Here we go again with the Clintons, money, and corruption:
Three years after the William J. Clinton Presidential Library opened its doors, the list of donors who helped the former president build his $165 million complex remains a secret from the public.
Yet the Blotter on ABCNews.com has learned that the Clinton Foundation sold portions of the list through a data company headed by a longtime friend and donor.
"The fact that they've sold the list and then turned around and said that these names must be kept anonymous completely undercuts their argument," said Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog group that tracks the influence of money in politics.
An employee of Walter Karl, a subsidiary of the data company InfoUSA, told ABCNews.com that the company made a list of more than 38,000 donors to the Clinton presidential library available for sale to foundations and other nonprofit groups from June 2006 to May 2007. A spokesman for the company would not say how the profits from the sale of the partial list were distributed.
Again, while this is not illegal, it is definitely morally reprehensible, since they'd made a big point earlier about donors being anonymous.
And there's more about InfoUSA, the parent company of Walter Karl, who was chosen to act as the vendor for the mailing list:
Hmmm... InfoUSA has been reimbursed? The question is, how? Money or cozy deals like selling a list of donor names for the Clintons?Vin Gupta, CEO of InfoUSA, was also on the list of donors giving $1 million or more.
His ties to the Clintons came under scrutiny earlier in the year when a lawsuit filed by InfoUSA shareholders accused Gupta of wasting millions of dollars of the company's money to "ingratiate himself" with the Clintons and other personal friends.
Separately, a New York Times article in May revealed that InfoUSA was involved in an investigation in Iowa for selling mailing lists of elderly Americans to criminals. In response to the investigation, the company released a statement saying, "While InfoUSA can not manage what a client does with the publicly available information InfoUSA provides, the company has a strict policy about not selling data to companies who act illegally."
Gupta has donated and raised millions of dollars for the Clintons' political campaigns and charities over the last decade. InfoUSA spent millions more paying the former president as a consultant and flying him and his wife to events around the country and family vacations in Hawaii and Acapulco, Mexico on the company's private jet, according to the court documents.
InfoUSA officials have stated that the expenses were "legitimate business expenses."
A spokesman for Sen. Clinton said in May that InfoUSA had been reimbursed for her flights, though ethics rules at the time only required the reimbursement be equal to the cost of first-class airfare.
Makes one wonder, doesn't it?
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