From Ben Smith writing at BuzzFeed:

When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, two of her biggest fundraisers were conducting massive Ponzi schemes. One was Hsu, who posed as a garment tycoon, and is now serving a 24-year sentence in federal prison in Milan, Michigan. The other, Hassan Nemazee, is serving a 12-year sentence in Otisville, New York, for bank fraud. He used fake documents and nonexistent loans to trick bankers into extending him more credit.

There is no suggestion that Clinton or her aides were ever aware that Hsu or Nemazee were fraudsters. And their frauds were, superficially, unrelated to their relationships with the Clintons.

But that’s how it often goes. Those two convictions cast light on a central perplexity of the 2016 presidential cycle, and its “Clinton Cash” phase: Why are shady people with murky interests always hanging around political superstars, and particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton? (Nemazee and Hsu were spectacularly felonious, and stole a lot of money, but they have many predecessors, from Jim McDougal to Raffaello Follieri — and indeed, many counterparts surrounding the retinues of other political figures.)