CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Watchdogs warn of ‘serious’ conflicts of interest for Clinton Foundation.
Donald Trump is not the only voice sounding the alarm over conflicts of interest surrounding Hillary Clinton’s namesake nonprofit.
Government watchdog groups — all of them champions of heightened transparency, campaign finance reform and other Democratic priorities — are also warning of potentially “very serious” conflicts of interest if the Clinton Foundation continues as business as usual with Clinton in the White House.
The transparency advocates are not calling for the foundation to shut its doors, as Trump has done from the campaign trail. But they are urging the adoption of tough new firewalls to eliminate any perception that Clinton Foundation donors could use their wallets to gain undue access to a Hillary Clinton White House.
“The Clinton Foundation has posed a very serious conflict of interest for the entire time that it’s existed,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, said Thursday. “The conflicts of interest are very real, and that gives Trump some ammunition to throw at it, and we’re going to hear about it [until the campaign ends].”
Holman said Clinton’s recent vow to bar all foreign and corporate donations to the Clinton Foundation if she wins the presidency is “a big, big step in the right direction.” But, he quickly added, that alone is not enough to eliminate the “pay to play” perceptions now dogging the Clinton campaign following revelations that top State Department aides acted on the foundation’s behalf when Clinton headed the agency.
To do that, he said, the Clintons will have to snip all family ties to the foundation, including the removal of Chelsea Clinton from the group’s board — a step the Clinton team said it’s not ready to take.
They’ll do nothing, because they can get away with anything. And rubbing your noses in it is half the fun.