Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (66 page)

At seventy-five, the experienced Shalala didn’t qualify as new blood, but she certainly knew her way around the personalities and politics of the Clintons’ world—and the family trusted her. Despite controversies over staff unionization and athletics, her tenure in Miami was considered highly successful, bringing billions of dollars in new donations to the university and raising its national academic ranking in the
U.S. News & World Report
college survey from 67 to 47.

Word about Shalala had leaked to the press while board consultations on the choice were proceeding, during a Clinton Global Initiative University conference at her school in early March. A press release from the foundation confirmed the choice, noting that she wouldn’t start in New York until late summer, when she was scheduled to step down from the university position she had held for fourteen years.

In announcing the appointment, Bill Clinton said, “I don’t know in my long life that I’ve ever worked with anybody that has quite the same combination of policy knowledge and concern, political skills, a personal touch with people and a sense of innate fairness that inspires
confidence across political, regional, economic, and psychological lines. She’s a remarkable person.”

Yet if the prospect of Donna Shalala’s leadership promised stability for the foundation, Hillary Clinton’s looming presidential campaign assured the opposite. A loud collision between politics and philanthropy, which had coexisted awkwardly for years, was now inevitable.

During the four years that Hillary served as secretary of state, few questions were asked about any conflict between her official responsibilities and her husband’s charitable and business ventures. The arrangements reached at the outset between the Obama administration and the Clintons with respect to foundation donors, paid speeches, and restrictions on CGI seemed to have satisfied almost everyone who had expressed an ethical concern.

When the
New York Times
Magazine
published a Bill Clinton profile in May 2009, the story’s nearly eight thousand words discussed his proficiency at crossword puzzles and his “Oh Hell” habit, but scarcely mentioned any issue between her job and his enterprises, except to say that while some Obama White House advisers had initially worried about him, “to their surprise, [Bill] Clinton has done nothing to complicate Obama’s life so far.”

In the wake of Clinton’s North Korea rescue mission, a few commentators had alluded to a potential problem, but only at very low volume. And later, when the foundation published its donors every year, in apparent adherence to its agreement with Obama, news stories noted, without alarm, that several of the largest were foreign governments such as Australia and Norway.

Almost nobody seemed to care, in short, despite Hillary’s powerful influence on American foreign policy—and had she not been a viable candidate for president, it is possible that almost nobody ever would have cared about the donors or the speeches.

When her candidacy became more probable than possible, however, the press revived those questions—and suddenly discovered problems that nobody had noticed for four years. Months before Hillary announced that she was running for president, stories about the foundation’s foreign donors began to appear again in major news
outlets. The first report appeared in the
Wall Street Journal
on February 17.

Based on a search of the donor listings on the foundation website, the
Journal
found that countries including Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Germany, the Netherlands, and—as previously reported—Australia, Canada, and Norway had donated millions of dollars over the years. According to the
Journal
, the total in foreign donations amounted to $48 million.

All of that data, as not many observers noticed, had been posted voluntarily, since the foundation was no longer obligated to reveal any of its donors after Hillary stepped down from the State Department. The foundation had ended the limitation on foreign contributions that held while she had served—but had also continued to disclose its donors, foreign and domestic, unlike other foundations and charities.

The
Journal
’s unsurprising revelations spurred competitors to follow its lead; within two days, the McClatchy Newspapers and th
e Washington Post
both published original stories on the foundation’s donors, with an emphasis on donations from abroad. Each sliced the data in various directions, expanding outward from the focus on foreign governments. McClatchy found that of the 168 donors giving more than $1 million each, at least seventy were foreign individuals or entities; and of the seven top donors that had given more than $25 million, four were foreign. The
Post
indicated that of donors who had given more than $1 million, a third were foreign governments or “other entities based outside the United States.”

Both stories suggested that the prevalence of foreign donations would harm Hillary politically, without regard to their humanitarian use. According to the
Post
, the foundation’s foreign donors had essentially circumvented the ban on foreign contributions to political campaigns, while the McClatchy story quoted a pollster saying that her association with “big bucks” would likely alienate her from middle-class voters.

On February 20, the
New York Times
published an editorial, titled “Separate Philanthropy from Political Clout,” that opened with a paean to the former president’s good works. “The Clinton Foundation has become one of the world’s major generators of charity, mobilizing global efforts to confront issues like health, climate change, economic de
velopment and equality for women and girls.” The editorial called on Hillary to reinstate the ban on foreign contributors, “who might have matters of concern to bring before a future Clinton administration.” The same could be said of domestic contributors, of course, and the
Times
didn’t explore the distinction.

“No critic has alleged a specific conflict of interest,” the editorial stipulated, which was true as of that moment. “The foundation, in fact, went beyond normal philanthropic bounds for transparency six years ago in instituting voluntary disclosure of donors within broad dollar ranges on its website. But this very information can feed criticism.” That too was true; indeed, all of the criticism so far had been fed solely by the foundation’s commitment to continued disclosure of its donors.

The editorial concluded by urging Hillary to “reassure the public that the foundation will not become a vehicle for insiders’ favoritism, should she run for and win the White House. Restoring the restrictions on foreign donors would be a good way to make this point as Mrs. Clinton’s widely expected campaign moves forward.”

Aside from this naive recommendation—which, if enacted, would have deprived millions of people of life-saving medicine, among other needs—the editorial was fair and reasonable. But the coverage of the Clinton Foundation, its finances and its namesakes, would soon change direction, abruptly and sharply, in the newspaper of record and elsewhere.

That shift would begin on page one of the
New York Times
.

Late in the afternoon on Sunday, April 12, Hillary’s nascent campaign released a soft-sell, two-minute video ad that featured vignettes of ordinary but diverse Americans, talking about their changing lives and their futures. Just before the end, the smiling candidate appeared onscreen to say, “I’m getting ready to do something too. I’m running for president. . . . Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion. And I want to be that champion.”

Within the next two hours, the board members and staff of the Clinton Foundation received a personal email from Hillary, informing
them that she would be resigning from the board, effective immediately, to devote her full effort to the campaign. “As I step down from that position, I know that I am leaving the Foundation in great hands,” she wrote. “I am equally as excited that Chelsea will continue to lead the Foundation’s mission with Bill, building upon our family’s commitment to help all people live their best life story.”

Beneath that cheerful message, however, both the candidate and the institution that she was leaving behind were increasingly under siege from their traditional critics in the media and on the right. In the weeks before her announcement, newspapers and airwaves had been filled with stories about her use of a personal email account—instead of an account in the State Department’s state.gov domain—that questioned her motivations, probity, and adherence to laws and regulations.

Her decision to unilaterally delete thousands of emails that she deemed “private,” before releasing the remainder for archiving by the federal government, had inflamed the controversy. Instantly labeled “Hillary’s email scandal,” it would balloon into a Justice Department investigation that haunted her campaign into the 2016 primaries and beyond.

Eventually Hillary would publicly apologize for using her private email address for government business, which violated the spirit of transparency she professed to honor. What irritated her supporters was that so many Republicans had done the same, or much worse, while escaping the censure she endured.

Several of the Republican presidential prospects—and many Republicans in Congress—had used personal email accounts for public business without drawing much or any scrutiny. And Hillary’s offense scarcely compared with the Bush administration’s monumental email fiasco, when millions of messages went missing from White House servers—and millions more were never recorded on those servers at all, as required under the 1978 Presidential Records Act, because dozens of White House staff were using private accounts provided by the Republican National Committee.

Among the RNC email clients had been Bush political adviser Karl Rove and his staff, who had used those accounts to communicate with the office of crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Backup tapes containing
all the Bush White House emails for the administration’s first two years had been “recycled,” which meant that messages pertaining to the 9/11 attack and the planned invasion of Iraq were gone.

Hillary had turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department archivists, at their request. But similar requests to her predecessors, former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, brought forth nothing. Powell acknowledged using a private email account for government business, but said he had not retained any of those messages. And Rice claimed not to have used email at all.

Still, media outlets and Republican politicians claimed to be shocked by Clinton’s use of private email, when little or no attention had been paid to any of the Republican transgressions of that same standard.

Questions about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation grew more pointed after Reuters correspondent Jonathan Allen filed a story in mid-March about CHAI’s failure to report seven such contributions during her tenure at State. The countries whose donations went unreported were Australia, the United Kingdom, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Swaziland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Although the Clinton Foundation itself had reported donations annually as required by its agreement with the Obama administration, CHAI management had not disclosed its donors to the spinoff from the main organization in 2010—a violation that spokeswoman Maura Daley described as “an oversight.”

None of the countries on the Reuters list raised any national security alarms, and the story didn’t allege that the State Department had showed favoritism toward any of them. Allen also reported that the failure to list those donations meant that they had not been “vetted” by the State Department ethics officer, as promised under the 2008 agreement.

CHAI’s Daley replied that the Australian, Swedish, and British donations represented increases upon prior gifts from those governments and therefore didn’t require vetting. The small Swaziland and Papua New Guinea donations were passed through from other prior donors, including Australia and the Global Fund, neither of which required vet
ting. And the Rwanda donation was not a gift at all, but a fee for services provided by CHAI. Daley acknowledged that the Swiss donation was new and ought to have been disclosed to the State Department ethics office in advance. But altogether, the unreported donations totaled only about one percent of the organization’s annual budget.

Such distinctions scarcely mattered, however, in the atmosphere of distrust that was rapidly descending over Hillary and, by extension, Bill Clinton and the foundation that bore their names. They had known for decades that even their smallest missteps would be magnified and distorted—if not by a responsible news outlet like Reuters, then by other publications, cable networks, talk radio hosts, websites, and, in the age of social media, on hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Twitter posts.

There was nothing scandalous in the funding that foreign governments—almost all of them close U.S. allies and friends like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Norway—had provided to CHAI since 2002, beginning long before Hillary became secretary of state. (The only scandal was that Western governments hadn’t started to fund AIDS treatment in the developing world years earlier.) Even Republicans who seized upon the Reuters revelations to denounce Clinton didn’t claim to find a quid pro quo for any of the CHAI donations.

Still, the furor over foreign funding posed a serious problem for Hillary if not for the foundation itself. On April 15, the foundation’s press office issued a statement announcing that it would accept donations from only six countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom—that had historically supported its programs (and CHAI in particular) for years before her first presidential campaign. Conspicuously absent from that list were nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose donations to other global charities—such as Oxfam or the World Food Programme, to name only two—had never raised any questions despite their repressive policies.