Clinton Foundation: No Model for Fiscal Responsibility

If Hillary Clinton wants to tout herself as a candidate for fiscal responsibility, that will be difficult to demonstrate, based on the financial mess of the Clinton Foundation, which has been little more than a cauldron or corruption and cronyism.

Bill Clinton never tires of reminding the public that he was the last president to sign a balanced federal budget. But the financial management of the foundation is less than exemplary, as the New York Times reported in August 2013.

The foundation ran deficits in 2007 and 2008 because it faced competition—Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That may very well repeat itself over the next two years. The foundation had multi-million-dollar shortfalls several other years as well. The Times reported that in 2012, the Clinton Foundation raked in $214 million but still ran a shortfall of $8 million.

The Times reported that the organization staff was concerned it was too reliant on Bill Clinton for buck raking, and so pulled in Hillary and Chelsea with a goal of raising the endowment to $250 million.

As the latest Clinton campaign competes with the foundation for funds, it’s worth realizing how much duplication exists between the two. The headline of a recent column by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel summed it up: “The Clinton Foundation Super PAC. It’s past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation is a charity.”

“Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes,” Strassel wrote. “The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.”

The Washington Post reported that Clinton fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell, a member of George Soros’s shadowy billionaires’ club known as the Democracy Alliance, donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation (for more on the Democracy Alliance, see Foundation Watch, October 2014). In February, the foundation’s chief development officer, Dennis Cheng, resigned to be a fundraiser for Hillary’s 2016 campaign. And in March of this year the Wall Street Journal reported that Donna Shalala, one of the more controversial members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, will take over as CEO of the foundation later this year when her tenure as president of Miami University ends. When she served as Health and Human Services Secretary, Shalala, a longtime Clinton loyalist, “thought it was a mistake to run the effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system from the White House, and she opposed Mr. Clinton’s decision to sign a sweeping welfare law.” After defending President Clinton when “allegations of an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky surfaced,” she later “dressed him down in front of the cabinet” after Clinton “admitted that he had had an improper relationship” with Lewinsky.