Did you know Michelle Obama got a $100K+ raise shortly after her husband became a senator? She went from earning $121,910 in 2004 as an executive director at the University of Chicago Medical Center to making $316,962 in 2005 as a vice president of community affairs, right after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Was there a cause and effect? Who knows? But more important: It's truthy enough for a corporate media witchhunt, don't you think?
Via ABC News:
After his wife became Secretary of State, former President Bill Clinton began to collect speaking fees that often doubled or tripled what he had been charging earlier in his post White House years, bringing in millions of dollars from groups that included several with interests pending before the State Department, an ABC News review of financial disclosure records shows.
Where he once had drawn $150,000 for a typical address in the years following his presidency, Clinton saw a succession of staggering paydays for speeches in 2010 and 2011, including $500,000 paid by a Russian investment bank and $750,000 to address a telecom conference in China.
“It’s unusual to see a former president’s speaking fee go up over time,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush. “I must say I’m surprised that he raised his fees. There’s no prohibition on his raising it. But it does create some appearance problems if he raises his fee after she becomes Secretary of State.”
Public speaking became a natural and lucrative source of income for Clinton when he returned to private life in 2001. Records from disclosure forms filed by Hillary Clinton during her tenures in the U.S. Senate and then in the Obama Administration indicate he took in more than $105 million in speech fees during that 14 year period.">more loved than others:
We won't even get into the irony of the Bush administration's ethics lawyer (talk about a no-show job!) casting aspersions on anyone else. Instead, let's compare speaking fees, shall we?
Donald Trump: $1.5 million.
Ben Bernanke - $200K to $400K
Tim Geithner - $200K
Of course, this story's a year old. God only knows whether it's gone up!
As one of our readers said: It's Nefarious If You're A Clinton (INIYAC).
The moral of the story: It's very easy to arrange information to make people think what you want them to think. Keep that in mind. Inoculate yourself, it's going to be a long campaign.
