Donald Trump slammed a longtime Clinton aide’s controversial description of Clinton Foundation activities as further evidence of the “outright corruption” Hillary and Bill Clinton have cultivated during their decades in public office.
“The more emails WikiLeaks releases, the more the lines between the Clinton Foundation, the secretary of state’s office and the Clintons’ personal finances are blurred,” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “Just today we read about Clinton confidant Doug Band bragging that he had funneled tens of millions of dollars to ‘Bill Clinton, Inc.’ through the foundation donations, paid speeches and consulting contracts.”
Trump was referring to a 2011 memo, made public Wednesday by WikiLeaks, in which Band laid out the close ties between the foundation, Bill Clinton’s personal wealth and a consulting firm he had recently founded called Teneo Strategies.
Band, who served as one of the top fundraisers for the Clinton Foundation before moving on to Teneo, said his firm had encouraged companies wishing to do business with Bill Clinton to donate to the foundation, and vice versa.
He described himself and fellow foundation staffer Justin Cooper as Bill Clinton’s “agents, lawyers, managers and implementers” in the memo, which emerged during a period of tensions between Band and Chelsea Clinton amid rumors that Teneo had solicited business using Bill Clinton’s name without his knowledge or consent.
“Mr. Band called the arrangement ‘unorthodox.’ The rest of us call it outright corruption,” Trump said in the statement on Thursday. “In fact, the Clinton Foundation even hired a law firm to find out if their pay-to-play scheme would jeopardize their charitable status with the IRS.”
The GOP nominee was referring to a corporate review performed by Simpson Thatcher during the same time frame as the spat between Chelsea Clinton and Band.
The former first daughter had privately expressed concerns that her family’s foundation risked losing its nonprofit status if bureaucratic waste and conflicts of interest continued to plague the charity. Clinton Foundation officials made the results of the Simpson Thatcher audit available to the public in 2013.
“If the Clintons were willing to play this fast and loose with their enterprise when they weren’t in the White House, just imagine what they will do if they are given the chance to control the Oval Office,” Trump added.
Hillary Clinton has fended off allegations of pay-to-play throughout her entire presidential campaign. Critics have suggested the Democratic nominee allowed Clinton Foundation donors to enjoy special access to the State Department during her tenure as secretary of state.
Amid a backlash over emails that indicated foundation employees worked closely with State Department aides, Bill Clinton announced this summer that he planned to step back from the foundation should his wife win the election and shutter its most controversial arm, the Clinton Global Initiative, regardless of the outcome.
