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OP do you maintain that you are non-partisan?
Report: Clinton State Dept Pulled Strings for Menendez in Pay-to-Play Deal with Dem Donor
Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Obama CampaignFormer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) supported a visa waiver for the daughter of a fugitive Ecuadorian banker in exchange for significant campaign contributions to the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, NBC 4 New York reported that Menendez, with express written support from Clinton, intervened on behalf of Estefania Isaías, who was banned from traveling to the U.S. due to accusations of visa fraud. Isaías is the daughter of Roberto Isaias, who lives in Miami and is currently fighting extradition to Ecuador for banking crimes and under investigation for money laundering by the Department of Homeland Security.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Clinton requested that Isaías’ visa ban be lifted so that she could work for an Obama fundraiser:
Clinton Spokesman Nick Merrill claimed no special treatment for Isaías and that the “rigorous processes” for matters involving visa fraud were followed, “nothing more, nothing less.”…the case involving Estefanía could prove awkward for Mrs. Clinton, who was in charge of the State Department at the time high-ranking officials overruled the agency’s ban on Ms. Isaías for immigration fraud, and whose office made calls on the matter.
Alfredo J. Balsera, the Obama fundraiser whose firm, Balsera Communications, sponsored Isaías’ visa, was featured recently in USA Today as a prominent Latino fund-raiser backing Mrs. Clinton for president in 2016.
The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.
...
In the spring of 2011, Ms. Isaías, a television executive, was in a difficult situation.
Her father and uncle were Ecuadorean fugitives living in Miami, but she was barred from entering the United States after she brought maids into the country under false visa pretenses and left them at her parents’ Miami mansion while she traveled.
“Alien-smuggling” is what American consular officials in Ecuador called it.
...
What happened next illustrates the kind of access and influence available to people with vast amounts of money.
For more than a year, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and his staff engaged in a relentless effort to help Ms. Isaías, urging senior government officials, including Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to waive the ban. The senator’s assistance came even though Ms. Isaías’s family — a major donor to him and other American politicians — does not live in his state.
The Obama administration then reversed its decision and gave Ms. Isaías the waiver she needed to come to the United States — after tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the family poured into Mr. Obama’s campaign coffers.
An email from Mr. Menendez’s office sharing the good news was dated May 15, 2012, one day after, campaign finance records show, Ms. Isaías’s mother gave $40,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, which provided donations to the president and other Democrats.
“In my old profession as a prosecutor, timelines mean a lot,” said Ken Boehm, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog. “When a donation happens and then something else happens, like the favor, as long as they are very, very close, that really paints a story.”
OP do you maintain that you are non-partisan?
"libertarian"
No scare quotes needed; but I do lean conservative on a few issues. I can't think of anything substantial on which I agree with liberals (in their current incarnation).
you don't say?
No, I do say.
So they're all on welfare right?
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