Clinton in murky territory on charity
Nominee says she’d handle conflicts of interest as president
Hillary Clinton says she would take “unprecedented steps” to deal with the conflicts of interest with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation if she is elected president.
Those steps might not be enough to mitigate the unprecedented nature of a president controlling a multimillion-dollar public charity in addition to her constitutional duties, government ethics experts say.
Clinton’s management of conflicts of interest while she was secretary of State has become rival Donald Trump’s newest line of attack against the former first lady, calling for an independent prosecutor to examine whether Clinton used her Cabinet post to grant favors to foundation donors. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee launched an investigation of those relationships Thursday.
Regardless of how Clinton dealt with the foundation as secretary of State, a Clinton presidency would face questions about the foundation’s donors.
“Obviously, if I am president, there will be some unique circumstances, and that’s why the foundation has laid out additional, unprecedented steps that I would take if I am elected,” Clinton told CNN Wednesday.
Those steps would include changing the name to the Clinton Foundation, refusing donations from corporate and foreign donors and eliminating many of its international programs, according to a blog post by former president Bill Clinton. The result would be a greatly diminished foundation, since almost half its funding comes from corporate or foreign donors.
On CNN, Clinton rebutted an Associated Press report that 85 of 154 private citizens she met with or telephoned during a two-year period as secretary of State had contributed to the
foundation, totaling $156 million. “I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire,” she said. She said she would have met with the donors regardless of whether they gave to her foundation.
Modern presidents have often faced questions about business conflicts of interest, which most have dealt with by either putting their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees or by holding diversified mutual funds and Treasury bonds, as President Obama does.
Trump has faced questions about how he would manage his vast real estate empire — which he said he would leave to his children.
There’s no mechanism for putting a public charity in a blind trust — much less one that is so tied to the legacy of one man, former president Bill Clinton. After all, the foundation was first established to build the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, then ballooned into a charity that raised $2 billion for worldwide development, disease prevention and education. In doing so, Bill Clinton’s postpresidency legacy project became Hillary Clinton’s résumé booster.
The two ethical situations are very different but do have one commonality: Both the Trump Organization and the Clinton Foundation are inextricably linked to their founding families. Both concerns owe their success to the personal brands of their founders, and that makes separating the personal and political even more difficult.
“We’re going into uncharted waters with both of these potential presidents,” said Stuart Gilman, former assistant director of the Office of Government Ethics during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. “We have two presidential candidates that have significant conflicts of interest. I think the Clintons have a much easier road to get away from that. Whether they want to is a personal and a political question.”
He said the Clintons are emotionally invested in their foundation and rightly proud of its efforts. “I’m sure it’s killing them, because they’ve put their heart and soul into this,” he said. But he said the Clintons should completely relinquish control of the foundation — perhaps to the Carter Center, the presidential foundation established by Jim- my Carter to do similar humanitarian work.
There’s no law that would require either Trump or Clinton to divest themselves from their organizations.
Conflict-of-interest laws don’t apply to the president because the decisions he or she makes — signing bills, deploying armed forces, granting pardons — can’t be delegated to anyone else.
“She does not have to do this, but she should do it for the good of the country,” said Richard Painter, a former associate counsel in the George W. Bush White House who said he’ll vote for Clinton.
Painter said many of the accusations against the Clinton Foundation are unfair, but Clinton ought to relinquish control of the organization to prevent it from being a distraction. “Her choice is to lose the election or perhaps win but have a miserable four years,” he said.
At the minimum, Painter said, Clinton should remove all family members from the foundation’s board, elect independent trustees and take the Clinton name off of it.
“The Clinton Foundation is a big one,” Painter said. “But the U.S. government is a whole lot bigger and more important.”
He said he would ask Clinton the same question he often had to ask presidential nominees who were reluctant to cut ties with potential conflicts: “Does she want this job or not?”