and speculation’ and conversations of a casual nature. Significant parts of what Danchenko told the FBI were inconsistent with what Steele told the FBI during his prior interviews in October 2016 and September 2017. At no time, however, was the FISC informed of these inconsistencies. Moreover, notwithstanding the repeated assertions in the Page FISA applications that Steele’s primary sub-source was based in Russia, Danchenko for many years had lived in the Washington, D.C. area.”

“The FBI knew in January 2017 that Danchenko had been the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011. In late 2008, while Danchenko was employed by the Brookings Institution, he engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money. According to one employee, Danchenko believed that he (the employee might be following a mentor into the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information. During this exchange, Danchenko informed the employee that he had access to people who were willing to pay for classified information.”

“The FBI converted its investigation into a full investigation after learning that Danchenko (i) had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and (ii) had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers… at that earlier time, Agents had interviewed several former colleagues of Danchenko who raised concerns about Danchenko’s potential involvement with Russian intelligence. For example, one such colleague, who had interned at a U.S. intelligence agency, informed the Office that Danchenko frequently inquired about that person’s knowledge of a specific Russian military matter.”

You can read the report here.

[msclaritea]

The U.S has also been interfering with Haiti. Bill 'I'm A Pedo' Clinton blocked Haiti's ability to sell rice. All of this is outright Genocidal tactics against two black countries. The light Cubans came here and got taken care of. The rest are still in Cuba. And don't get me started on the Clinton Foundation involvement there. It's also pretty anti-Christian. Haiti has a large Christian number.

this is your daily reminder that it's been over 65 years since cuba overthrew batista's US-backed fascist dictatorship and the US is STILL keeping cuba in extreme poverty using an "embargo."

back in the 1950s, using US funds and US-trained soldiers, batista (not castro) removed most of cubans' rights, including the right to strike, censored all media, and used secret police to torture and publicly excute anyone who protested his dictatorship. In a document released by the CIA in 2005, it stated as many as 20,000 people were killed. In return, batista gave control of most of the arable land to the US. during the revolution, this land was reclaimed and redistributed, which means that USAmericans can now sue anyone who "traffics" in this "confiscated" property.

Despite US sanctions being an "embargo," the US also fines foreign companies for doing business in Cuba, meaning it's effectively a blockade. Despite Obama lightening some of these restrictions, Biden has done little to undo the tightened policies from Trump's administration.

In November, the UN called for the 31st time (!!!) for the US blockade to end, supported by 187 countries and opposed only by the US and its bestest buddy (I'll let you guess who).

Cuba has been in economic crisis for years. Monthly income in Cuba is $30-60. There is very little food and it is hard to purchase anything like toiletries, clothes, and over-the-counter medicines. Domestic production is down because they don't have the resources to sustain them. The US has been intentionally impoverishing and starving Cuba for decades, and they continue to make it clear that it is not going to stop.

So, yeah. US democracy is a joke, end the US blockade on Cuba, and fuck genocide joe.

[reality-detective]

Part 1

Clintons’ Secret Pedophile and Cannibal Club in Haiti Exposed By Locals

The Clintons have long considered Haiti to be their personal playground where they can indulge in their wildest fantasies with close friends from the global elite, according to Haitians who allege the Democrat power couple are involved in a Satanic cannibal club in which children are ritually abused and their flesh eaten.

According to multiple eyewitnesses in Haiti, the Satanic club has become the new Bohemian Grove for the jetsetting globalist elite, with private jets regularly landing in Port-au-Prince before the passengers are whisked away to their secret hideout in the jungle where unspeakable horrors involving children have been documented by local investigators.

The locals call this place “Clinton’s den” and generations of local children have been taught to be terrified of Bill and Hillary who are viewed as evil incarnate due to the depraved nature of the company they keep, as violent cannibals and pedophiles stalk the island with impunity. 🤔

[mel-rhodes-place]

ISRAEL INVADES LEABANON

(Israeli soldiers are deployed in the Upper Galilee region of northern Israel near the border with Lebanon on Sunday. Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133463/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-invasion) Israel has launched a significant ground invasion into southern Lebanon, marking a dramatic escalation in its conflict with Hezbollah. Why it matters:  This move…

[heyjoe4041]

The Boeing whistleblower "committed suicide". Hmmm, I wonder how much Boeing stock the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation own?

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

The Meghans are following the Clinton Crime Foundation Model. Remember this:

[theworldchangedwithoutme]

The woman isn’t dumb. She saw what happened to Epstein.

[reasoningdaily]

Less than two months ago, parts of Port-au-Prince seemed like a ghost town. Streets and parks normally bustling with commerce and people were nearly empty.  

Market women, who normally lined the roads selling everything from food to second-hand cellphones, were few and far between. Charred tires, piles of rocks, and makeshift barricades, the remnants of months of protests against the government, could be seen throughout the capital. The once pristine Petionville,  an affluent suburb of Port-au-Prince, was barely recognizable in some parts, with trash overrunning the streets. 

Over the last 18 months, Haiti has been in the throes of a perpetual cycle of protests —  some violent — and unrest that has destabilized the country for weeks at a time. Years of pent-up frustration over rising inflation and basic costs of necessities on the island came to a boil during a week in July 2018, when the Haitian government nearly doubled fuel prices over night. The move, which was a condition for future aid imposed by the International Monetary Fund, sparked outrage that spilled into the streets, leaving Haiti’s capital charred by flames and fury. People were barricaded in their homes, offices, restaurants, while thousands of people took to the streets rallying against the fuel hike. 

The Best Western, which permanently closed its doors on Oct. 31, loomed over Petionville as a symbolic and literal reminder of the state of affairs in Haiti. For many, the U.S.-based hotel chain’s arrival in the country had marked a positive new turn in Haiti following the January 2010 earthquake.

Now, it seems, the hopeful signs have come undone. While daily life in Haiti has always been difficult for most Haitians, the past 18 months on the island have been particularly hard. As the country finds itself in the throes of a fluctuating political, economic and social crisis, the capital city has been virtually paralyzed, with schools, businesses, and banks closed for days, if not weeks, at a time.

This was not the Haiti anyone had hoped for 10 years after the disaster.

The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010 killed roughly 300,000 people and displaced nearly a million more. While the epicenter of the earthquake was only 16 miles from Port-au-Prince, the tremor could be felt as far away as Cuba and Venezuela. The devastation was the single greatest humanitarian crisis the small-island country had ever faced. The capital’s already fragile infrastructure was nearly decimated, while the airport and seaports were rendered inoperable. The National Assembly building and Port-au-Prince Cathedral were also destroyed.

“There was a natural expectation that things would be done differently from there on because it was such a big tragedy and the way that that tragedy unfolded was in itself a reflection of choices that were made historically in the country in terms of governance,” said Ludovic Comeau Jr., professor of economics at DePaul University and former chief economist of Haiti’s central bank. 

According to Comeau, most of the country’s wealth was severely impacted by the earthquake because of the centralization of Haiti’s economy in Port-au-Prince, with damages totaling 120 percent of the country’s GDP. 

“[It was] not only our hope, but almost our certainty, that things would be done differently [in Haiti] and within the next 20 years, Haiti would be an emerging economy,” Comeau said. “It’s certainly not the path we took. There’s no way Haiti will become an emerging economy by 2030.”

“This is worse than the earthquake”

Melinda Stephanie Dominique, a medical student at Quisqueya University, spent the fall semester waiting to find out when it would be safe enough for her to return to school. Instead of studying for exams and walking the halls of her campus with her classmates, she was home weighing the risks she would face if she did decide to venture out. 

“We watch the news, we see the videos,” said Dominique, who has three years left in her program. “We’re not going out just like that. Especially when you can hear the bullets yourself. There’s no way to know whether you’ll be able to make it back home.”

While some schools sent notice and formally closed their doors at the height of the protests, others simply shuttered their doors because students stopped coming in.  In Dominique’s case, Quisqueya University opted to suspend classes until the protests subsided. 

“We don’t know what’s going to happen in this country,” Dominique said. 

The political and social turmoil in the country is exacerbated by a feeling of hopelessness that has taken hold in the country, in large part due to the disappointment surrounding earthquake relief and reconstruction efforts. 

For the first time in decades Haiti had the world’s attention. However  the overwhelming consensus is that the Haitian government and members of the CORE Group — composed of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General, the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, the United States of America, and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States — squandered what little chance Haiti had to emerge as a growing and stable economy. 

Comeau says the last decade is one of “missed opportunities, endemic corruption sustained by an equally endemic impunity.”

“You have a situation where public officials in charge of budget in some administrations pilfer the country’s money, and there’s no accountability,” he said. “There’s this mentality that people can do whatever they want, including mismanaging and essentially embezzling public funds. You see all of this culminates in the PetroCaribe scandal.” 

In 2005 Venezuela launched the PetroCaribe program that allowed Caribbean countries to buy oil at market value, with only a portion of the payment made upfront, while the remainder of the balance could be paid through a 25-year financing agreement with a 1 percent interest rate. The aim of the program was to spur development and fund social programs in recipient countries. In Haiti, however, nearly $3 billion of the PetroCaribe funds went missing, with Haitians having little to show for the billions of dollars that were poured into the country. 

“There’s nothing that can be shown for that $3 billion,” Comeau said. “This is what I’m talking about when I say missed opportunities. Here you have this money from 2008 – 2017 that was available to do something great. We could have built a major hospital in every major region in the country. We could have built universities in every department. We could have improved our infrastructure and modernized, which would have attracted foreign investors. We missed all of this.”

Since the earthquake, more than $7 billion in foreign aid has been disbursed to Haiti, according to research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Haitian organizations and firms, however, received just over 2 percent of the funds that had been allocated to the country. 

Criticisms and accusations of fraud, mismanagement and misappropriation of funds plagued relief efforts for years, spurring accountability campaigns demanding answers to the whereabouts of billions of dollars that were meant for reconstruction efforts in Haiti. 

Bill and Hillary Clinton were at the center of many scandals surrounding Haiti and the relief funds.

In the days following the earthquake, Bill was tapped as co-chair of the commission tasked with allocating relief funds, while Hillary oversaw more than $4 billion Congress earmarked recovery efforts. However, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed officials from the Clinton Foundation — the couple’s personal philanthropic fund — were looking out for bids and proposals from the Clintons’ friends and associates.  In the end, the foundation secured 34 projects in the country, including the $350 million Caracol Industrial Park project. The project led to the creation of 10,000 jobs in Haiti, instead of the 65,000 the Clintons promised. 

“Billions of dollars were donated to Haiti after the earthquake and we have no idea what was done with that money,” Comeau said.

“In 10 years, nothing has changed,” Dominique said. “We didn’t move forward; we stayed static.”

For many, the current state of affairs in Haiti is worse than any damage the country suffered because of the earthquake. This was more devastating because of its “man-made” nature. 

The chain of events to follow would set the stage for a Haiti that many are saying is at its lowest point ever.  The Kot Kob Petrocaribe movement would highlight more than ever the endemic corruption in Haitian politics, and pave the way for the dismissal of prime ministers and eventual calls for the  resignation of President Jovenel Moise. The movement, which started on Twitter, has since been co-opted and used by Haitian politicians and oligarchs to further their political interests by calling for the ouster of Moise. 

Haiti’s already fragile tourism sector has been one of the biggest casualties of Haiti’s unrest. Following the earthquake, former President Michel Martelly made a big push for tourism in the country, with then-Minister of Tourism Stephanie Voulledrain leading an international branding tour, selling Haiti as an untapped tourism treasure trove. 

Several fruitful projects began as  part of the effective branding campaign. Airlines added flights to the country, new hotel brands were drawn to Port-au-Prince and more and more members of the Diaspora and their friends made their way to Haiti for vacation, conferences and more. 

However, in a matter of months, years of work has been reversed. Best Western closed its doors. Delta ceased flights to Haiti, while other carriers significantly reduced their service to the country. Popular resorts and hotels like Decameron Indigo Beach Resort and Spa, and Karibe are virtually empty. 

Searching for understanding

There are several theories as to why Haiti is in the state it is in, despite the billions of dollars in aid and donations the country received. Some point to neo-colonialism, imperialism and U.S. intervention, while others place blame on the Duvaliers, the corrupt Haitian government, or the lack of engagement among the Diaspora. The truth is, it’s a melange of it all, which is what makes imagining what comes next for Haiti so difficult. 

“The Haitian-American convention did away with Haiti’s sovereignty and it’s a sovereignty that Haiti has never gotten back,” Alain Martin, director of The Forgotten Occupation, said. The documentary tells the story of the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 from the perspective of Haitian historians, authors, journalists and politicians. “To this day, nothing happens in Haiti without the say-so of the State Department.”

The Haitian-American Treaty of 1915 gave the U.S. control over Haitian finances, and the right to intervene in Haitian affairs whenever the U.S. government deemed necessary. That same year, the U.S. government placed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president of Haiti, making him the first leader in the country under the U.S. occupation.

“He represents the father figure of the modern Haitian president. Ever since Dartiguenave, with maybe one or two exceptions, every president we’ve had, has been  beholden to the State Department,” said Martin. 

“You have to look at Haiti as a Shakespearean tragedy. Those of us who truly love Haiti and would like to see the country move forward, don’t have the physical resources to make that happen,” he said. “How can we fight against the State Department? We need allies that we simply don’t have. What the US wants to happen in Haiti is what’s going to happen.”

So what comes next for Haiti?

“The change will have to come from the U.S.,” Martin said. “We need to build a leftist movement in the U.S. that elects leaders that are going to have different policies toward Haiti. But it’s a long shot. Regardless if there were Democrats or Republicans in power in the U.S., their foreign policies toward Haiti have never changed.” 

As for Moise, he at least has public support from the U.S., which is enough to keep him in power for now. Over the last three months, U.S. officials have made their way to Haiti or Haitian communities in the United States to “encourage dialogue” over the political impasse that has held the country in its grip for almost two years. Their efforts have been met with gratitude from some and with anger from others.

“There’s always a segment of Haitian society that is looking to the U.S. to be a sort of savior for the county,”  Martin said. “They are incapable of seeing Haiti foster its own destiny and barely its own institutions to get the country going. It’s a subconscious collective insecurity that we do not have the capability of doing it on our own.”

In October 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congresswoman Frederica Wilson — who represents the largest Haitian constituency in the U.S. — participated in a roundtable discussion with members of South Florida’s Haitian community over the growing unrest in Haiti. 

Ambassador Kelly Craft’s November 2019 meeting with Moise was met with anger and disapproval from Haitians over what they perceive to be U.S. interference and meddling.  And just last month, Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale met with members of the opposition and various Haitian business leaders in a closed-door meeting where he pressed for a functioning government that can work together. 

“Haitians in Haiti acknowledge now that the Diaspora is the backbone of Haiti,” Comeau said. “The Diaspora is the primary source of foreign funds in the country.” In 2019 the Diaspora sent $3.5 billion to Haiti. While remittances are primarily sent from those living in the United States and Canada, more money is starting to come from Chile and Brazil, where there are growing Haitian communities. 

“The Haitian government needs to think more strategically in terms of Diaspora remittances,” he said. “Most of the money sent is spent on consumption. Haiti needs to tap more systematically into the resources of the Diaspora.

We need to have Haitians in the Diaspora invest in Haiti instead of sending money.”

One of the consistent U.S. voices when it comes to Haitian / U.S. affairs has been Marco Rubio, whose comments regarding Haiti have fluctuated from supporting the will of the people calling for Moise’s ouster, to urging calm and support for Moise.

While protests had subsided and a sense of normalcy seemed to return to Haiti as the 10th anniversary of the quake approached, what happens next is uncertain, and Haitians remain discouraged.

“The earthquake came and there were so many promises to build back better,” Martin said. “Yet the earthquake is forgotten, the people who died in the earthquake are forgotten and the promises made have been forgotten.”

[weil-weil-lautre]

Full article under the jump

Old friends and longtime aides are wringing their hands over Bill Clinton’s post–White House escapades, from the dubious (and secretive) business associations to the media blowups that have bruised his wife’s campaign, to the private-jetting around with a skirt-chasing, scandal-tinged posse. Some point to Clinton’s medical traumas; others blame sheer selfishness, and the absence of anyone who can say “no.” Exploring Clintonworld, the author asks if the former president will be consumed by his own worst self.

It was a wedding straight out of Sex and the City: a rehearsal dinner looking out over the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero, a garden ceremony and dancing reception in a grand château outside Paris, topped off by a private fireworks display. The groom was a thirtysomething American lawyer with friends in high places, the bride a dark-eyed designer with social sheen, and the guest list a mix of family and what Noël Coward once called Nescafé Society.

But the real cynosure of the occasion last August was the smiling, snowy-haired man who is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends, the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton. He had come to the City of Light with the motley crew that constitutes some of the post-presidential rat pack to celebrate the marriage of Douglas Band, the man who for the last decade has been his personal aide, gatekeeper, enforcer, and—more recently—counselor in the multifarious business, philanthropic, and political dealings that keep Clinton restlessly circling the globe.

Also in attendance was Ron Burkle, the California supermarket billionaire and investor who is Clinton’s bachelor buddy, fund-raiser, and business partner. Burkle had come with an attractive blonde, described by a fellow guest as “not much older than 19, if she was that.”

Burkle’s usual means of transport is the custom-converted Boeing 757 that Clinton calls “Ron Air” and that Burkle’s own circle of young aides privately refer to as “Air Fuck One.” Clinton himself had arrived on the private plane of another California friend, the real-estate heir, Democratic donor, liberal activist, and sometime movie and music producer Steve Bing, whose colorful private life includes fathering a child out of wedlock with the actress Elizabeth Hurley and suing the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian for invasion of privacy, alleging that private investigators for Kerkorian swiped Bing’s dental floss out of his trash in a successful effort to prove that Bing’s DNA matched that of a child delivered by Kerkorian’s ex-wife, the former tennis pro Lisa Bonder. (The suit was later settled out of court.)

In fairness, it should be said that Clinton’s entourage that weekend also included his daughter, Chelsea, and her boyfriend, Marc Mezvinsky, and no one who was there has adduced the slightest evidence that Clinton’s behavior was anything other than proper. Nor, indeed, is there any proof of post-presidential sexual indiscretions on Clinton’s part, despite a steady stream of tabloid speculation and Internet intimations that the Big Dog might be up to his old tricks. On any given visit to London, for example, Clinton is as apt to dine with Tony Blair or Kevin Spacey as with anyone who might raise an eyebrow.

But among the not-so-small cadre of Clinton friends and former aides, concern about the company the boss keeps is persistent, palpable, and pained. No former president of the United States has ever traveled with such a fast crowd, and most 61-year-old American men of Clinton’s generation don’t, either. “I just think those guys are radioactive,” one former aide to Clinton who is still in occasional affectionate touch with him told me recently, referring to Burkle and (to a lesser extent) Bing. “I stay far away from them.”

Another former aide, trusted by Clinton for his good judgment, said, “On the sort of money, women, all that stuff … I’m the bad guy. All this stuff is kept away from me. Whatever they’re doing, they definitely view me as somebody you cannot confide in.”

A longtime Clinton-watcher, who has had ties to the former president since his first campaign for governor of Arkansas, said of Clinton’s sometimes questionable associations, “I don’t know what to make of any of that, if it’s a voyeuristic experience, or if he’s participating in it.”

Yet another long-serving Clinton aide said simply, “If you figure it out, would you let me know?”

Bill Clinton’s relevance—and his presence in public life—is as close to permanent as any politician’s can be. Before touching off a string of controversies in his wife’s campaign this year, he was among the most popular figures on the planet, one of only three Democratic presidents in the 20th century to serve two full terms. His looming presence will make him a factor in the Democratic vice-presidential sweepstakes, the fall campaign, and every future presidential election of his lifetime, whatever his wife’s fate.

I have covered Clinton on and off for 16 years, since his 1992 presidential campaign. I first really met him on New Year’s Eve 1994, when he shook my hand on the beach at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and let his eyes travel ever so subtly to the newly issued White House press pass hanging around my neck, so that he could know to say, “I’m glad you’re here, Todd.” As a White House correspondent for The New York Times for more than two years, I spent some part of almost every day watching, thinking about, worrying about, or writing about Clinton and his never-a-dull-moment presidency. I found it hard not to admire his roving intellect, his protean political talents, his outsize personality, and the tactical skill with which he eventually confronted the Republican congressional majority that bedeviled so much of his tenure. Clinton had no use for the string of pure and noble losers that had come to define the Democratic Party’s presidential prospects for so long. He wanted to win, and he knew how. (I should add, by way of disclosure, that my wife, Dee Dee Myers, was Clinton’s first press secretary. They have not been in regular contact since she left the White House, and she has not been a source for this article.)

WATCHJonas Brothers Test How Well They Know Each Other

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

To know Clinton is, sooner or later, to be exasperated by his indiscipline and disappointed by his shortcomings. But through it all, it has been easy enough to retain an enduring admiration—even affection—for a president whose sins against decorum and the dignity of his office seemed venial in contrast to the systemic indifference, incompetence, corruption, and constitutional predations of his successor’s administration. That is, easy enough until now.

This winter, as Clinton moved with seeming abandon to stain his wife’s presidential campaign in the name of saving it, as disclosures about his dubious associates piled up, as his refusal to disclose the names of donors to his presidential library and foundation and his and his wife’s reluctance to release their income-tax returns created crippling and completely avoidable distractions for Hillary Clinton’s own long-suffering ambition, I found myself asking again and again, What’s the matter with him?

As I sought to answer that question for myself, in conversations with dozens of current and onetime Clinton aides, many of whom I have known all these years (Clinton himself declined to be interviewed), I realized just how much about the former president is not known, and not knowable, at the moment, mostly because of his unapologetic stonewalling. Virtually no one, except Ron Burkle, knows just what Clinton put into Burkle’s investment business, or just what he has done since to earn millions of dollars, with the prospect of reaping millions more. Most of the names of the donors who have contributed some $500 million to Clinton’s library and foundation over the past decade are not known, either. Virtually no one, except his doctors and family, knows the precise state of Clinton’s health. Virtually no one really knows what strategic role he has played in his wife’s campaign.

A Cavernous Narcissism

So what can be known, or fairly inferred, from the available record?

There is reason to believe that Clinton, who never made more than $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas and left the White House about $12 million in debt, has had his head turned by his ability to enjoy his post-presidential status; that the world of rich friends, adoring fans, and borrowed jets in which he travels has skewed his judgment or, at a minimum, created uncomfortable appearances of impropriety. There is ample evidence that his eight-year absence from a political workplace that has changed radically in the interim has left him conspicuously rusty at the craft of which he was once a master. There are those friends who worry that Clinton has never been the same since his quadruple-bypass surgery, in 2004, and the unexpected follow-up operation six months later to remove accumulated scar tissue on his lung.

“There’s an anger in him that I find surprising,” one senior aide, who has known and served both Clintons for years, told me this spring. “There seems to be an abiding anger in him, and not just the summer thunderstorms of old. He has been called into question repeatedly by top staff. The fact is, you can only weigh in so often on this stuff. It’s just a huge force of nature.”

It may well have been Clinton’s displaced anger (at the media, the Obama campaign, or both) on his wife’s behalf that led to his charged performance in the South Carolina primary, where he campaigned extensively against the wishes of Hillary’s high command in the mistaken belief that he could help her among black voters. He not only failed to do so but damaged his own relations with many prominent blacks, just as black voters were flocking to Barack Obama for the first time in large numbers. Hillary’s campaign was arguably never the same again.

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

It is also possible that all these influences have combined to make the cavernous narcissism that has always driven Clinton, for better and worse, at last consume the man almost completely. It was Clinton’s political genius to position the Democratic Party, for the first time in a generation, as the champion of those who “work hard and play by the rules.” In his own life, he has always followed only the first half of that dictum, and has never been fastidious about appearances, in ways charming and not. At a private meeting in New York City in 1992, AIDS activists, who were lobbying Clinton to include a speaker with AIDS at the Democratic convention that summer, presented him with a big batch of condoms, and a participant told me at the time that Clinton instantly replied, “My staff thinks this is the last thing I need.” Less amusingly, in the run-up to the 1996 re-election campaign, when Clinton took one of his many fund-raising trips to California, I teasingly asked his press secretary, Mike McCurry, whether the president intended to go jogging with Eleanor Mondale, the daughter of the former vice president—as he had on a previous trip—after he was spotted with her (and Barbra Streisand) in the wee hours of the morning. The next day, as we boarded the plane at Andrews Air Force Base en route to Los Angeles, McCurry, whose effectiveness as Clinton’s spokesman was aided by the fact that he never fell in love with him, sidled up to me and told me that he had passed my question on to the president, and that Clinton had responded, in vivid terms he knew I could not print, that I should not confuse exercise with extracurricular activity.

Only much later would the world learn that no less an informed observer than Monica Lewinsky, whose judgment, in hindsight, has often seemed sounder than the president’s, had taken note of Mondale’s presence at his side. According to Andrew Morton’s authorized account Monica’s Story, Lewinsky flew into a swivet when she was once stopped at the White House gate on her way to a hoped-for meeting to deliver Christmas gifts to the president. While waiting, she learned that Mondale was with him in the White House.

“Do you think I would be stupid enough to go running with someone I was foolin’ with?,” Clinton later asked Lewinsky. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Do you want me to answer that?”

The “Butt Boy”

By most accounts, including his own, Clinton struggled to find his footing in the early days of his post-presidency. “I was lost for three weeks after I left the White House,” he said on the campaign trail this winter. “Nobody ever played a song anymore. I had no idea where I was.” He had ended his administration in a firestorm of criticism over his eleventh-hour pardon of a raft of assorted miscreants, including the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife, Denise, contributed $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential-library fund, approximately $1 million to Democratic causes, including $70,000 to a fund supporting Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, and $7,000 worth of furniture for the Clintons’ new home in Chappaqua, in suburban Westchester County.

“When he first started transitioning, it was hard,” one former longtime aide told me. “But then he said to me, ‘I’ve always been a guy who could bloom where I was planted.’ I’ve been impressed by how truly happy he’s been as an ex-president. He’s much more focused than I would ever think he would be.”

Soon enough, Clinton was busy with plans for his library, and for the foundation that would not only build it but would undertake philanthropic and policy projects around the world; with paid speeches at $150,000 to $250,000 apiece; and with the writing of what would become his best-selling memoir, My Life, published in 2004. Deeply in debt with Whitewater- and impeachment-related legal bills, he set about earning an income that would “support a senator,” as he put it. He more than succeeded. This spring, when the Clintons—under intense pressure from Barack Obama and the news media—at last released their income-tax returns for the years since they left the White House, the total haul amounted to a staggering $109 million. Included in that total, besides Hillary Clinton’s Senate salary and Bill Clinton’s presidential pension, were $10 million in book income for Hillary and $29 million in book income for Bill, along with $51 million in speaking fees for the former president.

The command center for Bill Clinton Inc. is the former president’s penthouse office on 125th Street, in Harlem, and the go-to guy in the operation is a figure barely known to the public but a center of controversy in Clintonworld: Doug Band. Band, 35, joined the White House as an intern in the counsel’s office in 1995 and by the end of the administration was the president’s personal aide, or “butt boy,” the person responsible for making sure the president wakes up on time in the morning and stays on schedule during the day, and for peering around the corner of the president’s existence 24-7, at home and on the road, to make sure he has everything he needs (lunch, tie, speech, hat, golf clubs, a handy bathroom) and avoids everything unnecessary, unwanted, and undesirable (you get the drift). Band was the fourth young person to hold that job in Clinton’s White House tenure, and he holds some vestigial elements of it but has also moved far beyond. In Clinton’s post-presidential years, Band, who earned a master’s and a law degree by studying nights at Georgetown, has expanded his duties. His official title is “counselor,” and Clinton credits him with helping to conceive the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conference on venture philanthropy that brings together movers and shakers from the worlds of business, charity, and academia to tackle problems ranging from poverty to climate change.

Band can be brusque and aggressive for a person whose job it is not to be noticed. In 2001, when I wrote about Chelsea Clinton’s graduation from Stanford for The New York Times and noted that a number of former White House staffers, including Band’s predecessor, Kris Engskov, a bright young Arkansan, were on hand in Palo Alto to help out with logistics, I got a call the next morning from Band, curtly reminding me that he, not Engskov, was now the man who managed the former president’s cell phone.

Last fall, Band fired off a stern letter to Nino Selimaj, owner of the Osso Buco restaurant, on University Place in Manhattan, demanding that a photograph of Selimaj with Chelsea Clinton that had hung in the restaurant’s window for five years (in the time-honored tradition of publicizing celebrity patronage, but to Chelsea’s apparent annoyance) be taken down forthwith. “Ms. Clinton, a private citizen, was not consulted prior to this picture being displayed, and thus, her permission was not given for you to do so,” Band wrote. Selimaj, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was crushed but left the picture up until this April when he removed it to make room for a new batch of photos.

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

A former Clinton aide acknowledged, “He’s a real point of animus from Hillaryland.” In 2004, Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, who had gone on to help establish Clinton’s foundation as his post-presidential chief of staff, left her job after two and a half years at least partly, she told friends, because Band rubbed too many people the wrong way, perhaps unintentionally, and made too much work for her. Williams, who took over Hillary Clinton’s struggling campaign in a staff shake-up this spring, has told intimates that while Band is not one of her favorites she had other, more personal, reasons for moving on. But one of Williams’s former colleagues and friends told me, “Maggie said, ‘That’s it. I’m done,’ because Doug does not show good judgment all the time.”

A range of Clinton loyalists complain privately that Band does not keep Clinton away from people like Burkle and Bing, who attended Band’s wedding to Lily Rafii, a glamorous designer of high-end handbags, belts, and other accessories.

A Classic Clinton Vacuum

The most pointed criticism of Band is precisely this: that he does not possess what Clinton has always needed in a string of strong-willed aides, such as his gubernatorial chief of staff Betsey Wright, or his director of Oval Office operations, Nancy Hernreich—the judgment to save him from himself. The origins of such criticism may lie in the fact that one of his predecessors as personal aide, Stephen Goodin, was cited, together with Hernreich, in the Starr Report as having tried to keep Monica Lewinsky away from the president, while Band, then only an intern, escorted her to a White House party, at her request.

“It’s a classic Clinton vacuum, in my opinion,” one former aide told me, referring to the inability of Band—or perhaps anyone—to monitor the company Clinton keeps. “He surrounds himself with people sometimes who are really good or really bad, and there’s rarely any in-between.”

Band’s supporters among Clinton’s longtime circle say most of the criticism means he is doing his job. “In my experience, he’s pretty good at protecting a guy who, you know, everybody wants to grab his sleeve,” former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta told me. “He pushes back hard.” Even some who do not always admire his hard-charging style say he kept conscientious, worried vigil during Clinton’s 2004 heart surgery and that Hillary relied on him greatly.

Band’s defenders say that complaints about his judgment are misplaced, and are really complaints about Clinton’s judgment. Band himself declined to be interviewed. But someone who knows him well said that he was sure Band was unhappy and surprised by the presence of Burkle’s young date at his wedding, and that to the degree that Band has ruffled feathers or made enemies by saying “no” to various supplicants, friends, and favor seekers who believe Clinton should acquiesce to them, he has done so with the president’s and his family’s best interests at heart.

Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.

None of these wisps of smoke have produced a public fire. But four former Clinton aides told me that, about 18 months ago, one of the president’s former assistants, who still advises him on political matters, had heard so many complaints about such reports from Clinton supporters around the country that he felt compelled to try to conduct what one of these aides called an “intervention,” because, the aide believed, “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.” The would-be intercessor was rebuffed by people around Clinton before ever getting an audience with the former president, and another aide told me that the effort was not well received by either Bill or Hillary Clinton and that some Hillarylanders, in particular, were in denial about the continuing political risks that Bill’s behavior might pose.

The sensitivity among Clinton’s staff to these questions is such that, after I posed some queries about Clinton’s relationship with Burkle and Co., a spokesman, Jay Carson, e-mailed me this comment: “The ills of the Democratic Party can be seen perfectly in the willingness of fellow Democrats to say bad things about President Clinton. If you ask any Republican about Reagan they will say he still makes the sun rise in the morning, but if you ask Democrats about their only two-term president in 80 years, a man who took the party from the wilderness of loserdom to the White House and created the strongest economy in American history, they’d rather be quoted saying what a reporter wants to hear than protect a strong brand for the party. Republicans look at this behavior and laugh at us.”

Whatever the facts of Clinton’s personal life, it is beyond dispute that he has associated with some decidedly unpresidential company. In 2002, Clinton flew to Africa with the New York investor Jeffrey Epstein on his private Boeing 727 on an anti-AIDS and economic-development mission. (Others on the mission included Kevin Spacey and the comedian Chris Tucker.) In 2006, Epstein was indicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution in Palm Beach, Florida, and he later came under investigation by federal authorities amid allegations that he hired under-age girls for massages and more in a house stocked with sex toys and genitalia-shaped soaps. He remains the subject of at least four pending civil lawsuits from young women and is reportedly expected to accept a plea deal on a state charge that would give him 18 months in prison, followed by house arrest, in lieu of a trial now set to begin this month.

When I asked several Clinton aides and friends why the boss hung around with people like Burkle and Bing, they suggested various reasons. Bing, 43, who helped finance Shine a Light, the recent Martin Scorsese documentary about the Rolling Stones, and who has given tens of millions to environmental and other causes dear to Clinton’s heart in recent years, is described as very well read, thoughtful, interesting—and willing to stay up long into the night indulging Clinton’s craving for conversational companionship. (A spokesman for Bing said he would have no comment.)

Burkle, 55, a onetime supermarket boxboy who eventually parlayed ownership of several grocery chains into a fortune that Forbes magazine estimates to be at least $3.5 billion, is said to have bonded with Clinton over their shared origins as outsiders who rose to the very biggest leagues. They met during Clinton’s 1992 campaign, after the Los Angeles riots, and Burkle’s union-friendly stance and support for a range of Democratic causes quickly endeared him to Clinton. A former Burkle associate told me that Burkle has always been careful to conduct his own social life discreetly in Clinton’s presence, but would not deny that the divorced Burkle leads what he euphemistically called a “European lifestyle.” And, the former associate added, “how many older guys wouldn’t want to hang out with younger girls, if they could? Would you rather hang out with a smart, good-looking 20-year-old, or a 45-year-old?”

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

One person, who has worked at the highest levels for both Clintons, told me that Clinton’s association with such people “just shows poor judgment, for someone who understands political calculations the way he does, and the subtleties as he does, that he puts himself in that position.”

Business with Burkle

In his book Giving, an extended Hallmark hymn to the virtues of venture philanthropy, Clinton writes that Burkle’s provision of post–White House work was the “only private sector offer I accepted” upon leaving office. In fact, that is not true: Clinton has also collected more than $3 million in consulting fees from InfoUSA, a data-mining company headed by a longtime contributor, Vinod Gupta, a Nebraska multi-millionaire who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clintons’ campaigns. The company has drawn media scrutiny for allegedly selling consumer data about vulnerable senior citizens to unscrupulous telemarketers, and some shareholders once sued InfoUSA, charging that Gupta wasted nearly $1 million in company funds flying the Clintons around the world. (InfoUSA did not respond to a request for comment.)

But Clinton’s business relationship with Burkle is far and away his largest source of income after books and speeches: $15.4 million between 2003 and 2007, according to the Clintons’ recently released tax returns. That amounts to about 20 percent of all the income that Clinton earned in those years. Until the release of the tax returns this year, Hillary Clinton’s Senate financial-disclosure forms had revealed only that Clinton earned “more than $1,000” a year from his partnerships with Burkle.

Burkle is perhaps the single best example of the self-reinforcing network of rich personal, charitable, political, and business supporters Clinton has built since his White House years. For Clinton’s re-election campaign Burkle held regular fund-raisers at Green Acres, his sprawling estate in Beverly Hills, which once belonged to the silent-film star Harold Lloyd, and Burkle has also raised millions of dollars for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. What has Clinton done in return? Burkle himself has said that Clinton has provided invaluable introductions and entrée to potential investors, including the Teamsters union. (A spokesman for Burkle’s companies did not return repeated telephone calls seeking comment.) When the tax returns were made public this spring, Jay Carson issued a statement saying that “the president provides his best advice on potential investments, advocates generally on behalf of the funds, and seeks to create opportunities for investors to consider investing in these funds or in the investments the funds make.”

The Burkle partnership carries ample potential for conflicts—real and perceived—whether or not Hillary Clinton is ever president. For one thing, she lent her campaign $11.4 million this year, and because the Clintons’ finances are commingled, it would be difficult to discern whether money from Burkle-related ventures (or other potentially controversial sources of income) made its way into Clinton campaign coffers. Burkle’s other investors include an entity connected to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, whose regime has been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department. (Two years ago, Senator Clinton nevertheless opposed a Dubai-based company’s efforts to acquire control over the management of six United States ports.)

Over the years, Clinton has had three main business involvements with Burkle. The first is a broad advisory capacity, for which Clinton has been paid flat fees for work as a rainmaker and liaison between Burkle and various potential investors. In fact, a Clinton aide says, this accounts for all the money that Burkle has paid Clinton to date. As part of the advisory arrangement, Clinton received a stake—of unknown size—in two Burkle domestic investment funds, for which Clinton will see a profit only if annual returns exceed a certain threshold. They appear on track to do so, the aide says, but have so far not produced a payout for Clinton. The third strand is an international investment fund (which has also yet to generate cash returns for Clinton) in which the former president invested an undisclosed amount of his own money, along with Burkle and the same entity connected to Sheikh Mohammed. Clinton has the right to opt out of any controversial investments by this fund, as he recently did with an investment in China.

Doug Band, though not Clinton himself, was involved in another Burkle investment that produced embarrassment. As The Wall Street Journal reported last fall, Band helped introduce Burkle to Raffaello Follieri (an Italian entrepreneur and the boyfriend of the actress Anne Hathaway), who had a proposal to buy and develop properties being sold off by the Catholic Church. Band received a $400,000 finder’s fee for the transaction (which he has said he passed on to others involved). Burkle later sued Follieri for allegedly misappropriating funds to pay expenses. (The dispute was settled out of court.) A Clinton adviser told me that Follieri (who was recently charged with attempting to pass a bad check for $215,000 in New York; the charge was later dropped) had come with good references. (Attempts to reach Follieri were unsuccessful.)

This winter a Clinton spokesman announced that Clinton was moving to sever his ties with Burkle to avoid potential conflicts should Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee. But in fact, one Clinton aide told me, severing the ties is complicated because putting a value on the partnerships is difficult.

On the Stump

In the middle of the so-called Potomac primary this winter—simultaneous elections in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia—I went to watch Clinton campaign for Hillary one Sunday in Baltimore County: at a senior-living complex in Catonsville and a gritty Democratic club in blue-collar Dundalk. Much of what I saw felt instantly recognizable: the fluid, conversational, extemporaneous style; the succinct statement of the case (“You ought to be for her because she’s spent a lifetime making the only kind of change that matters: making changes in other people’s lives”); the frequent pronouncements that something or other was “a big deal” (a favorite phrase in his presidency); and the genial stretchings of the truth.

“Now, when I got elected, I had the lowest net worth of any president of the 20th century,” Clinton told his appreciative audience at the Charlestown Retirement Community, blithely ignoring poor Harry Truman, who so struggled to make ends meet as a senator in Washington that he put his wife, Bess, on his office payroll at a higher salary than any other employee there. A moment later, Clinton invoked Truman to make a point about Hillary’s courage in fighting for universal health-insurance coverage, saying, “A lot of you remember that Harry Truman was the first president who tried to get universal health care for everybody. They beat his brains out and nearly destroyed his presidency, and he was a very great president.” Truman’s greatness is now in little dispute, but the contemporary criticism of his presidency had less to do with his drive for health care than with the Korean War.

But if much about Clinton is familiar to one who covered him in his prime, other aspects of his appearance and demeanor are unsettling. He is visibly older and thinner. His hair is whiter and his countenance paler. At times, as the day wears on, he makes an odd cotton-mouth sound, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth as he talks. “At some point in your life, which most of us in this room have reached,” he tells the seniors, “you realize that even if you live to be 100—and I hope you all do, and a bunch of you will, by the way—you have more yesterdays than tomorrows.”

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

That, too, was a line Clinton liked to use in the White House, but it rings differently at 61 than it did at 46 or 50. By the standards of the males in his family, Clinton is a very old man indeed. His father died at 28, three months before his son was born, and his maternal grandfather, who helped raise him, died at 58, so Clinton has long faced atypical intimations of his own mortality. Many of those who know him well say he now tires more easily, and loses energy.

Post-Op Complications

That is hardly surprising: not quite four years ago, Clinton underwent quadruple-bypass surgery to relieve blocked arteries in his heart, a procedure whose comparative commonness in the modern medical world belies the range of subtle, complex, and not always obvious complications that can follow it. “He’s recovered much, much more slowly from the heart surgery than anybody thought,” one former aide told me. “He still has energy, but not stamina. He can recover, but he used to do that nonstop, with three hours’ sleep.”

Just weeks after his triumphal encore appearance at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, Clinton, who has suffered for years from esophageal reflux, the symptoms of which can sometimes mimic signs of cardiac trouble, complained of chest pains and shortness of breath, and an angiogram showed severely blocked arteries that doctors said meant he was doubtless headed for a major heart attack. On September 6, 2004, in surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, Clinton’s breastbone was cut open, his chest pulled apart. His heart was stopped for 73 minutes while a heart-lung machine maintained his body’s flow of blood and breathing, and surgeons took blood vessels from his chest and his left leg to create detours around the segments of arteries in his heart that were severely clogged with plaque—more than 90 percent blocked in some cases.

Six months later, as the result of a rare and unexpected complication, Clinton had a second surgery to remove a rubbery rind of scar tissue caused by the accumulation of bloody fluid in the lower lobe of his left lung; the tissue had cut his breathing capacity by more than 25 percent. In this operation, known as a thoracotomy, an incision was made between a pair of Clinton’s ribs, and doctors spread them apart to make room for the insertion of surgical instruments that peeled off tissue surrounding the scar tissue and then the hard, rubbery rind. Experts describe the aftermath of such surgery as typically quite painful, much more painful than that of bypass surgery.

As a private citizen—albeit a very prominent one—Clinton has not received anything like the post-surgical media attention he would have if he were still president, and many details of his treatment in recent years are not known. After his first surgery, The New York Times reported that he would take a range of medications, including a beta-blocker to maintain regular heartbeats, a statin to lower his cholesterol, an ace inhibitor to control high blood pressure, and aspirin to thin his blood. These medications may cause a range of side effects, including fatigue, muscle pain, dehydration, depression, and impotence. Coronary bypass can also cause subtle changes in cognition, which may, or may not, be temporary. There is further medical disagreement about whether such changes are caused in part by small particles of plaque that are discharged by the heart-lung machine and sent to the brain, or by the underlying artery disease itself. If a patient has arterial disease in his heart, he could have it in his brain too.

“I would think mood changes would be a big issue in his life from that bypass surgery, especially having to go back a second time,” says Dr. Thomas Traill, a prominent cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, who is not involved in Clinton’s care. Many people who have bypass surgery get depressed afterward, while others suffer from increased irritability. “It’s very similar to postpartum depression. You deliver a child and then a week later it’s a dismal anticlimax. The same thing happens with heart surgery: you wonder if you’re going to make it, and then you wake up in the intensive-care unit and you’re the center of the universe, and a week later you’re exhausted and sore and about to be sent home.”

“It’s also true,” Traill adds, “that a lot of people are never really the same again, that their mood is not right. Some of that may have been triggered by the original illness and some by surgery. Then there’s a persistent problem: you’re taking medications, you’re under doctors’ care, and every day when you shave you know you’re not going to live forever. So whether or not he’s, as they like to say, clinically depressed, his mood cannot be the same as before this happened.”

The Guilt Factor

Whatever the explanation, much of Clinton’s behavior on the campaign trail this year has been so maladroit as to constitute malpractice: his blowups at television reporters, his derisive dismissal of Obama’s unwavering anti-war stance as a “fairy tale,” and most of all his denigrating comparison of Obama’s performance in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s victories there two decades ago (which even one of his closest former aides described to me as insensitive at best). Perhaps no figure in modern American politics has less standing to say “Shame on you!” than Bill Clinton, but he said just that—twice—to a hapless reporter who asked him in January about comments by a former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman comparing Clinton’s tactics to those of the late Lee Atwater, the take-no-prisoners Republican strategist known for racially charged campaigns.

As the days wore on, the former Senate Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle said Clinton’s behavior was “not keeping with the image of a former president.” His former labor secretary and onetime friend turned critic, Robert Reich, called Clinton’s attacks on Obama “ill-tempered and ill-founded.” No less a loquacious commentator than the Reverend Al Sharpton said that it was time for Clinton to just “shut up.” His old flame Gennifer Flowers, who has endorsed Hillary, referred to him as an “idiot husband.” Congressman James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking black member of the House of Representatives, who pointedly had remained neutral in the primary, finally called Clinton’s behavior “bizarre.” And on more than one occasion, in one way or another, Senator Clinton herself had to tell him—as she did after he revived controversy over her imagined landing in Bosnia under sniper fire by unleashing a string of new inaccuracies to defend her—“Let me handle this.” There is little doubt that Clinton’s own intensity has fueled his wife’s. One senior aide told me bluntly that Bill’s anger “has not served her well. That side of him feeds the worst side of Hillary. He does stoke her up.”

Aides to both Clintons say part of the problem was that, until Maggie Williams came on board, no one from Hillary’s campaign was even tasked with routinely keeping Bill abreast of developments, so long-simmering tensions between her people and his were allowed to worsen. After Williams’s arrival, Clinton participated in a daily conference call with her and other top campaign advisers to review the state of the race that one aide said sometimes turned into a virtual monologue. “There’s not a detail that escapes his notice and commentary,” the aide said, “and as usual with Clinton, much of what he says is worth listening to.” Aides explain the depth of Bill Clinton’s involvement by invoking what one of them called “the guilt factor.”

MOST POPULAR

Georgia Republicans Say They'll Move to Remove Fulton County DA Fani Willis From Office With New State LawBY ERIC LUTZ

Our Flag Means Death Season 2: Exclusive First LookBY SARAH CATHERALL

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic RealityBY JONATHAN TAPLIN

“There’s this piece of him really wanting this desperately for her, for all of the reasons you can imagine,” this aide told me. “She put her career on hold to be with him I mean, it’s her time, and he feels that.” Clinton was also never cut out to be a supporting player. He is Gladys Knight and not a Pip, as his former aide Jamal Simmons, who now backs Obama, put it this spring.

The way Clinton handled the courtship of Senator Ted Kennedy in the run-up to Kennedy’s eventual endorsement of Obama is instructive. “Barack pursued Kennedy with a soft touch,” a person close to Kennedy told me. “He checked in every once in a while Counter that with the way the Clintons were handling him. There was nothing soft about the Clintons’ requests. Hillary would call and make a formal request. Clinton, as he felt Kennedy slipping away, would get more and more insistent, and he would make the whole conversation about how bad Obama was, not how good his wife was.”

Losing a Step

Clinton’s temper has continued to get the better of him. By the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, he was reduced, in a Philadelphia radio phone interview, to denying that his comments in South Carolina had been in any way racially charged, and instead insisted that the Obama camp “played the race card on me.” He sputtered, “I mean, this is just, you know … You really gotta go something to play the race card with me—my office is in Harlem.” At the end of the interview, apparently unaware that he was still on the air, Clinton was heard to say, “I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?” Asked the next day by another reporter what he had meant by saying the Obama campaign “was playing the race card,” Clinton would have none of it. “No, no, no, that’s not what I said,” he erupted, as if he did not know that his earlier comments had been recorded and were all over the Internet. He added, “You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today.” It’s a nice question, just who was playing the games. When I asked a Clinton campaign official how the former president could have issued such a flat denial, the aide immediately responded, with no trace of irony, that the offending reporter had used the word “playing,” while in the radio interview Clinton had used the word “played.” I’m not sure whether that makes Clinton’s outburst better or worse, but it’s of a piece with the parser the public knows so well.

As the primaries ground on, the campaign deployed Clinton more strategically (and, perhaps, more effectively) in the kinds of smaller towns presidents never visit—47 stops in Pennsylvania, 39 in Indiana, 50 in North Carolina—where he stumped in largely white, working-class areas but, poignantly for a man once dubbed the nation’s “first black president,” not in African-American ones. That sea change in Clinton’s standing among blacks will remain a consideration in how to use him, or not use him, in the general-election campaign, no matter who the Democratic nominee.

I saw Clinton at two of his nine stops on the day before the North Carolina primary in May. He was himself, for good and bad. In Zebulon, population 4,329, he arrived one hour and seven minutes late to speak to a crowd of 500 or so, talked for 40 minutes on topics from the Iraq war to hybrid cars, adoption and foster-care policy, and mortgage foreclosures, and concluded, in a repeated refrain that took on the insistence of a preacher’s call, that Hillary’s campaign had been carried along by “people like you in places like this.” Minutes later, after a front-porch rally in nearby Louisburg, population 3,726, a woman in the crowd approached him, tears streaming down her face. I could not get close enough to hear what was said, but Clinton listened, then cupped her face in his big hands, in that way that only he can. It was classic Clinton, but not enough to prevent an Obama blowout in the state the next day.

Perhaps more than anything, Clinton, whose audiences in recent years have tended to be adoring crowds who hang on every word of what those who have heard his standard speech say is a rambling tour d’horizon of world problems, has simply lost a step.

“Look, the game has changed,” said Mike McCurry. “He ran his last national campaign in 1996, and remember, we kind of ran unopposed. It’s been a while since he did that, and the way you summon people up and get them to do things has changed. All of this stuff, the blogging and the YouTubing and the way in which everything is instantaneously available: I tell you, until you get out there and are actually dealing with the consequences—having what you just said as you were walking out the door [all over the Internet], that’s brand-new to him.”

A Dictator’s Embrace

When Clinton left the White House, aides say, he made a list of all the world problems he cared most about and might yet do something to help solve. At the top of his list was Mideast peace, but Clinton quickly realized that that was an endeavor in which uninvited meddling was inappropriate, so he concentrated on a range of other issues, from H.I.V./AIDS to clean water, childhood obesity, global warming, and—after the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina—disaster relief. Some aides have said they see a clear effort to redress problems that he let fester as president, whether AIDS or the Rwandan genocide. It is beyond dispute that Clinton’s foundation has done worthy work around the world, funneling low-cost anti-retroviral drugs to more than a million AIDS patients, shining the singular power of a presidential spotlight on the good work of others, and raising millions of dollars for practical programs in places much of the world’s power establishment never bothers with.

But it is also beyond dispute that Clinton has blended the altruistic efforts of his philanthropy with the private business interests of some of his biggest donors in ways that are surpassingly sloppy, if not unseemly, for any former president. A case in point is Clinton’s relationship with Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk, a billionaire and philanthropist who has donated millions to the ex-president’s foundation. According to Newsweek, in 2007, at a Pinchuk-sponsored international conference in Yalta, Clinton wowed the crowd with a presentation on Ukraine but also sparked controversy when he was embraced by Pinchuk’s father-in-law, the country’s former president Leonid Kuchma. Kuchma’s repressive regime has been linked by a government investigation to the 2000 murder of a dissident Ukrainian journalist. The man was found decapitated—one of scores of journalists who have been killed or have disappeared in Ukraine since the country achieved independence, in 1991.

Even more troubling is Clinton’s relationship with the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra. This winter, a lengthy investigative report in The New York Times disclosed that, in 2005, Clinton flew to the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan on Giustra’s MD-87 jet for what was billed as a philanthropic three-country tour. The two men had dinner with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has held the country in a vise-like grip for nearly two decades. At their meeting, Clinton expressed support for Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors elections and promotes democracy. That position was sharply at odds with official American foreign policy and came in the face of stinging criticism of Kazakhstan’s record on human rights from many sources, including the junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Within two days, Giustra’s company signed preliminary agreements allowing it to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency. And months after that the Clinton Foundation received a $31.3 million donation from Giustra that remained secret until a Giustra representative acknowledged it late last year. (Giustra has separately pledged another $100 million to the foundation.)

A Clinton spokesperson and Giustra have both said that Clinton was unaware of the specifics of the uranium deal. But critics of Clinton’s judgment say that misses the point.

“There’s no way in the world that President Clinton didn’t understand what was going on there, and no way in the world that he didn’t understand what his role was supposed to be in that visit: to lay the hands of the former president of the United States on the individual he was traveling with and thereby bring credibility to whatever reason that individual was there for,” says Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a Washington watchdog group that monitors money and politics. “To deny that is to, basically, take the position that you can fool all of the people all of the time.”

The Public Pensioner

It is for just such reasons that Clinton’s refusal to make public the names of donors to his foundation has drawn withering fire. (Some donors—including the Saudi royal family and the governments of Dubai, Kuwait, and Qatar—were made public by The New York Sun when a list of them was discovered on a public computer monitor at the opening of the Clinton library, in Little Rock, and others have since become known as the result of interviews and journalistic digging through the tax records of known Clinton friends and supporters.) Clinton aides say that donors were promised confidentiality, but they have also pledged to make public the names of future donors—though not past ones—should Hillary Clinton become president.

“I think there’s also a kind of sentiment that if somebody’s given us money to save the lives of tens of thousands of kids who have H.I.V., let somebody fucking bitch about it,” one senior Clinton adviser told me. “If they don’t want us to take that money, or if it offends some sensibility of Fred Wertheimer, so be it.”

Clinton is under no legal obligation to disclose such donors—or, for that matter, to disclose much of anything about his personal financial dealings. No one knows the details of the earnings—almost certainly many millions of dollars—that the first President Bush has made from his investment in the Carlyle Group, for example. Gerald Ford quietly raked in big director’s fees from companies such as American Express, and Ronald Reagan briefly scandalized late-80s Washington by taking $2 million for a single speaking trip to Japan. But their wives never ran for president.

Throughout our history there has been a strong presumption that former presidents should conduct their affairs in ways that do not seem to cheapen, degrade, or exploit the high office they held. Hillary Clinton’s own service as senator, and her presidential campaign, reinforce that imperative in Bill Clinton’s case. Harry Truman was so reluctant to accept any business or commercial offer, however high-minded, that might be seen as capitalizing on the presidency that he nearly went broke in retirement. A few years after leaving office, he had seen a $600,000 advance from Life magazine for his memoirs whittled away by expenses and 67 percent income taxes to a net gain of about $37,000. Only the sale of his family farm for a shopping center saved him from real embarrassment. Finally, he took his case to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, and the first bill stipulating an annual presidential pension (initially $25,000) and money for offices and staff was passed.

Clinton benefits handsomely from Truman’s foresight. His presidential pension has totaled more than $1.2 million since he left office, and despite his fantastic private-sector income, an analysis this spring by the Web site Politico showed that he has taken almost as much in taxpayer dollars for his post-presidential existence as the other two living ex-presidents—Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush—combined. Since 2001, Clinton has received more in almost every category—pension, staff salaries, supplies—than any of his colleagues in that smallest of clubs. Before Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford died, Clinton’s telephone and rent expenses came close to exceeding the comparable expenses for all four then living former presidents combined. Part of the difference is that Clinton served eight years in office, entitling him to a federal health-insurance plan and a higher pension than Ford, Carter, or Bush, and part is that his office space in Manhattan is more expensive than space in Atlanta or Houston.

Still, there is a repellent grandiosity about Clinton’s post-presidential style. Before he settled on more modest space in Harlem, Clinton had intended to rent the entire 56th floor of Carnegie Hall Tower, in Midtown, for roughly $738,000 a year. He changed course after a rash of sharp congressional and public criticism. Each year at Christmastime, Clinton sends out to supporters a slim, paperbound volume of his Selected Remarks, with a gold-embossed “Happy Holidays” greeting card replete with the requisite “bug” showing it was printed in a union shop. Last year’s number ran 25 pages and featured three thoroughly ordinary efforts: a commencement speech at Knox College, in Illinois; remarks to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in South Africa; and comments at the 50th-anniversary commemoration of the de-segregation of Little Rock Central High School. “Since leaving office,” the first page of the booklet states, “President Clinton has devoted his time and energy to causes of both personal concern and global significance.”

A Solitary Man

Throughout his career, Bill Clinton has justified acts of extraordinary selfishness in the name of idealism—he’s always in it for the people, the plain folks who tell pollsters they trust him to look out for their interests, even if they don’t trust him. He has been forgiven colossal egotism, even cruelty, by those closest to him because of his superlative political talents, and because of the overreaching of his enemies. As president, Clinton often could not show grace in the smallest ways. He dithered about where and when to go on vacation, so that aides and Secret Service agents could not plan their own. He declined to release aides and reporters who had waited around all through a pointless Saturday of duty while he made up his mind whether to play golf (a game at which he has been known to cheat). He was never, ever, on time. In Joe Klein’s roman à clef about the Clintons, Primary Colors, the Betsey Wright character accuses the Bill Clinton character of always skating by on charm and talent and need. “You have never paid the bill,” she tells him. “Never. And no one ever calls you on it. Because you’re so completely fucking special. Everyone was always so proud of you. And me, too. Me the worst.”

In the end, this is Clinton’s most grievous sin, his steady refusal to take grown-up responsibility for the consequences of his own actions. In the White House, on the day of his last sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton told her that he was worried that a foreign embassy might be listening in on their calls, and that if she were ever questioned, she should say they were just friends. Then he looked into her eyes and sang, “Try a Little Tenderness,” a song that goes: “She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.” On the day this winter that he accused Barack Obama of spinning a “fairy tale” about Obama’s anti-war stance, Clinton went on to whine about an Obama campaign research sheet criticizing his business dealings and insisting, “Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon.” So, yes, let us stipulate: Ken Starr was a prurient, partisan zealot. Yes, other ex-presidents have made a lot of money and it is hard to begrudge Clinton his earnings (even if he did take six million nickels for a speech to the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification of China). Yes, Obama is a daring opponent who thinks he is hot shit and has benefited from the same enthusiasm, energy, and fresh-faced appeal that a fella named Bill Clinton once elicited (but he has suffered from some of the same skepticism, too). It is Clinton’s invariable insistence that his problems are someone else’s fault, and that questions or criticisms of him, his methods, motives, or means are invariably unfair, that is his unforgivable flaw.

He has told friends that he is not worried that his aggressive performance this year has done lasting damage to his reputation (some of them are not so sure). Whatever the future holds for Hillary Clinton, her husband is not fading away. He will remain a presence, a force to be reckoned with, as long as he draws breath.

But for a politician with so many admirers, allies, acquaintances, faithful retainers, and hangers-on, Clinton remains a profoundly solitary man, associates say, without any real peers, intellectual equals, or genuine friends with whom he can share the sweetest things in life. (The one who has always come closest, for better and worse, for richer and poorer, is simply too busy these days.)

So he spends his time veering between feeling sorry for himself and working to help others, between doing good and giving his enemies fresh ammunition, between vindicating his legacy and vitiating it. “So much of modern culture is characterized by stories of self-indulgence and self-destruction,” Clinton writes near the end of Giving, from which he earned $6.3 million and gave away $1 million (or 16 percent) to charity. “So much of modern politics is focused not on honest differences of policy but on personal attacks. So much of modern media is dominated by people who earn fortunes by demeaning others, defining them by their worst moments, exploiting their agonies. Who’s happier? The uniters or the dividers? The builders or the breakers? The givers or the takers? I think you know the answer.”

I used to think he did, too. But substitute the words “my life” for the words “modern culture” and “modern politics” in the passage above, and you’ll have a pretty succinct summary of what Bill Clinton has, at last, become.

Todd S. Purdum is *Vanity Fair’*s national editor.