Donor controversies raise old criticisms of Clintons’ fundraising and wealth

WASHINGTON — The massive fundraising and wealth-generating operation that Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have built over the past decade and a half has revived one of the most enduring criticisms of the couple: that they have a blind spot when it comes to setting ethical boundaries with the people who give them money.

Two factors could make the current questions even more problematic. First, the Clintons now bring in contributions on a scale that would have been unimaginable during the controversies that beset Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s.

Second, many of the funders have had a role in elevating the couple — whom Hillary Clinton once described as “dead broke” when her husband left office — into the ranks of the super-rich.

A Washington Post analysis found that the former president was paid at least $26 million in speaking fees by companies and organizations that also donated to his foundation — a quarter of his overall speaking income between 2001 and 2013.

While it is far from unusual for an ex-president to burnish his legacy with charitable works or to fill his family bank account by giving six-figure speeches, no one else has done so while his wife was serving as secretary of state and building the machinery for her own White House bid.

Complicating the issue further is the fact that many of the large donations to the Clinton Foundation and most of Bill Clinton’s speaking fees have come from foreign sources — a practice that continues.

“The story line of the Clintons’ fundraising goes way back, and it hasn’t always been flattering,” said Viveca Novak, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “It wouldn’t have been hard to predict that the foundation’s acceptance of huge tranches of foreign money would raise questions about whether those donors would get favorable treatment if Hillary Clinton wins the White House.”

The New York Times on Thursday added new evidence that this practice creates, at a minimum, perceptions of conflict.

A Canadian mining executive who donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation led a uranium mining company that was sold to the Russians, benefiting from a deal that had to be approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. A second executive, Frank Giustra, sealed a deal to buy uranium from Kazakhstan in 2005 shortly after a visit to that country with Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is making a preemptive strike on an upcoming book, “Clinton Cash,” by conservative author Peter Schweizer that examines the foundation’s financing and the Clinton family’s wealth. The book provided part of the basis for the Times’ report.

On Thursday, the Clinton campaign issued a statement dismissing the report and the book as “innuendo.”

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon stressed there was no evidence that Ms. Clinton’s State Department approved the uranium deal to benefit foundation donors.

He said Ms. Clinton herself was not personally involved in the interagency approval process, that the deal was approved by a variety of government agencies and that the donors involved have said they received no assistance from Ms. Clinton in the matter.

In a memo earlier Thursday to allies and surrogates, Mr. Fallon wrote, “Republicans, their allies, and the people desperately trying to tear down Hillary Clinton will continue to rely on this book’s false attacks and conspiracy theories, but bit by bit, the truth will come to light. This isn’t the first baseless smear against Hillary Clinton, and it certainly won’t be the last.”

Nonpartisan advocates of limiting the amount of money in politics say the problem is, in no small measure, one of the Clintons’ own making.

“It would be in everyone’s best interest if the Clinton Foundation adopted a policy of accepting no money whatsoever from any foreign countries, foreign corporations and foreign individuals,” added Fred Wertheimer, a veteran of the wars over campaign finance who is now president of the watchdog group Democracy 21.

There is indeed an echo of the furor that was generated in the 1990s when the Clintons wooed big Democratic Party donors with overnight sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and intimate coffees in the Map Room, where they could rub elbows with the government officials who regulated their industries.

During the 1996 re-election campaign, Vice President Al Gore was dispatched to raise money at a Buddhist temple and dialed for contributions from his phone at the White House. All of that continued to haunt him during his own campaign for president.

And in one of his final acts in office, Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife, songwriter Denise Rich, gave a $450,000 donation to the Clinton presidential library.