The Clinton Foundation is not the Red Cross

But there was one particularly interesting exchange, in which Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, running mate to Republican Donald Trump, set his sights on Hillary Clinton’s family charity, the Clinton Foundation. The foundation has been a source of scandal and irritation for her campaign ever since two years ago, when the New York Times kicked off reporting on the influence its donors had in the Clinton State Department.

“I am glad to talk about the foundation,” responded her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. “The Clinton Foundation does an awful lot of good work.” He even argued that it “gets higher rankings for its charity than the American Red Cross does.” (This is not true, by the way.)

Kaine went on to note that the State Department had investigated itself and concluded (despite much evidence to the contrary) that Clinton had done nothing at its helm to benefit her foundation donors.

Kaine is not the first Clinton defender to paint the foundation as something sacred for all the good it does, which only the mean-spirited would dare attack. But the average voter needs to understand how misleading this is. The Clinton Foundation is not the Red Cross, or is it the Missionaries of Charity or the Salvation Army.

Whatever charity work it does, the foundation’s more relevant purpose right now pertains to its $30 million annual payroll. This is how it has served as a vehicle for keeping the Clinton political machine together and running at a time when there was no other obvious way.

It isn’t necessarily easy for someone serving in a cabinet department, let alone someone outside government for good (Bill Clinton), to keep a standing army of loyalists well-paid. The foundation meant, among other things, that donors could pay for the Clintons to keep one. And in many notable cases, those donors were people or nation-states with known interests before Clinton’s State Department.

We have noted previously how the foundation became a source of leverage for donors. Emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests have shown that at times the foundation served as a much more effective channel for donors to reach Clinton for official government business than simply going through the State Department like everyone else.

But another part of this picture is the question of where the donors’ money was going. For example, it offered Clinton a way to have wealthy friends provide the money to pay loyalist Sidney Blumenthal $10,000 a month for six years, for doing … well, no one seems to know. Blumenthal had been barred from the State Department for spreading rumors among journalists that President Obama had been born in Kenya.

The foundation also hired Huma Abedin as a consultant. Under an agreement that Clinton approved, she was able to supplement a low-wage (we kid) $135,000 State Department job with consulting fees from the foundation, among other sources.

So this is just one example of where Clinton Foundation donors’ money went. And in the midst of the current campaign to make Clinton president, it seems quite relevant.

And of course, the donors often got something out of it themselves. Sometimes it was just face-time with the secretary that couldn’t be obtained through normal State Department channels. Other times, it was something more involved, such as having the U.S. government intervene to prevent a takeover of their Congolese mining operations, or getting the administration’s sign-off on the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium deposits to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The bottom line here is that no one should be fooled into thinking that an outfit that pays Sidney Blumenthal that kind of money has been established out of purely disinterested altruism. There’s a good reason why people gave to the Clinton Foundation instead of other charities, which is why there’s a good reason the Clinton Foundation has become an albatross for Clinton’s candidacy.