Band’s request also included Justin Cooper, who also worked for former President Bill Clinton and for the foundation.
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Yet, even some allies are arguing that those moves wouldn’t go far enough to prevent an appearance of undue influence by the charity’s donors. That report, and others that have looked into the connections between Clinton and their donors, have yet to find any wrongdoing on behalf of the family. What’s at stake is the big prize.
“No issue better illustrates how corrupt my opponent is than her pay for play scandals as secretary of state”, Trump said in an OH speech this past week.
According to several people familiar with the former president’s operation, the rationale behind the interwoven payrolls is that they allow for a small team to assist Clinton in a variety of settings without having to do logistically complicated hockey-like line changes.
So Clinton gets the princely sum of $96,600 each year for staff, and tracks the work these staffers do in his capacity as ex-president. About $6 million came from other donors that are not disclosed by the Clinton Foundation Insamlingsstiftelse.
The transactions do not reveal illegal activity, it said, but do raise new questions about the ties between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of State.
For the Clintons, the decisions surrounding the foundation are the latest chapter in an unprecedented partnership of personal and political ambitions.
There certainly can be many fair complaints about how the Clinton Foundation raised money while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
A recent report by the Associated Press indicates that “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 worldwide programs”.
But Judicial Watch noted that federal law “strictly limits” such passports to certain individuals, including Foreign Service officers and those “having diplomatic status or comparable status because he or she is traveling overseas to carry out diplomatic duties on behalf of the U.S. Government”.
While Politico suggested that Clinton has been particularly greedy in requesting federal allocations, reporting that his requests since 2001 had been “more than any of the other living former presidents”, the piece ignored that such allocations have been larger for each successive president, with President George W. Bush receiving the most funds in fiscal year 2015.
There also was an agreement – specifically, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) – entered into by the Clinton Foundation and the office of President-elect Barack Obama on December 12, 2008.
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Foreign donations to USA political activities are forbidden and Bill realized that an ingenious workaround to this law was to establish a charity, and the Clinton Foundation was born. It recommends that if Hillary Clinton wins, both Bill and Chelsea Clinton should end their operational involvement in the foundation and its affiliates for the duration of her presidency, relinquishing any control over spending, hiring and board appointments.
