WASHINGTON
(AP) -- 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. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible
ethics challenges if elected president.
At
least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone
conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department
donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its
international programs, according to a review of State Department
calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85
donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more
than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.
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.
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.
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," said
Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia
University's graduate fundraising management program. "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 Barack 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.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian
Fallon did not respond to the AP's questions about Clinton transition
plans regarding ethics, but said in a statement Tuesday the standard set
by the Clinton Foundation's ethics restrictions was "unprecedented,
even if it may never satisfy some critics."
GOP
Vice Presidential candidate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said the AP
analysis was evidence of "pay-to-play" politics at Clinton's State
Department. He called for the foundation to be shut down and for an
independent prosecutor to be appointed to investigate.
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.
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