CLINTON FACES ETHICS CHALLENGE IF SHE WINS RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
People who met the Democrat presidential nominee when she was secretary of state donated $156 million to her family charity
More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Mrs Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programmes, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as US$156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, while 20 gave more than $1 million.
Among those granted time with Mrs Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Mrs Clinton’s help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Mrs Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
The meetings between the Democrat presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Mrs Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Mrs Clinton. Her calendars and emails released recently describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
Associated Press findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton Foundation donors and people who met personally with Mrs Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include US federal employees or foreign government representatives. Mrs Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in the calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.
Mrs Clinton’s campaign said the AP analysis was flawed because it did not include in its calculations meetings with foreign diplomats or US government officials, and the meetings examined covered only the first half of Mrs Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Analysts have sought for years a complete set of Mrs Clinton’s detailed schedules covering her time in office, which she could have voluntarily released but did not. AP sued the State Department in federal court to obtain the schedules it has received so far.
“It is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton’s basis for meeting with these individuals,” spokesman Brian Fallon said. He called it “a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation”.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fiercely criticised the links between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, saying his general election opponent had delivered “lie after lie after lie”.
“Hillary Clinton is totally unfit to hold public office,” he said at a rally on Tuesday in Austin, Texas. “It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office.”
On Wednesday, Mrs Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook defended the Democratic nominee on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and questioned Mr Trump’s own dealings. “We need to look more closely at Donald Trump,” he said.
The Clinton Foundation recently addressed ethics concerns by announcing changes planned if Mrs Clinton is elected.
On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation’s board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from US citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, US companies or corporate charities.
Bill Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid programme, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programmes to other charities.
Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already
provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.
“There’s a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems,” said Douglas White, an expert on charities who previously directed Columbia University’s graduate fundraising management programme. “The point is, she can’t just walk away from these 6,000 donors.”
Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.
“If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she’s tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done,” said Norman Eisen, who was President Barack Obama’s top ethics counsel.
Mr Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Mrs Clinton should retain the Obama administration’s current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules.
Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to president George W Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said the Clinton family should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.
Mr Fallon said the standard set by the Clinton Foundation’s ethics restrictions was “unprecedented, even if it may never satisfy some critics”.
State Department officials have said they are not aware of any agency actions influenced by the Clinton Foundation. Department spokesman Mark Toner said there are no prohibitions against agency contacts with “political campaigns, non-profits or foundations including the Clinton Foundation”. He added that “meeting requests, recommendations and proposals come to the department through a variety of channels, both formal and informal”.
Some of Mrs Clinton’s most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband’s political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half of her four-year tenure.
Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of a lawsuit, is a fundraising bundler who was listed in Mrs Clinton’s planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Centre for Middle East Peace, Mr Abraham said last year his talks with Mrs Clinton concerned Middle East issues.
Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, a review showed.
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest microcredit for poor business owners, met with her three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a non-profit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank’s board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Mrs Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Global Initiative programmes as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, which Mr Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation — a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution’s annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Mr Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.
As a US senator from New York, Mrs Clinton, as well as then Massachusetts senator John Kerry and two other senators, in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Mr Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Mr Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mr Yunus first met Mrs Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department’s foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a charity run by Mr Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totalling $2.2 million over Mrs Clinton’s tenure.
By September 2009, Mr Yunus began complaining to Clinton’s top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh’s government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money — a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Mr Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.
Mr Yunus continued writing to Ms Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh’s prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Mrs Clinton told Ms Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert “ASAP”.
Mrs Clinton called Mr Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Mrs Yunus had told Ms Verveer by email that “the situation does not allow me to leave the country”. By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Mr Yunus to step down from the bank’s board. Mr Yunus sent Mrs Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Ms Verveer, Mrs Clinton wrote: “Sad indeed.”
Mrs Clinton met Mr Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Her arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank’s effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Mrs Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that “we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank”.
Grameen America said all foundation donations were made by Grameen entities and not personally by Mr Yunus.
In another case, Mrs Clinton was host at a September 2009 meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Mr Schwarzman’s firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor but he personally donates heavily to Republican candidates and causes. One day after the meeting, according to Mrs Clinton’s emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Mr Schwarzman’s request. In December that same year, Mr Schwarzman’s wife Christine sat at Mrs Clinton’s table during the Kennedy Centre Honours. Mrs Clinton also introduced Mr Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Centre, before he spoke.
Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone’s charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the US to the Middle East.
Mrs Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of MAC Aids, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance Aids education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa.
The MAC Aids fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Ms Mahon and the fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered two other organisations to beef up a USAID programme in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organisations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Mrs Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Mr Schwarzman. Later that month, Mr Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Mrs Clinton and a US-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organisations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.
When Mrs Clinton appeared before the US Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then senator Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Mr Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Mr Obama’s transition team.
Now Mr Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation. “The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favouritism,” he said.