CLINTON CONTROVERSIES
Questions about foundation, emails plague Hillary
WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump attacks Hillary Clinton over Clinton Foundation contributors — and whether they sought State Department favors — former President Bill Clinton on Monday said if his wife is president, he will stop raising money for the organization.
Hillary Clinton faces a confluence of controversies — emails from her private server fueling questions about Clinton Foundation donations.
The questions will likely last until the November election with more emails still in the pipeline.
Some of this trouble Bill and Hillary Clinton could — indeed should — have seen coming, as the foundation was raising money from foreign sources and megadonors while she was serving as secretary of state, with the potential second run for the White House in front of her. Here’s what’s new:
The FBI found some 15,000 new emails, and a federal judge told the State Department to put together a schedule to release them.
If Hillary Clinton is president, Bill Clinton said in a letter released on Monday, he will step down from the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton board and the group will not accept foreign donations. Bill Clinton will end fundraising for his foundation — which was created to bankroll the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, and since has spawned the Clinton Global Initiative.
The obvious question lingering is why the Clintons didn’t install the new rules while she began her tenure as secretary of state — to sidestep the perception of conflict of interest and pay- to- play with domestic and foreign donors.
“The process of determining the Clinton Foundation’s future if Hillary becomes president has not been easy,” Bill Clinton wrote. “It’s an unprecedented situation, so there’s no blueprint to follow.”
The Sun- Times has learned that Chicago’s Raj Fernando, a megadonor to the Clinton Foundation — and a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns — still wielded some clout with Clinton even after he was the subject of an ABC News exposé about his lack of qualifications to be on the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board.
Fernando, who founded Chopper Trading, quit the advisory panel Aug. 17, 2011, after attending one meeting, following the ABC report.
But a copy of a newly obtained Clinton State Department schedule for March 14, 2012, provided to the Sun- Times by Citizens United, a conservative group, shows that Fernando had a five- minute appointment with Clinton, called a “private pull aside,” in Clinton’s outer office.
The schedule did not mention the subject matter. It did come just before Clinton hosted a lunch for then- British Prime Minister David Cameron at the State Department. The Obama White House had invited Fernando to be a guest at a state dinner honoring Cameron that evening.
A spokesman for Fernando, who was a superdelegate for Clinton at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, declined to comment.
Citizens United President David Bossie, who has been probing the Clintons since the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president, is also the head of one of the major anti-Hillary Clinton super PACs, “Make America Number One.”
Fernando “was too controversial to remain on the International Security Advisory Board, but not too controversial to meet with Secretary Clinton. Why? The Clintons needed him to keep writing big checks,” Bossie said.
Judiciary Watch, another conservative group — also probing the Clintons for years — made public Monday new Clinton State Department emails and other documents.
On June 26, 2009, according to one of the newly released emails, Hillary Clinton’s friend since college, Chicago attorney Kevin O’Keefe, asked her in an email to help Kevin Conlon — a Chicago public affairs consultant — “set up a meeting with you and a major client. . . . Secondly, Rich Daley has gone out of his way to ask me to ask you to keynote his father’s forum next year.”
O’Keefe wrote that the now former mayor “asked for you for this year but you were out of the country and he had to settle for Biden.” O’Keefe, who met Clinton when she lived in Park Ridge, and Conlon are Clinton’s top Illinois organizers and have helped raise money for the Clintons for years.
A Clinton campaign spokesman, Josh Schwerin, said, “Once again this right- wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s is distorting facts to make utterly false attacks. No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”