Rolling in It

He’s so money and he knows it.
(AP photo)

The Drudge headline simply reads “slush,” but WaPo has the details:

The Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups.

The disclosure came as the foundation faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.

The money was paid as fees for speeches by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Foundation officials said the funds were tallied internally as “revenue” rather than donations, which is why they had not been included in the public listings of its contributors published as part of the 2008 agreement.

This next part is, if you’ll excuse the word choice, rich:

The paid appearances included speeches by former president Bill Clinton to the Ni­ger­ian ThisDay newspaper group for at least $500,000 and to the Beijing Huaduo Enterprise Consulting Company Ltd., an investment holding company that specializes in the natural gas market, for at least $250,000. Citibank paid at least $250,000 for a speech by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The disclosures underscore how much the Clintons have leveraged their star power to draw more money not just for their personal enrichment but also for the benefit of their philanthropic work.

While the story notes that the Clinton Foundation has raised $2 billion-with-a-b since its founding less than 20 years ago, it fails to note that in 2013, the last year for which reports are available, it gave only 6% of its revenues as charity. Travel and office supplies were bigger expenses than “giving.”

So I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the Clinton Foundation is more interested in “philanthropic work” or in the Clinton’s “personal enrichment,” but the numbers do seem to be rather lopsided towards the latter.