Reuters has reported on additional dishonesty from the Clinton Foundation regarding contributions made when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. In order to reduce the risk of the influence peddling which Clinton is now accused of, two requirements were placed on Clinton to maintain transparency when she was Secretary of State–archiving her email on government servers and releasing the identities of all donors. Clinton failed to comply with either, and then destroyed evidence. When it was found that contributions from contributors who received favors from Clinton were not listed on the tax returns. the Foundation initially claimed that they were listed on their web site. Reuters found that the the contributions were not listed on their web site as the Foundation had claimed:
The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that the government funding totals omitted from their tax returns cannot be found on their website either, despite the foundation’s acting chief executive officer earlier suggesting they were available there.
The foreign government funding received by the globe-spanning charities of Hillary Clinton’s family has received particular scrutiny in recent weeks as Clinton seeks to become the Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.
The foundation’s acknowledgement means precise totals for government grants to the charity for the last three years of Clinton’s four-year tenure as secretary of state have still not been publicly disclosed. All U.S. charities have to separately disclose each year how much they get in government funding, both domestic and foreign.
Shortly before taking office in 2009, Clinton promised the Obama administration heightened transparency concerning donors to her family’s charities to avoid accusations of conflicts of interests when she became the nation’s most senior diplomat. In recent months, the charities have said they did not comply with some parts of the agreement.
In April, Maura Pally, the foundation’s acting chief executive officer, said it was a mistake not to separately list government grants on its public tax forms for 2010, 2011 and 2012 after a Reuters review found errors, but added that the public could find the break-outs elsewhere.
“Those same grants have always been properly listed and broken out and available for anyone to see on our audited financial statements, posted on our website,” she wrote in a statement on the foundation’s website.
The audited financial statements, however, do not break out government grants separately, foundation officials told Reuters.
The Foundation has long had a reputation for being a slush fund for the Clintons but, because of the manner in which financial information on the Foundation is kept hidden, specifics are not known. Many conservative sites (such as here) are claiming that only ten percent of its budget on charity, but I suspect that this is an exaggeration.
As reports on the abuses of the Clinton Foundation have come out over the past month, charity watchdog organizations have been taking a closer look at the Clinton Foundation. New York Magazine features an article on the recent disputes between the Foundation and Charity Navigator:
The Clinton Foundation scandal cycle is already spinning off new complications. A case in point: After being the subject of a spate of negative newspaper accounts about potential conflicts of interest and management dysfunction this winter — long before Clinton Cash — the Clinton Foundation wound up on a “watch list” maintained by the Charity Navigator, the New Jersey–based nonprofit watchdog. The Navigator, dubbed the “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is a powerful and feared player in the nonprofit world. Founded in 2002, it ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence. For a while, the Clinton Foundation was happy to promote Charity Navigator’s work (back when they were awarded its highest ranking). In September 2014, in fact, the Navigator’s then-CEO, Ken Berger, was invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative. Of course that was before the Foundation was placed on a list with scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Red Cross.
Since March, the Foundation has embarked on an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to get removed from the list. Clinton Foundation officials accuse the Navigator of unfairly targeting them, lacking credible evidence of wrongdoing, and blowing off numerous requests for a meeting to present their case. “They’re not only punishing us for being transparent but are not being transparent themselves,” Maura Pally, the Foundation’s acting CEO, told me by phone from Morocco last week. “Charity Navigator doesn’t disclose its donors, but we do and yet that means we’re suffering the consequences.”
Navigator executives counter that the Foundation has demanded they extend the Clintons special treatment. They also allege the Foundation attempted to strong-arm them by calling a Navigator board member. “They felt they were of such importance that we should deviate from our normal process. They were irritated by that,” says Berger.
The feud is a microcosm of all that is exhausting about the Clintons’ endless public battles. Generally, it goes like this: bad press about their lack of transparency sparks some real-world consequence or censure, the Clintons complain that they’re being held to an unfair standard while their critics contend that they expect to be able to write their own rules, and the resulting flare-up leads to more bad press.
The trouble with Navigator started on Wednesday morning, March 11. Foundation officials became alarmed when they received an anonymous email from the watchdog’s Donor Advisory committee informing them they would be added to the list on Friday, March 13, unless they could provide answers to questions raised in newspaper accounts. Among the press controversies the Navigator cited: A Wall Street Journal report that noted “at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during [Hillary Clinton’s] tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.” Politico, meanwhile, revealed that the Foundation failed to report to the State Department a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government, a violation of the ethics agreement the Clintons had arranged with the Obama White House. Politico also reported that the Foundation’s former CEO, Eric Braverman, quit after a “power struggle” with “the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades.”
The article describes the pressure the Clintons have tried to place on Charity Navigator to be removed from their watch list but I would be surprised if they do the one thing required to be removed from the list: “Sandra Miniutti, the Navigator’s spokesperson, told me that, in order to get off the list, the Clintons need to publicly address each of the controversies raised by the media with a convincing response.”
Other watch dog organizations have also been critical of the Clinton Foundation, including Common Cause, which has called for an independent audit of the Foundation.
As much as the Clintons claim this is yet another right wing attack, instead of a Fox problem the Clintons now have problems with Reuters, New York Magazine, The New York Times, AP, The Guardian, and many liberal publications which have the integrity to report on dishonesty and corruption in politicians regardless of party affiliation. Ultimately this is not a right wing problem–it is a Clinton problem.
