More than half of the people outside the government who met with
Hillary Clinton while she was serving as secretary of state gave money
to the Clinton Foundation, either personally or through or companies or
groups, according to a review of State Department calendars released to
the Associated Press.
At least 85 of the 154 people from private interests
who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton donated to her
family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs,
according to the documents obtained by the AP.
The 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million
combined, and at least 40 donated more than $100,000 each while 20 gave
more than $1 million.
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence
reacted Tuesday to the AP report while campaigning in Pennsylvania,
saying it was not a "laughing matter."
"Hillary was on Jimmy Kimmel last night, joked about
it, said her emails were boring. Hillary Clinton this is not laughing
matter, nobody is above the law," Pence said. "American people are sick
and tired of pay to play."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus
called for a special prosecutor to look into pay for play allegations
in reaction to the AP report.
“The evidence is clear – it’s time a special
prosecutor be appointed to investigate the growing proof of pay-to-play
at Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” he said in a statement. “This is
among the strongest and most unmistakable pieces of evidence of what
we’ve long suspected: at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, access to
the most sensitive policy makers in U.S. diplomacy was for sale to the
highest bidder."
Donors who were granted time with 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 Clinton's help with a visa
problem and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with
Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to
counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP
story relied on "utterly flawed data," in a statment released Tuesday
afternoon.
"It cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary
Clinton's schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she
crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the
Clinton Foundation.
"The data does not account for more than half of her
tenure as Secretary. And it omits more than 1700 meetings she took with
world leaders, let alone countless others she took with other U.S
government officials, while serving as Secretary of State.
"Just taking the subset of meetings arbitrarily
selected by the AP, it is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton's
basis for meeting with these individuals. Melinda Gates is a
world-renowned philanthropist whose foundation works to address global
health crises and eradicate disease in the developing world. Meeting
with someone like Melinda Gates is squarely in the purview of America's
top diplomat, whose job involves confronting these same global
challenges."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said
Tuesday night at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas that Clinton is
"unfit to hold office."
"It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton
Foundation ends and where the State Department begins," he told
supporters. "Its clear the Clintons set up a business to profit off of
public office, they sold specific actions by and for large amount of
money."
The meetings between the Democratic presidential
nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements
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
Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week
describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation
donors.
The AP's findings represent the first systematic
effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton
foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to
her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or
foreign government representatives. 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 AP's calculations
because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic
duties.
The review presents an extraordinary proportion of visitors indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off
ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if
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 U.S. citizens and what it described as independent
philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S.
companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no
longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the
Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based
programs 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," Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who
previously directed Columbia University's graduate fundraising
management program, told the AP. "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 L. Eisen, who was President Obama's top ethics counsel and
later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the
Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, 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 Bill, Hillary and Chelsea
Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership
roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy
decision affecting past donors.
Some of 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 to
AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have
covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton's
calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the
State Department last year in federal court for those materials and
other records.
S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in
emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a
Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton's planners for
eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the
Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham
told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast 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, AP's 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 Clinton three times and talked with her
by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities
investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured
him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded
for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find
ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had
been working with the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Global Initiative
programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans
for the poor. Grameen America, the bank's nonprofit U.S. flagship, which
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 Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and
$50,000.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as
then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007
sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got
one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential
Medal of Freedom.
Yunus first met with 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 nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million
commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began
providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2
million over Clinton's tenure.
By September 2009, 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 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 with him and asked the State
Department for help in pressing his case.
"Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be
raised in a friendly way," he asked Verveer. Yunus sent "regards to H"
and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to
attend.
Clinton ordered an aide: "Give to EAP rep," referring the problem to the agency's top east Asia expert.
Yunus continued writing to 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,
Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her
East Asia expert "ASAP."
Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the
Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen
Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that "the situation does not allow
me to leave the country." By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had
forced Yunus to step down from the bank's board. Yunus sent Clinton a
copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton
wrote: "Sad indeed."
Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in
August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012.
Clinton's 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, 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's Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.
Earlier this month, State Department spokeswoman
Elizabeth Trudeau acknowledged that agency officials are "regularly in
touch with a range of outside individuals and organizations, including
nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks and others." But Trudeau said the State
Department was not aware of any actions that were influenced by the
Clinton Foundation.
In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009
breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone
Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's
firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates
heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast,
according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa
issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's
wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center
Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy
Center, 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 U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials
did not make Schwarzman available for comment.
Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the
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 State Department said at the
time.
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10
million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund
made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global
Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other
organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in
2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2
million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The
fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with
Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that
month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton
and a U.S.-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 organizations to help survivors of sexual
slavery in Cambodia.
MAC AIDs officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.
When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early
2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen.
Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about
the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were
focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted
more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation
and Obama's transition team.
Now, 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 favoritism," Lugar said.
