Foundation turns into liability for Clinton
SAN FRANCISCO — Should Hillary Clinton be elected president, there will be no end to the allegations that the way to get favors from her is to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
“Pay to play,” as Donald Trump charges. It’s become one of the most powerful applause lines in his presidential campaign, a way of putting some force behind his portrayal of his opponent as “Crooked Hillary.”
Some of Trump’s attacks on Clinton may have sell-by dates: Benghazi and even her email management as secretary of state happened in the past. The suggestion that she’d skew White House policy to please her family foundation’s rich donors is designed to make voters see how influence peddling could be run out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. ‘Like oil and water’
Even though there is no evidence that Clinton took any actions while secretary of state to help donors to the foundation her husband and daughter ran, “the issue is the perception,” said Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
“The perception is that donating to the foundation is the way to gain in- fluence,” Reich said. It’s a reason that philanthropy and partisan politics “mix like oil and water.”
The challenge for Clinton is that there are few surefire ways to blunt that perception, short of folding a charity that even Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has said does some “very important work.”
In 2014, the World Health Organization said the foundation’s affiliated Clinton Health Access Initiative was one of a handful of organizations that helped bring down the cost of AIDS drugs in poorer countries.
Analysts say that eliminating suspicions about a President Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Clinton Foundation will require a much thicker firewall than the agreement she signed when she became secretary of state in 2009. No favors, but face time
The Clinton Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding promising to disclose donors regularly. But it violated that provision on several occasions, including when it failed to report a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government in 2010.
Foundation contributors may not have received favors, but they got face time with Clinton. Emails released this month as part of a lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch showed that Clinton Foundation officials were not shy about asking Clinton’s State Department for meetings with their donors.
Although the communications between Clinton Foundation and senior State Department aides didn’t violate agreements that Hillary Clinton signed, “they demonstrate a blurring of the lines between official government business and Clinton’s personal connections — breaking the firewall Clinton agreed to preserve,” the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact said last week.
To tamp conflict of interest concerns should his wife become president, Bill Clinton said last week that the foundation would no longer accept donations from corporations and foreign governments.