Another day, another Clinton scandal. The Boston Globe reported this morning that yet another Clinton tax-exempt organization, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), failed to disclose foreign donations it received while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.
“The Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013,” the Boston Globe wrote. “[CHAI CEO Maura Daley] said the charity deemed it unnecessary, except in one case that she described as an ‘oversight.'”
Ethics promise on foreign donors was bypassed by the biggest of Clinton family charities http://t.co/1osVrbxCcb pic.twitter.com/dlqAgOESmm
The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 30, 2015
More interesting, however, is CHAI’s stated rationale for refusing to disclose the donations: since it was only passing the money on to other groups and not using it in-house, it didn’t feel compelled to disclose the payments.
That rationale flies in the face of other explanations provided by the Clinton Foundation about why its charitable grants to other projects and organizations comprise such a small percentage of its budget. Clinton allies have claimed that the charitable grant numbers are low only because the Clinton non-profit universe does the bulk of its charitable work “in-house.”
“The charity defended the lack of some disclosures on the grounds that the donations in question were simply passed through the charity to fund an existing project,” according to the Boston Globe.
The new explanation for the non-profit’s refusal to disclose the sources of its foreign cash flies in the face of previous defenses of the Clinton Foundation’s spending habits. Instead of directly funding charitable efforts, huge swathes of Clinton Foundation cash were instead used to pay rent, buy office supplies, fund private jet travel, and host what the New York Times described as “glitzy annual gathering[s] of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.”
Based on an extensive analysis of the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings, The Federalist found that the organization spent less than 10 percent of its budget on charitable grants in 2013. From 2009 through 2012, it spent less than 15 percent of its budget on charitable grants to other organizations.
In 2013, for example, a majority of the Clinton Foundation’s budget was spent on staff salaries, travel, office supplies, and rent.
The Clinton Foundation announced last week that it would be refiling several years’ worth of tax returns because it improperly failed to disclose to the IRS foreign contributions it received while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.
