Boston-based group admits to mistakes
(Boston Glove) – An unprecedented ethics promise that played a pivotal role in helping Hillary Rodham Clinton win confirmation as secretary of state, soothing senators’ concerns about conflicts of interests with Clinton family charities, was uniformly bypassed by the biggest of the philanthropies involved.
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, Maura Daley, the organization’s spokeswoman, acknowledged to the Globe this week. She said the charity deemed it unnecessary, except in one case that she described as an “oversight.”
During that time, grants from foreign governments increased by tens of millions of dollars to the Boston-based organization.
Daley’s acknowledgement was the first by the charity of the broad scope of its apparent failures to fulfill the spirit of a crucial political pledge made by the Clinton family and their charities. The health initiative has previously acknowledged failing only to disclose the identity of its contributors, another requirement under the agreement.
The failures make the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is headquartered on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston, and goes by the acronym CHAI, a prominent symbol of the broken political promise and subsequent lack of accountability underlying the charity-related controversies that are dogging Clinton as she embarks on her campaign for president.
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. Previously, it has acknowledged that mistakes were made.
But loopoholes and legalistic explanations about what new foreign donations should be excluded from disclosure were not publicly discussed in the initial deal. In 2009, the incoming Obama administration, Clinton, and then-Senator John F. Kerry all publicly touted the Clinton charities’ “memorandum of understanding’’ as a guarantee that transparency and public scrutiny would be brought to bear on activities that posed any potential conflicts of interest with State Department business.
“Transparency is critically important here, obviously, because it allows the American people, the media, and those of us here in Congress . . . to be able to judge for ourselves that no conflicts — real or apparent — exist,’’ Kerry said during a Senate floor speech on Jan. 21, 2009.
The memorandum, which did not outline a penalty for failing to comply, was signed in December 2008 by Valerie Jarrett, co-chairwoman of the Obama transition team, and Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton aide who at the time was CEO of the Clinton Foundation and sits on the board of the CHAI.
Jarrett and Lindsey declined to be interviewed about CHAI’s repeated failures to disclose major increases in foreign grants.
The White House and the State Department also declined to take a firm stand on the apparent violations of the agreement. The White House press office declined to comment in any specific way. The State Department released a brief statement in muted tones that contrasted starkly with Kerry’s defense of the agreement in 2009.
“We would have expected that CHAI identify for the department the foreign country donors that elected to materially increase their donations and new country donors. The State Department believes that transparency is the critical element of that agreement,’’ said Alec Gerlach, a Kerry spokesman.
The building in South Boston where the offices of the Clinton Health Access Initiative are located.
With a budget of more than $100 million a year, the CHAI makes up nearly 60 percent of the broader Clinton charitable empire, which includes the Clinton Foundation and several offshoots. Government grants to CHAI, nearly all of them from foreign countries, doubled from $26.7 million in 2010 to $55.9 million in 2013, according to the charity’s tax forms.
A Republican senator on the Foreign Relations Committee who voted in favor of Clinton’s confirmation in 2009, John Barrasso of Wyoming, said the lack of adherence to the basic terms of the agreement raised questions about her promise.
“I took her at her word. Maybe I was wrong to do that,” he said in an interview. “Because now the evidence shows that she didn’t disclose any of these things. The interesting part is you would think that for all of their time in the White House and time in the Senate, that she would want to be very far away from the hint of this kind of problem.”
Dan Diller, a member of the committee’s Republican staff when Clinton was confirmed, said it was difficult to comprehend why the Boston charity didn’t disclose its foreign grants to the State Department.
“If it is just a pass through to do good works that the whole world is cheering, then what could possibly be the harm in disclosing the donations?” Dillon said. “The administrative burden of disclosing such donations is negligible. I don’t understand why they would not trumpet their success and get credit for transparency in the process.”
Scrutiny of the family foundation shouldn’t be a surprise to the Clintons or their allies running the various pieces of the family’s charitable network. The phrase “Clinton Foundation” came up by name 75 times during Clinton’s confirmation hearing — demonstrating the significant concerns among lawmakers about potential conflicts of interest and a need for transparency.
At the hearing, then-Senator Clinton batted down questions by pointing to the highly specific contents of the agreement and the broad pledges for disclosure.
The agreement said the Clinton charities and the Obama administration wanted to “ensure that the activites of the [Clinton Foundation and its affiliated organizations], however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as secretary of state.’’
All donors were required to be disclosed. Existing streams of donations from foreign countries did not have to be submitted to the State Department for possible ethics reviews. But it required that Clinton charities disclose to the State Department when foreign nations “increase materially’’ their commitments to the charities. But the specific amount of increase that triggered such reporting was not defined.
Clinton said at the time that the agreement went “above and beyond the requirements of the law and the ethics rules” to “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest” between the foundation and her role as secretary of state.
Kerry’s Senate speech in her defense help clear the way for an overwhelming confirmation vote, 94-to-2.
“All contributions by foreign governments will be subject to a review process by the State Department’s officials,’’ Kerry said on the Senate floor. “This review will occur prior to the receipt of any such contribution, and Senator Clinton has made clear that the process has been designed to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.’’
Kerry played a key role in brokering the disclosure agreement as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2015/04/29/clinton-health-charity-failed-report-foreign-grant-increases-required-under-agreement-for-hillary-clinton-confirmation/yTYoUTi3wGhy3oDonxy6gI/story.html
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