New findings worsen previous concerns over Hillary Clinton’s dealings with foreign donors who gave to her Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, according to a Yahoo! News report on Thursday. It has been learned that the Clinton Health Access Initiative did not produce information on any foreign donations to the United States’ State Department lawyers for needed-review during Mrs. Clinton’s time served as the nation’s secretary of state. The time frame was from 2009 through 2013 when she resigned the post. The revelation that the Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to the State Department was made by the organization’s spokesperson Maura Daley.
Daley claims that the charity deemed it was, for the most part, unnecessary. Those grants from foreign governments which the Initiative believed to not be worth reporting increased by tens of millions of dollars. Ms. Daley’s admission of new information is the initial report by the charity to show failures of reporting the political pledge made by the Clinton family and their charities. The Initiative has already said it failed to disclose the contributors’ identities, but that was the only acknowledgement of failed disclosures offered. Daley gave a host of reasons for nondisclosures of foreign donors – and increases in donations from existing foreign donors – but the reasoning isn’t washing out well with the throngs of officials who believe the State Department should have been better informed of the Foundation’s foreign dealings.
First of all, the information that was withheld should have been revealed to the United States senators who had severe misgivings about Mrs. Clinton’s Foundation’s connections to foreign donors when she was being considered for the secretary of state post. Secondly, the latest revelations are a prominent symbol of the broken political promise and subsequent lack of accountability underlying the latest controversies surrounding Mrs. Clinton, according to the Boston Globe on Thursday. As could be expected, the charity defends the missing disclosures. The Initiative claims that the donations which were not disclosed were passed through the charity to fund an existing project.
Of greatest concern is that in 2009, President Obama’s administration, Mrs. Clinton, and John Kerry – who was a senator at the time – strongly stated that transparency and public scrutiny would be evident on activities that posed any potential conflicts of interest with the State Department. As revelations continue to come forth, the promised transparency obviously was not in place. It was Kerry who said on the senate floor in January of 2009, “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.” It is strongly believed that Kerry’s incredible support of Hillary Clinton helped her overwhelmingly get confirmation to be the nation’s secretary of state – with a senate vote of 94-to-2.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative is approximately two-thirds of the Clinton charitable organization – which includes the Clinton Foundation and several subsets. From 2010 to 2013 alone, government grants to the Initiative – which are practically all from foreign countries – more than doubled from $26.7 million to $55.9 million. These figures are now verifiable by the Initiative’s tax information. Last week it was reported that only 15 percent of the donations made to the overall Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation have actually gone to charities. The other 85 percent has gone towards “other” expenses.
Politicians who assisted in confirming Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state six years ago are speaking out against the Democratic 2016 presidential candidate. For example, Se. John Barrasso – of the Foreign Relations Committee – now says that serious questions are currently being raised about Hillary Clinton’s promise regarding the basic terms of the agreement. He went as far as to say, “I took her at her word <and> maybe I was wrong to do that.” He continued, “…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.” Obviously, the investigation of the Foundation and related concerns continue.