The foundation also announced this year that if Clinton wins the presidency, it will stop taking new contributions from foreign or corporate donors.
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Clinton announced he would end the 12-year run of the Clinton Global Initiative in August, one of several steps he and Hillary Clinton have announced to wind down their charitable organization, the Clinton Foundation.
The layoffs were first reported by Politico.
At its height CGI employed about 200 full-time staff, but many have already jumped ship following uncertainty about the foundation’s future if Clinton is elected president. He diligently thumbed through the pages of a farewell defense, which he had been working on moments before he addressed the Clinton Global Initiative one final time. It’s unclear how many people will be losing their jobs. “It was poorly managed, treated too glibly, patronizingly, completely lacking empathy at the fact that so many young people were going to be laid off”, a former C.G.I. official told Politico.
During an interview with NPR, which aired Monday, Clinton opened up the door to Republicans’ pay-to-play attacks by saying that some donors probably gave to the Clinton Foundation to gain greater influence with the Clintons, eyeing a Clinton White House 2.0.
Critics have suggested that the Clinton Foundation could create new conflicts of interest for a Clinton administration, an argument that the Clintons have grudgingly accepted – though without explaining why the same arguments would not have applied to her term as Secretary of State.
So far, the Clinton Global Initiative hasn’t released details on what projects would continue, though some are multi-year commitments, meaning that employees could potentially stay on for years.
However, some of the cuts to the Clinton Foundation are apparently independent of the November election, and simply the result of the broader scandal surrounding the so-called “charity”.
A foundation spokesperson told Politico that the employees will have their jobs with benefits until the end of the year, and that they are giving them “career coaching, access to job leads in a variety of fields, and resume and job search” assistance.
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The former president’s final address to CGI is expected to be a “personal reflection”, on more than a decade at the Clinton Foundation, a person familiar with his thinking told Politico.
