Clinton Cash: New book claims the Clintons had shady dealings with foreign governments

Will the latest WikiLeaks dump bring down Hillary Clinton?

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last updated 20 April 2015

It's "the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy," according to The New York Times, and GOP presidential candidates and conservative super PACs are already salivating over it.

The thrust of the claims of Peter Schweizer's new book are readily apparent in the title: Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Schweizer, a conservative who once worked as a speech-writing consultant to George W. Bush, argues that the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton accepted donations in exchange for favors while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Schweizer claims he has discovered "a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds."

His examples include a free-trade agreement in Colombia that benefited a major foundation donor's natural resource investments in the South American nation, development projects in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, and more than $1 million in payments to Mr. Clinton by a Canadian bank and major shareholder in the Keystone XL oil pipeline around the time the project was being debated in the State Department. [The New York Times]

The Clinton campaign dismissed the book as part of a conservative line of attack that focuses on "twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories." The book comes out May 5.