Hillary Clinton Promised to Disclose Foundation Donors, But Didn't
Reuters reports on even more information that Hillary Clinton has kept private; this time it's the names of donors to the Clinton foundation that she promised to release in full, but didn't.
From a major report this afternoon:
In 2008, Hillary Clinton promised Barack Obama, the president-elect, there would be no mystery about who was giving money to her family's globe-circling charities. She made a pledge to publish all the donors on an annual basis to ease concerns that as secretary of state she could be vulnerable to accusations of foreign influence.
At the outset, the Clinton Foundation did indeed publish what they said was a complete list of the names of more than 200,000 donors and has continued to update it. But in a breach of the pledge, the charity's flagship health program, which spends more than all of the other foundation initiatives put together, stopped making the annual disclosure in 2010, Reuters has found.
In response to questions from Reuters, officials at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the foundation confirmed no complete list of donors to the Clintons' charities has been published since 2010. CHAI was spun off as a separate legal entity that year, but the officials acknowledged it still remains subject to the same disclosure agreement as the foundation.
The specifics spelled out in the Reuters story are complicated, as if often the case with these sorts of stories. But it's the bigger picture that makes an impression.
Combine this with the story about Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email on a private server during her time at the State Department, and you have a portrait developing of someone who is secretive and unwilling to comply with basic tests of political transparency and who resists full oversight or disclosure, even when promising not to. It's not a great image for Clinton, and it's probably not too surprising that, as all of this rolls out, support for her is dropping amongst Democrats.
