Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said this weekend that Hillary Clinton should cut all ties with the Clinton Foundation if she wins in November, adding his voice to a growing chorus of Clinton-friendly voices who’ve said she needs to do something about the charitable group and her possible conflicts of interest.
“I would certainly suggest that as president of the United States, she should cease operations, all contact with the Clinton Foundation,” the Vermont lawmaker said Sunday in an interview on “Meet the Press.”
“Does that mean shutting it down, or just not being involved?” host Chuck Todd asked.
“At the very least, she should not be involved,” Sanders said. “At the very least.”
The host continued, and asked if it’d be better if the foundation were shuttered completely if Clinton wins the election.
“I don’t know enough — they do a lot of good things with AIDS and so forth, so I can’t definitively answer that,” Sanders said. “But I think, Chuck, what we have got to do as a nation is have a very serious debate on the enormous crises facing this country. That is where our focus has got to be.”
The Vermont lawmaker and failed 2016 presidential candidate is not alone in saying Clinton needs to distance herself from the foundation should she win in the fall.
The New York Times’ editorial board wrote this week that “The Clinton Foundation has become a symbol of the Clintons’ laudable ambitions, but also of their tangled alliances and operational opacity.”
“If Mrs. Clinton wins, it could prove a target for her political adversaries. Achieving true distance from the foundation is not only necessary to ensure its effectiveness, it is an ethical imperative for Mrs. Clinton,” it said.
Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., who supported Bernie Sanders during the primaries but now supports Clinton, also said this week she needs to do something about her foundation problem.
“We have got to get rid of extraneous issues, and if this foundation is an extraneous issue that goes to the heart of whether it’s trust or transparency, then get rid of it,” Grijalva said.
“Because there is so much on the table, right now, for the American people and for the future of this nation that extraneous issues such as the foundation, which if that is something that needs to be cut off, then it should be cut off,” he said.
Clinton has been dogged for years over her ties to both public office and the Clinton Foundation.
New questions regarding the foundation and Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state cropped up last month after the Associated Press published a report Tuesday showing that half of the non-government individuals who met with her at the State Department were foundation donors.
Of the 154 non-government officials who met or had phone calls scheduled with Clinton when she worked the top spot at the State Department, approximately 85 either donated directly to the foundation or “pledged commitments to its international programs,” AP reported, citing State Department calendars.
Those 85 donors contributed a combined $156 million to Clinton-controlled entities.
“At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million,” the AP noted. “Some of Clinton’s most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband’s political coffers.”
Bill Clinton also announced last month that the foundation would stop accepting donations from foreign and corporate entities should the Democratic nominee win in the fall.
However, even with the pledge to halt foreign and corporate donations to the foundation, much of the Clintons’ network of charitable foundations would be exempt from this policy, including the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which raised 60 percent of its revenues in 2015 from foreign government grants, and the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which profited after Clinton’s State Department approved a deal that played to the group’s stake in uranium mining, the Boston Globe reported.
Further, as far as Bill Clinton’s pledge is concerned, it would not affect “more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000,” the AP noted.
