By Errol Louis CNN Political Commentator
Editor’s note: Errol Louis is the host of “Inside City Hall,” a nightly political show on NY1, a New York all-news channel. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
With the recent revelations of how former President Bill Clinton mingled fundraising for the nonprofit Clinton Foundation with lucrative commercial opportunities for himself, Hillary Clinton and her campaign surrender any right to complain about alleged corner-cutting and murky dealings by the family foundation run by her opponent, Donald Trump.
Both candidates have accused each other of improperly using family nonprofits for personal benefit. Now, it seems, both candidates turn out to be right.
“There’s no other way to look at it except pure corruption” is how a Trump spokesman, Jason Miller, describes the practices detailed in a damning memo from 2011, released through the WikiLeaks website, that shows aides to Bill Clinton discussing how they raised millions of dollars from corporate donors for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) — a nonprofit initiative of the Clinton Foundation — and also arranged for those same donors to separately pay Bill Clinton millions of dollars personally for “speeches, books and advisory service engagements.”
The aides called that part of the operation “Bill Clinton Inc.” and estimated they raised $3 million in fees for the ex-president and arranged deals that would pay him as much as $66 million in future years.
In one such arrangement, according to the memo, UBS Global Wealth Management donated $900,000 to the Foundation — and also paid the ex-president $2 million in speaking fees between 2011 and 2015, along with $225,000 to Hillary Clinton for a speech in 2013.
Bill Clinton’s speeches were generally delivered alongside former President George W. Bush — a powerful statement of clout by a banking institution that, likes its competitors, must comply with a battery of federal laws and regulations.
What better way to signal a bank’s influence — and convince regulators to tread lightly — than to put two ex-presidents on the payroll? Other high-profile multinational companies, including Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical, made similar deals to pay donations to the foundation and speaking fees to the ex-president.
CGI held its final meeting last month — the Clintons shut it down to avoid criticism from Trump and other political adversaries — but the details of the close mingling of public and private fundraising show a tawdry side that some advisers warned could cause problems for Hillary Clinton.
At a minimum, it blunts the Clinton campaign’s criticism of Trump for his own family-foundation shenanigans, especially the Trump Foundation’s donation of $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi around the same time Bondi’s office was considering having Florida join a legal action against Trump for allegedly ripping off customers of Trump University.
“While the Clinton Foundation has received the highest ratings from independent charitable watchdogs, Donald Trump’s use of foundation money to donate to the Florida Attorney General actually broke the law,” read a statement posted on the Clinton campaign website. “Donald Trump has no standing whatsoever to question the Clinton Foundation, which works to make AIDS and malaria drugs more accessible, when it’s been proven he uses his own foundation to launder illegal campaign donations.”
Don’t expect to hear much more from either campaign about their rivals’ foundation follies. It’s a topic where neither candidate has much high ground to stand upon.
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