It’s getting hard to keep track of all the developments in the story of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton e-mails. On Monday, Bill Clinton posted an open letter on the Web site of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation announcing that, if his wife is elected President, the organization will accept donations only from "U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and U.S.-based independent foundations." In addition to ruling out donations from foreign sources, this statement appeared to preclude donations from U.S. corporations and their charitable foundations. The former President also said that he would no longer raise money for the foundation and would resign from its board of directors. He added that the organization, which he set up in 1997, would change its name to, simply, the Clinton Foundation.
If the Clintons and their political allies had been hoping that these moves would put an end to the news stories about the foundation, they were disappointed. On the same day that Bill Clinton issued his open letter, Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog, released a new batch of e-mails from Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime associate, who was her deputy chief of staff at the State Department.
Among the e-mails was an exchange from June, 2009, between Abedin and Doug Band, a longtime associate of Bill Clinton who worked with the Clinton Foundation, in which Band asked Abedin to find time on her boss's schedule for Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, of Bahrain. In one e-mail, Band referred to the Crown Prince as a "good friend of ours." According to the Clinton Foundation's Web site, the Kingdom of Bahrain has contributed between fifty thousand dollars and a hundred thousand dollars to the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual Davos-style get-together of C.E.O.s, politicians, and celebrities that is part of the foundation. Abedin wrote back to Band, "We have reached out thru official channels." Prince Salman got his meeting with the Secretary of State.
Judicial Watch obtained Abedin’s e-mail correspondence through a Freedom of Information lawsuit. A couple of weeks ago, the same organization released an initial batch of Abedin e-mails, one of which showed Band asking her to do a favor for another Clinton Foundation donor, Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire. On that occasion, Abedin agreed to put Chagoury in touch with a former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman. (Feltman subsequently said he never spoke with Chagoury.)
In a separate development on Monday, a federal judge ordered the State Department to conduct a rapid review of nearly fifteen thousand previously undisclosed e-mails that the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered during its recently concluded investigation into Clinton's private e-mail server. It's not clear how many, if any, of these e-mails relate to the Clinton Foundation, but that won’t stop people from speculating about it. If the State Department completes its review by September 22nd, the deadline the judge set, the e-mails could be released in October, just weeks before Election Day.
And the stories keep coming. On Tuesday afternoon, the Associated Press reported that "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." In case anybody didn't get the drift, the piece went on, "It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president." It should be noted that Judicial Watch is clearly out to get Clinton, and the A.P. story has been heavily criticized by writers at other outlets, including Vox and Inside Philanthropy. The numbers the article cites have been called into question, and, in any case, it doesn’t contain any evidence that Clinton did anything wrong.*
The same could be said for a lot of the coverage of the Clinton Foundation, but the drumbeat continues. Even before these latest developments, Donald Trump, who has serious ethical problems of his own, had accused Clinton and her senior staff of turning the State Department into a "pay for play" operation and demanded the shuttering of the Clinton Foundation. On Monday, speaking in Ohio, Trump called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and the foundation. He said that the F.B.I. and Department of Justice "cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton’s crimes."
Clinton’s defenders frequently point out that nobody has provided evidence that Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, changed any State Department rules, or took any policy decisions, to reward a Clinton Foundation donor. If the criticism and calls for drastic action were emanating solely from Trump and other Republicans, the Clinton campaign could perhaps dismiss them as partisan politics. That's not the case, though. "The Clintons should move now to end donations to the Foundation, and make plans to shut it down in November," the editorial page of the liberal Boston Globe said last week. "Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort." On Sunday, the Huffington Post ran a headline on its homepage that blared, "JUST SHUT IT DOWN."
At this stage, many Democrats (including, I'd guess, some members of the Clinton campaign) just want the Clinton Foundation to go away. But that won’t happen. The correspondence between Abedin and Band is there for all to see. So are investigative stories detailing the fact that some foreign individuals, and even some foreign governments, made hefty contributions to the foundation while they had business pending before the Clinton-run State Department. Also well-established is the fact that Bill Clinton received a lot of money in speaking fees—at least twenty-six million dollars, according to the Washington Post—from companies and organizations that also donated to the foundation.
A strong argument can be made that the Clinton Foundation should have been closed, or at least thoroughly overhauled, before Clinton became Secretary of State, at the start of 2009. But to shut down the foundation now, when it is under severe attack, would only give credence to Trump's spurious claims that it was never more than a corrupt scheme to enrich its founders and their cronies. Closing down the foundation would also mean ending programs that have helped reduce the incidence of poverty and disease in poor countries, and laying off about two thousand people who work on these efforts.
The foundation has been rightly criticized for a number of mistakes, such as failing to disclose all its foreign donors in a timely manner. But, in terms of the philanthropic work it does, it has some notable successes to its name. Through the Clinton Global Initiative, it has garnered more than thirty-four hundred "Commitments to Action" since 2005. Thanks to these efforts, Elsa Palanza, the G.G.I.'s director of global commitments, said in a post on the foundation's Web site, "more than 46 million children have access to a better education . . . more than 11 million girls and women have been supported through empowerment initiatives; more than 27 million people have increased access to safe drinking water and sanitation."
Those are the foundation's numbers, but outside agencies have also vouched for its work. In a 2014 report, the World Health Organization credited the foundation's health arm, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is now a separate, but affiliated, entity, with helping to bring down the cost of AIDS drugs in poor countries. "Nine million people have lower-cost H.I.V./AIDS medicine because of the work of the Clinton Foundation and my husband," Clinton told Anderson Cooper, in June of this year. After examining the basis of this claim, the fact-checking Web site Politifact rated it as "true," saying, "If anything, Clinton understated the number of people who have benefited from the program." Charity Watch, the watchdog group formerly known as the American Institute of Philanthropy, has granted the Clinton Foundation an A grade for financial management. In 2014, eighty-eight per cent of its two-hundred-and-forty-two-million-dollar budget went to projects, and twelve per cent went to overhead, such as fund-raising and management salaries. Charity Watch says that top-tier nonprofits average about seventy-five per cent.
Rather than torpedoing the foundation, it would surely make more sense, at least for the duration of a Clinton Presidency, to separate it from its founding family and turn it into an independent organization run and overseen by people unconnected to the Clintons. The reforms that Bill Clinton announced on Monday go some way in this direction, but not far enough. Effectively, the foundation has said that it will curtail its fund-raising and slim down to concentrate on its core activities, such as health care, education, and empowering women. As part of this strategy, it had previously announced that this year’s Clinton Global Initiative would be the last: with corporate donations precluded, the event would no longer serve any purpose. That was a necessary step, but others are needed.
To begin with, Chelsea Clinton ought to follow her father's example and promise to resign from the foundation's board of directors if her mother is elected. Two longtime Clinton aides, Bruce Lindsey, who is the chairman of the board, and Cheryl Mills, who served as counselor and chief of staff to Hillary Clinton in the State Department, should take the same step. So should Frank Giustra, the Canadian billionaire who along with Bill Clinton has set up a joint effort to promote enterprise in poor countries, and whose business dealings have attracted a lot of attention. Perhaps the Clinton family could retain a representative or two on the board. But, as long as the foundation is seeking donations of any kind, its chair should be an independent figure, and it should have a clear majority of independent directors.
The same principles should apply to the operations of the foundation. Donna Shalala, who took over as the foundation's president last year, is a highly respected former public official and university administrator, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Her involvement with philanthropy goes back to her days in the Peace Corps. But the fact that Shalala served in Bill Clinton's Cabinet for eight years, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, could raise concerns about her independence. For the duration of a Clinton Presidency, the person running the foundation should have no prior links to the family. The same should go for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is run by Ira Magaziner, a longtime Clinton aide.
Such reforms would be no reflection on Lindsey or Magaziner or Shalala. Instead, they would reflect the ethical demands placed on a President and any institution bearing the President's name. If the Clinton Foundation is to continue operating during a Clinton Presidency, it is essential to minimize potential conflicts of interest, actual and perceived. Only an unequivocal separation could achieve this.
Even then, and with all the fund-raising restrictions that Bill Clinton has announced, some wealthy individuals may still be tempted to make donations to the foundation to curry favor with a Clinton White House. As New York magazine's Jonathan Chait pointed out last week, "There is no way around this problem without closing down the Clinton Foundation altogether." That's the course of action that Chait and others recommend. And maybe they’re right. But it seems a bit cavalier to shut down an organization that, as Bill Clinton noted in his letter on Monday, has helped poor farmers in East Africa boost their crop yields, sick people throughout the continent gain access to AIDS medicines, and the devastated and deforested nation of Haiti plant five million trees. "Regardless of whether you like [Hillary Clinton's] politics or not, this is a good charity," Daniel Borochoff, Charity Watch's president, told the Washington_ Post _last year. For the sake of the beneficiaries of the Clinton Foundation, if not the Clintons themselves, it's worth trying to preserve at least some of it.
*This post was updated to include the criticisms of the Associated Press story about Hillary Clinton.
