Bill Clinton will certainly try to make the case Wednesday that the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots have done good work, and few people would dispute that.
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Bill Clinton admitted Monday that some Clinton Foundation donors might have given money to the charity in the hopes of getting official favors. He has promised to step away completely and split off various parts of the foundation to drastically reduce its scope if Hillary Clinton is elected.
But over the past year, evidence has emerged that both Clinton and the foundation failed to live up to those promises.
The timing of Bill Clinton’s speech income, from a perfume trade group in which a large member would later benefit from a Clinton Foundation project in Haiti, represents the kind of overlapping of private and charitable interests that has become a political liability for his wife as she runs for office. “And I trusted the State Department wouldn’t do anything they shouldn’t do”, Clinton said in an interview with NPR.
Clinton also praised his wife for weathering criticism during her presidential campaign.
“I’ve had this job longer than I ever had any job, and I’ve loved it”, Clinton said.
“This e-mail thing was treated like the most important event since the end of World War II”, he said.
In addition, the Clinton Foundation accepted millions of donations from foreign governments while Hillary was at State, including one that violated an ethics agreement it had with the Obama administration. “They did great work”.
The CGI is one facet of the larger Clinton Foundation and its premier event, a yearly CGI conference in NY, has become a high profile attraction where world leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, philanthropists, academics, celebrities and athletes rub elbows and discuss ways to combat social ills from poverty to public health.
“It’s just a more negative environment”, Clinton said.
A follow-up Associated Press story found that over half of the people Mrs. Clinton met with while serving at the federal agency were Clinton Foundation donors. In a third instance, he sought help from longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin to obtain a diplomatic passport.
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But he added, that will only happen if Hillary Clinton is elected.
