Bill Clinton would step down from the foundation board and it would stop accepting money from foreign and corporate sources, the former president told staff on Wednesday.
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Bill Clinton told staff members on Thursday that it will also hold its final Clinton Global Initiative meeting in September in NY, the AP reported, citing meeting participants who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus, who along with other GOP leaders has been critical of the foreign donations received by the Clinton Foundation, said that this is too late.
Clinton said he and his daughter, Chelsea, had not faced any external pressure to make the changes, but wanted to avoid potential issues or second guessing for Hillary Clinton should she move into the White House. “She promised to maintain a separation between her official work and the foundation, but recently released emails written by staffers during her State Department tenure make clear that the supposed partition was far from impregnable”.
It’s Bill Clinton’s 70th birthday today, and by way of celebration the London office of Heat Street has been leafing through the financial records of the William J. Clinton Foundation UK looking for a good news story with which to toast him.
“The foundation should remove a political – and actual – distraction and stop accepting funding”.
In previous years combined total income of about £1.5 million has flowed through the London-registered Clinton Foundation UK.
The Clinton Foundation’s NY office did not respond to requests for comment. That’s a start. And the Clinton Cash documentary has now been viewed well over three million times. Bill Clinton also plans to cease giving paid speeches – another move meant to prevent further accusations of cronyism.
The changes would serve as an effort to demonstrate a President Hillary Clinton would not be influenced by any of the foundation’s activities.
Hillary Clinton has not answered why her brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of a company that received a rare “gold exploitation permit” from the Haitian government while she was dispersing billions of US taxpayer dollars in Haiti quake disaster relief.
After she left the State Department, the foundation resumed accepting donations from overseas. He also unveiled another major change: the end of the Clinton Global Initiative, its annual event held for worldwide leaders and donors. A Clinton spokesman said the former president will also refrain from delivering paid speeches until the November election and will no longer give paid speeches if Hillary Clinton is elected.
The decision is an acknowledgment by Bill Clinton that while he wants the work to continue, he understands that it needs to be refocused and retooled should his wife win in November.
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The Clintons also failed to disclose donations given to the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, two other offshoots of the Clinton Foundation.
