Hillary Clinton’s Philanthropic Controversy: The Clinton Foundation

Overlooked in all the hubbub about her use of private, commercial email for official business while she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has encountered an additional headache with questions concerning donations to the Clinton Foundation, or as it is now called, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

In fairness, Hillary Clinton is not the first political figure in the U.S. to have encountered problems due to a charity or foundation established or run by family members or aides. The first high-profile problem of this ilk in recent years to garner major public attention was the foundation established by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), which was roundly criticized as a venue for special interests to purchase influence, favor, and face-time with the Congressman, regardless of whether they had a scintilla of interest in the DeLay Foundation’s concern for foster children. When DeLay was out of Congress, donor interest in his foundation plummeted, soon driving it out of business entirely.

Other national political figures with problem charities in their environments have been Newt Gingrich (the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation and the Progress and Freedom Foundation), Rick Santorum (the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation), John McCain (the Reform Institute, though at least when he was upbraided for its use as a holding pen for his aides, he dissociated himself from it), and many others. But the issues associated with the Clinton Foundation, due its size (assets of $226m) and its visibility (due to former President Bill Clinton’s international role) makes questions about the foundation a considerable problem for Hillary Clinton in her all but inevitable quest to be elected president in 2016.

Although the history of the Clinton Foundation has hardly been controversy-free, with significant questions raised about the impact of its work in Haitian disaster relief and about the former president’s hobnobbing with some donors such as Canadian financier Frank Giustra (see his Clinton-related access to a uranium deal in Kazakhstan), the latest questions seem to be falling to Hillary Clinton because of their potential relationship to her service as Secretary of State in the Obama administration or because they raise questions about her policy stances and beliefs.

In a nutshell, there are two streams of stories about the Clinton Foundation that have implications for the former Secretary of State. One is the fact that while she served as Secretary, the Clinton Foundation received several significant donations from as many as 19 foreign governments. Although the foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity and not required to reveal its donors, the Clinton Foundation has done so, revealing information about the size of their donations in ranges on its website, including these foreign governments:

• In the $10-25m category is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (plus Australia, though AUSAID, and Norway)
• In the $5m-10m category includes the Kuwaiti government as a donor (plus donations from another government agency in Australia, apparently focused on climate change, and the Netherlands and Sweden)
• Donors in the $1-$5m range included Qatar, the Sultanate of Oman, Brunei, and the United Arab Emirates (as well as more from Norway)

All told, the Clinton Foundation reports contributions from 19 foreign governments, with Germany, the Dominican Republic, Bahrain, Taiwan, Jamaica, and Canada also in the mix. Given that ranges rather than specific amounts were posted on the foundation’s website, the donations were worth between $51m and $136m. Listed as between $250,000 and $500,000 is a $500,000 donation (dedicated to Haiti earthquake relief) from the government of Algeria, made in 2010 when Algeria was negotiating with the U.S. Department of State on issues of human rights—and in the same year spent $422,000 in lobbying U.S. government officials.

By virtue of an agreement with the Department of State while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary, the Clinton Foundation was, after 2009, supposed to notify State of foreign government transactions and get an implicit nod of approval so that State and the Foundation could check on conflicts of interest. That didn’t happen with the Algeria donation, which one observer, former Congresswoman Jane Harmon, head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, suggested had simply gotten lost in the system.

There has been no insinuation of a specific quid pro quo between these governments and either Bill or Hillary Clinton. Because foreign governments cannot contribute to political campaigns (and the former First Lady is not yet an official candidate for the presidency) and because 501(c)(3) public charities like the Clinton Foundation cannot engage in partisan political activity, these donations are not backdoor versions of campaign contributions. For example, the Algeria donation was dedicated to and spent on Haitian earthquake relief. Public charities in the U.S. can and do accept donations from foreign governments.

Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that these donors didn’t have an expectation, much like donors to any politically connected foundation, of being seen as supportive of the former First Lady and of getting access to her now or in the future. Moreover, donors such as Qatar (which has been supportive of Hamas and Hezbollah) and Saudi Arabia (whose treatment of women seems runs counter to Hillary Clinton’s repeated endorsement of women’s empowerment around the world, not to mention Saudi Arabia’s distinctively harsh method of dealing with dissidents) raises questions as to why the foundation would solicit or accept donations from these governments. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton by virtue of her job had to deal with all kinds of nations, but acting as a philanthropist, the foundation didn’t have to solicit or accept donations from governments whose values might have conflicted with the foundation’s.

Bill Clinton defended the donations from foreign governments, suggesting that their money was a good thing toward helping the foundation pursue its goals, that the foundation was voluntarily revealing the names of its donors, and that governments such as the United Arab Emirates were helping the U.S. in its fight against the Islamic State (ISIL or Da’esh). It may not be apparent, but his linking of the UAE donation to U.S. foreign policy is exactly the problem Hillary Clinton faces with the donations from foreign governments. Would the foundation reject donations from governments opposed to U.S. policy? (It obviously hadn’t, in light of the relationship of Qatar and Hamas.) What if oil-rich Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro or Sudan ruled by Omar al-Bashir had offered donations? Is the foundation implementing a foreign policy vetting process of some sort?

The other area of defense of the donations from foreign governments is that during her tenure at State, Hillary Clinton had no official role at the Clinton Foundation, so that even if grants such as Algeria’s were coming to the foundation, she wasn’t in the driver’s seat, one way or the other. True, except that it is a primary family member—her husband—who was in the driver’s seat. The barrier between her official duties as Secretary of State and his activities in getting philanthropic donations from other countries is permeable, as critics have pointed out about the charities related to many members of Congress. In any case, since 2013, the foundation has been renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and her role as the clearly most significant albeit unofficial Democratic candidate for president makes the foreign government donations a legitimate area of inquiry.

A second stream of the critique has been revelations of the Clinton Foundation’s relationships with a number of banks that have run afoul of U.S. government regulators. Alexandra Jaffe of CNN reported that the Clinton Foundation and its Clinton Global Initiative arm had struck partnership arrangements with a number of banks while these banks were fending off investigations or paying substantial fines. Jaffe listed a variety of “strategic partners” of CGI including Barclays (which had to pay $300m in fines for breaking sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and the Sudan, and another $450m for global interest rate rigging), Deutsche Bank (under investigation for potential Iran sanctions violations), HSBC (which paid $1.92b because it allowed drug cartels to launder money and because it did transactions for customers in Iran, Libya, Cuba, and the Sudan), and Goldman Sachs (which paid a $1.2b fine for mortgage lending infractions).