Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann discussed the Associated Press’ story that revealed the existence of an LLC that was used to pay for Bill Clinton’s work for Teneo Consulting. That LLC was previously omitted from Personal Financial Disclosure forms for years.
As the guys at Bloomberg note, it raises more questions about Bill Clinton’s work as a “consultant” and again makes the case that the Clinton’s are out of touch with the American people.
See the full transcript below:
BLOOMBERG’s JOHN HEILEMANN: “But first, the Clintons’ workaholics. Under federal disclosure rules, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a whole bunch of financial information, but they left something out, and the AP revealed that something today. It’s six letters long. It’s called WJC, LLC, and the AP says it’s a so-called ‘pass through company’ with ‘no apparent employees or assets’ that’s ‘designed to channel payments to the former president.’ Mark, this story just broke, and it raises as many, possibly way more, questions than it actually answers, but my question to you is — where is this going and how big could it be?”
BLOOMBERG’s MARK HALPERIN: “Well, we don’t know where it’s going, and the Clinton folks are playing it down, and saying there’s no there there, but there’s at least three things this implicates. Like Mitt Romney, the Clintons had tax accounts and lawyers who said, ‘you should set things up for your income and you assets for the most advantageous way possible — could be legal but might not look great.’”
HEILEMANN: “Rather Romney-like.”
HALPERIN: “Number two, ok, Bill Clinton, what he did as a consultant, not the speeches which has been the conversation, what he did as a consultant is going to get a lot more attention because of this. And three, it opens the door to rhetoric like this from Bernie Sanders today.”
BERNIE SANDERS: “I’m not gonna condemn Hillary and Bill Clinton because they made a lot of money. That type of wealth can, you know, has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.”
HALPERIN: “Sanders talking to John Harwood in a restaurant right there, before this story broke. But this issue of the Clintons being fabulously wealthy, again teased out by this based on these facts.”
HEILEMANN: “Not just fabulously wealthy but fabulously wealthy and engaged in a complex web of various kinds of financial dealings and holdings, not all of which are totally — most of which are completely opaque, not all of which but some of which. The president has businesses other than speaking. The story points out, we don’t know exactly what those businesses are, we don’t know how much he’s made from them. There are some clients that are named here, at least one of whom the State Department said you can’t work for. A couple of others he was allowed to work for, but this is just more fodder for people who want to dig into this financial morass, I would call it, that is around the Clintons, and I just think this is a beginning of something that could be quite big and quite threatening.”
HALPERIN: “He got paid a lot of money, and we’re going to learn more about what he did to make it.”