A $100,000 donation given to a New York Times charity campaign in 2008 by Bill and Hillary Clinton’s family foundation is not included in a Times list of large gifts from various other foundations, such as George Soros’s charitable foundation.
Each year, the newspaper publishes a list of trust and estate gifts of $100,000 or more that are invested in an endowment, the income of which is used to fund the following year’s Neediest Cases campaign. When asked about the omission of the Clintons’ gift from the 2008-2009 list, New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said that “most likely” the Clintons requested that the money go towards that year’s campaign and not the endowment, but there is “no record” of why the funds were used that way.
The Washington Free Beacon first broke news of the Clintons’ donation based on the Clinton Family Foundation’s 990 filing for 2008, the same year the Times endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The Times later revealed to Buzzfeed that the July 2008 gift was actually a reissue of a misdirected June 2007 check that never reached the Times.
On March 1, 2009, the Times published a list of gifts from “trusts and estates” of $100,000 or greater that the Times said were added to an endowment that benefits the Neediest Cases program. The Clinton Family Foundation gift does not appear on that list. Although the Clinton Family Foundation is a 501(c)(3) private foundation and not a trust or estate, gifts from other similarly IRS-classified foundations, such as the Soros Fund Charitable Foundation, are nevertheless listed.
The Times‘s Murphy said that the newspaper’s “practice is to acknowledge contributions that go toward the Fund’s endowment. This one did not, most likely because of a request that it be directed to the current campaign.” The Times, however, runs its Neediest Cases campaign each year from November through early February, so the Clintons’ gift (both the original in 2007 and the replacement in 2008) was given outside of the regular annual campaign by the Times for such donations.
The Times told Buzzfeed that “our records show a note attached to the [Clintons’] July, 2008 check that says it should serve as a replacement for a check (with check #) dated June 22, 2007.” When THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked Murphy if the note indicated how the gift should be directed, Murphy replied, “I said ‘most likely’ because that is the primary reason a donation of that size would not go toward the endowment and instead be directed to the active campaign. There is no record of why it did not, just the fact that it was applied to the campaign, not the endowment.”
