Clinton health charity failed to report foreign grant increases as required under agreement for Hillary Clinton’s confirmation – Politics – The Boston GlobeClinton health charity failed to report foreign grant increases as required under agreement for Hillary Clinton’s confirmation – Politics – The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON 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. 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 State Department believes that transparency is the critical element of that agreement,” said Alec Gerlach, a Kerry spokesman.

Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff/File

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. 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?” 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. But it required that Clinton charities disclose to the State Department when foreign nations “increase materially” their commitments to the charities. Magaziner has said that the charity didn’t publicly disclose its donors because it believed the broader Clinton Foundation was doing so; there is considerable overlap in givers to the two entities.

Among the foreign governments that started giving money to the charity while Clinton was secretary of state were Rwanda, Sweden, Papua New Guinea, and Flanders.