Days before the 2016 presidential election, the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks released a hacked memo about the aggressive strategy behind Bill Clinton’s consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements that added tens of millions of dollars to the family’s fortune, including during the years Hillary Clinton led the State Department in the Obama administration.
History has shown that undecided and swing voters in close races can be won or lost by an October surprise in the weeks leading up to election. Just ask Hillary.
Timing was everything when FBI director James Comey told Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, that he was reopening an investigation into the Democratic Party presidential candidate over whether she mishandled classified information through the use of a private email server.
The Trump Justice Department in January 2018 launched a new inquiry into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in any pay-to-play politics or other illegal activities while Hillary served as secretary of State.
Here are 10 things you need to know about the swamp piggy bank charges against the Clinton Foundation
The Clinton Foundation is what philanthropists call an operating foundation, meaning it doesn’t give much money to outside groups. Instead, the foundation does its own work, with staff and partners around the world.
The foundation claimed to have assets of $455.7 million in 2015. It reported total revenue of $38.4 million for 2017, the lowest amount the foundation took in per year in more than a decade, Open Secrets reported.
In the U.S., the foundation has a school program that operates in every state, touching more than 31,000 schools and 18 million students. The program works to improve physical education, child nutrition, health education and staff wellness. It also works on prescription drug addiction. The foundation’s goal was to halve the number of opioid overdoses — which killed more Americans than car accidents, CNN reported in 2016. Internationally, health was a big focus for the foundation, which says it helped 11.5 million people with HIV including 800,000 children by saving 90 percent on the cost of their medication.
The Clinton Global Initiative is part of the foundation, acting as the “OKCupid of the charity world,” CNN reported. It matches funders with good causes at events throughout the year, “including a big annual meeting in New York every September that’s a who’s who of global movers-and-shakers.”
Wealthy Clinton Foundation donors and foreign government contributed during the 2016 elections, causing critics to allege conflicts of interests, the Observer reported. Clinton supporters defended the organization’s charitable work, dismissing claims that the foundation gave the Clintons a way to sell access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand while Hillary Clinton campaigned for president.
The AP reported in August 2016 that during her time as secretary, more than half of Hillary’s meetings with people outside government were with donors to the Clinton Foundation.
For years, news media including The New York Times and The Daily Caller reported “countless stories on donations to the Clinton Foundation or speech fees that closely fell around the time of favorable decisions by Clinton’s State Department,” The Hill reported.
In one, critics accused Hillary of a quid pro quo in which the foundation received large donations in exchange for supporting the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with ties to U.S. mining stakes, to a Russian nuclear agency. The deal was approved by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment when Hillary was secretary of state under Obama and had a voting seat on the panel, New York Times reported.
In his book “Clinton Cash,” conservative author Peter Schweizer chronicled the most famous of the Clinton Foundation corruption allegations. That empowered conservatives including Trump to renew the call for investigations into the Clinton Foundation, according to The Hill.
The book got the attention of F.B.I. agents, who regarded some of its contents as justification to obtain a subpoena for foundation records.
Launched as a public charity in 1997 to raise funds for the Clinton Presidential Library, the Clinton Foundation grew into one of the most visible U.S. foundations, running programs for HIV/AIDS, climate change, healthy children, economic development, and Haiti earthquake relief.
While in office, Trump openly pushed his own Department of Justice to investigate the Clintons, whom he still considered political opponents.
When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2008, she promised President Barack Obama that the foundation would publish all its donors every year. That didn’t happen, CNN reported.
From 2010 to 2013, the foundation’s health arm wasn’t disclosing all of its donors — leaving out countries such as Switzerland and lumping together individuals as one big group. The foundation didn’t tell the State Department that countries such as Australia and the U.K. doubled and tripled their donations between 2009 and 2012 while Clinton was secretary.
Public corruption prosecutors in Washington, D.C. expressed disinterest in working with the FBI on a Clinton Foundation-related investigation in 2016, saying they were concerned the FBI’s evidence wasn’t strong enough, AP reported.
The foundation was “subjected to politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have proven false,” foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said.
Trump repeatedly called out then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not taking action against Hillary Clinton, her aides and the foundation. Democrats said Trump was trying to keep the focus off investigations into whether his campaign was involved with Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.
In November 2017, Sessions directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate Republican grievances and determine if a special counsel should be appointed to look into allegations that the Clinton Foundation benefited from an Obama-era uranium transaction involving a Russian state company, AP reported. Sessions said prosecutors would also determine “whether any matters currently under investigation need additional resources.”
A hacked 2011 memo written by top Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band detailed “a circle of enrichment” in which he raised money for the Clinton Foundation from corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm, Teneo, while asking many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president, Washington Post reported.
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That memo was published by Wikileaks days before the 2016 presidential election. It described how Band helped run what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.,” obtaining “in-kind services for the president and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”
A Clinton campaign spokesman said the material “hacked by the Russian government and weaponized by WikiLeaks.”
In January 2017, the Justice Department and FBI launched an investigation into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in pay-to-play politics or illegal activities when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
On Dec. 13, 2018, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on Government Operations held a hearing titled “Oversight of Nonprofit Organizations: A Case Study on the Clinton Foundation”, Open Secrets reported.
The Clinton Foundation allegations embroiled Andrew G. McCabe, FBI deputy director from February 2016 to January 2018. He was accused of leaking information about the case to a reporter and later lying about it to the Justice Department inspector general, resulting in his firing in 2018 and a failed effort by the Justice Department to prosecute him.
John H. Durham, the Connecticut U.S. attorney assigned by Attorney General Bill Barr to review the Russia inquiry, sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter told the New York Times.
“Mr. Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies,” New York Times reported on Sept, 24, 2020.
The investigation into allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation that began about five years ago has not resulted in any charges.
