The refrain usually offered by the Clinton family’s defenders when the subject of their scandal-plagued foundation comes up is that the various arms of that public charity do so many good works. The implication therein is that an ethics violation here and there or the blurred lines between American diplomatic affairs and those of the Clinton family are just the costs of doing business. With a second Clinton presidency looking more likely, however, that unconvincing defense of the family foundation is being tossed. As new revelations about the Foundation’s conduct while Clinton served as Secretary of State emerge, even Hillary Clinton’s allies are conceding that the Clinton Foundation has to go.
“The inherent conflict of interest was obvious when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009,” declared the Boston Globe’s Clinton-friendly editorial board. “The foundation should remove a political—and actual—distraction and stop accepting funding,” it continued. “If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down.”
“I definitely think if she wins the presidency they have to disband it,” asserted longtime Clinton ally, Pennsylvania governor, and former Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell. “It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem.”
These aren’t calls to temporarily shutter the operation or to hand it over to a more independent steward but to dissolve the Foundation in its entirety. What problem might that be exactly? Rendell didn’t specify. Had he tried to itemize the myriad offenses to propriety and good government that lead right to the Clinton Foundation’s doorstep, he would not have found himself at a loss for material.
Over the course of the last year, a series of independent investigations and FOIA requests have created the picture of a foundation that serves as much as a charity as it does a smoke screen for the Clinton family’s personal advancement.
Last year, we learned that the State Department and White House approved of a deal to sell fully 20 percent of America’s uranium production capacity to a Russian-based firm that, soon afterwords, became a Russian-owned firm. It just happens that State was reviewing the deal precisely at the same time that the Clinton Foundation was accepting a $2.35 million donation from that very company. The Foundation has received a variety of conspicuously timed donations from the governments of unsavory states like Brunei, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria even as they lobbied the United States government to take a softer line on their human rights violations.
In just the last week, Americans learned Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department facilitated the request of a connected Lebanese businessman at the behest of Clinton Foundation senior administrator Doug Band. This occurred despite an ethics agreement signed by White House officials and Foundation brass who pledged as a condition of Clinton’s appointment to State to maintain separation between the charity and American national affairs.
Those revelations coincided with the discovery that the FBI went to the Justice Department with a request for a formal investigation of the Clinton Foundation—a request that was summarily denied. The DOJ insisted that it lacked evidence to pursue a corruption investigation, despite to the FBI’s findings. It is, however, almost impossible to divorce the Obama Justice Department’s transparently political handling of the Clinton email saga with its transparently political handling of the Clinton Foundation woes. For an increasingly likely future president with a significant trust problem, the Clinton Foundation is too great a threat. It has to go.
In some ways, this is a shame because, as Clinton Foundation defenders were quick to note, the charity did perform charitable works. The Clinton Development Initiative has helped alleviate famine conditions in Africa by training rural farmers and providing them with modern equipment. The Clinton Health Access Initiative has provided HIV/AIDS treatment to at-risk populations in regions without nearby medical treatment facilities.
As the Globe observed, though, any of the philanthropically-minded souls who contributed big dollars to the Clinton Foundation can focus their efforts on the Clinton family’s preferred causes though other venues. If, that is, their objective was to alleviate human suffering and not to get a little closer to the Clintons. That’s a revealing admission. Of course, the Clinton Foundation’s singularly important charitable works are suddenly redundant. The charity that provided so many indispensable services to the developing world must be scrapped entirely. Sorry, vast tides of agonizing humanity; the political headache this stuff might cause Mrs. Clinton is simply too undesirable.
So why are so many Clinton defenders changing their tune on the foundation, the defense of which was imperative when the former secretary of state was a vulnerable, little-loved candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination? Just take a look at the polls.
