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Comment by g00gler | Hacker News Reader

So, wasn't Hillary Clinton breaking the Constitution when she was accepting donations from Saudi Arabia at the Clinton Foundation while secretary of state?

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Why is anyone still talking about Hillary Clinton?

Donald Trump is the man in office. Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with anything.

However Clinton may or may not violated the Constitution is absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether Trump is violating it now.

> Why is anyone still talking about Hillary Clinton?

Because we're trying to ascertain if the complainers are genuinely principled or partisan hacks. I've a feeling most of them would be turning a blind eye if it wasn't trump.

Complainers can't prosecute and convict. Courts can. That's a difference I'd recommend coming to terms with as it's the crux of this discussion at a level that's intensely germane.

In this case particular, actually, it's the legislature that can prosecute and convict. Still not random people on HN, though :-P

Why does it matter? The complaints are either right, or they're wrong. The complainers' motives for making their complains have no bearing on that.

Maybe, but for those of us who aren't experts on constitutional law, it's difficult to ascertain exactly who is in the right, we have to decide which self-proclaimed experts to believe.

For this reason it's helpful to understand the motives of those putting forth a particular argument.

I have a rule, and I think it's a good one. When I hear some political rhetoric I ask myself "if the parties were reversed would this person still be saying the same thing?" If the answer is no, I ignore that person. This cuts out about 97% of all political discussion and saves a lot of time.

Right. I didn't like either of them, I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.

I just think it's odd to say that Trump should be impeached for something his opponent did while in office.

I don't think that rule can apply for anonymous Internet commenters listing objective claims. You probably don't have enough information to determine the partisanship of the commenter, and even if you did, their claims are either true or false, and debating that is almost certainly a better use of time.

I've noticed this a lot in Reddit too. There I feel it is A distraction tactic. Posters seek to make a comment about very in every Trump thread and it is always some distracting sound bytes about the emails or something. Totally irrelevant to the thread at hand.

Seems to work like a charm to derail conversation about the real topic at hand.

Because it show the duplicitous nature of people like you. Clearly this wasn't an issue Hillary, so it's obvious that is all political nonsense.

I would guess Hillary's situation would depend on the structure of the foundation. Likely she was not the one "accepting" it, and the ownership structure, such as it is, might not even include the Clintons. It might just have their name on it. This is all just speculation though.

I am willing to put money that this is being brought up so no one can set up another clinton foundation again. trumps press conference a while back he spent a considerable amount of time talking about his company and the legalities. he knew what he was talking about and they had spent some time working on it.(then he called cnn fake news). Now all this talk about nobility... This gets ruled on and he is totally inside the rules... but the real message is don't set up "Clinton Global Inititave" as it wound be outside the rules.

So does Hillary get to spend the foundation money on herself?

Didn't the leaks reveal that Chelsea's wedding was paid for by the foundation?

No, they didn't.

No, those were fake news headlines run by Fox and Russian news agencies.

Here is the email in question so you all can judge for yourselves:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046

For context, Doug Band is a very close Clinton associate and he's discussing an initiative apparently launched by Chelsea Clinton to investigate money within the Clinton Foundation (which is also mentioned in some of the other Podesta emails).

That's the one. Thanks for digging it up.

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