Politico's Kenneth Vogel is reporting on how the Clintons paid for that infamous private email system and lots of other IT equipment for the Clinton Foundation:

Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their non-profit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.

The thousands of pages of newly uncovered records reveal sometimes granular detail about how Bill Clinton’s representatives directed the spending of taxpayer cash allocated by the GSA under the Former President’s Act.

The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”

The Clintons did not have this problem.

The rest of us should all have a problem with this system, however.

It would be terrible if a former president or his wife found themselves in actual want, as Mary Todd Lincoln did after her husband was assassinated.

It was a good idea when Congress voted a pension to ensure that this didn't happen again. Harry Truman was the first president to draw a pension for serving as the nation's chief executive.

So far so good, but a system whereby former presidents become royalty and have expenses such as the ones described in the Politico article picked up by the taxpayer needs some major rethinking.

Hot Air comments:

Vogel writes that this is all legal, and he’s correct.  The purchases and the subsidies were perfectly legal — for the cash that came directly out of the pension payouts. Any of us could use our own pensions to do exactly the same thing, assuming of course that our pension is $200,000 a year and our own security task force to protect it. The rest of the retirees among us have to satisfy themselves with an annual donation to Feed My Starving Children and a new Chromebook every five years. If that.

But as Vogel explains, the actual picture of how the Clintons have exploited the Former Presidents Act (FPA) gets a lot more murky … and tawdry. They’ve been shaking down taxpayers for sixteen years to run their Clinton Foundation political schemes:

Read the entire Politico article–a real eye-opener.