Clinton Foundation

Jeffrey Epstein Was the Monster Capitalism Made

A new book with fresh details about Epstein – his life, death, and relationship with Bill Clinton – reminds us that his crimes couldn’t have happened without a system that allowed him to hoard unlimited wealth.

At the centre of the sordid tale of Jeffrey Epstein lies a single, glaring truth: Epstein could never have done the unspeakable things he did if he hadn’t existed in a world that allowed him to amass unlimited wealth.

That’s not the argument of Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper’s A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein, part of a spate of new reporting on Epstein’s life, crimes, and outlandish death. As reporters for the right-wing Washington Examiner and various conservative media before that, it’s unlikely that the authors were aiming to write a parable about the perils of concentrated wealth in the hands of amoral financiers and the need to redistribute it.

Rather, Goodman and Halper have produced a well-reported, down-the-line book on the Epstein saga, a story that, by its very nature, makes that case for them. The story of Epstein and his crimes is impossible to untangle from the matter of wealth and power: who has it, who doesn’t, what they’ll do to get it, and the terrible things they can do once they have it.

A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein
Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper
Barnes & Noble

Epstein himself was New Money, his drive for riches fuelled, the authors report, by bitter memories of a dreary upbringing in an immigrant family “firmly on the lower end of the middle class.”

As they and other recent Epstein-centric media argue, these working-class roots drove Epstein to craft a lifestyle of gleaming luxury for himself, and made his eventual imprisonment in a rat-and-roach-infested Manhattan jail particularly traumatic.

As we now know all too well, Epstein used his charm, charisma, and lack of ethical scruples to springboard himself out of the low-income trap — having dropped out of college and found himself working as a roofer — and into a teaching position at a preppy high school he wasn’t remotely qualified for, one he used as another stepping stone into the world of the elite. After that, it was only a few rungs more before Epstein had his hands on the near-limitless fountain of cash he soon used to construct the sexual pyramid scheme that structured his days, waving around the money he had always craved to lure young girls who had none of it.

Money and wealth explain virtually every facet of Epstein’s crimes. How did he get away with these schemes for years under the noses of the Palm Beach Police Department, eventually escaping with barely a slap on the wrist? It may have helped that he had given the department and the city government tens of thousands of dollars, and hired a top prosecutor’s husband as his attorney.

How did he avoid even media scrutiny for as long he did? Epstein paid for glowing coverage that oversold his philanthropy, and dangled job offers in front of journalists. The evisceration of the now-defunct muckraking website Gawker at the hands of billionaire Peter Thiel made it even harder to report on him, argues one reporter, whose salacious, on-the-record piece about Epstein, his alleged co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, and an unnamed billionaire, died at the hands of legal threats by the latter.

Also read: Disgraced US Financier Jeffrey Epstein Dies by Suicide: Media Reports

Money and wealth also explain Epstein’s infamous network of relationships. We already know how the prospect of loose millions dropping from Epstein’s pockets drew scientists and intellectuals to his amateur salons (“What does that got to do with pussy!?” were among Epstein’s contributions to these intellectual soirées).

And we also know the role money played in Epstein’s friendship with Prince Andrew, who begged the pedophile financier to help bail out his debt-ridden ex-wife. So, too, does it explain his connection to Bill Clinton, who had privately made known his intent to “spend roughly half my time making money” after leaving the presidency, and whose Global Initiative at the Clinton Foundation, the authors report, may have gotten its seed funding from Epstein.

In fact, it’s the reporting on Clinton’s Epstein-related misadventures that may well draw the most interest in the book (and so far already has). Goodman and Halper tease out new details about the two men’s relationship, demystifying it in a way that is both damning and exonerating for the former president.

On the one hand, multiple sources suggest Clinton wasn’t having underage sex around Epstein. On the other, the reason he was hanging around the pedophile is little better for a man who continues to be one of the Democratic Party’s leading lights: he was having an affair with Maxwell, the woman who procured and abused girls with Epstein. That this revelation might actually somewhat improve his public standing after years of speculation speaks to the legendarily bad judgment and greed of the former president.

Little St. James Island, one of the properties of financier Jeffrey Epstein, near Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Photo: Reuters/Marco Bello

Readers of the book will find plenty more details about the two men’s friendship that reflect poorly on the former president, including the possibility, supported by circumstantial evidence, that it was his former national security advisor who tipped Epstein off to an impending police raid in 2005, allowing him to spirit away his computers and other electronics off the property before the authorities came knocking.

Suffice it to say, Goodman and Halper, together with Netflix’s new Epstein documentary, give a fairly definitive debunking to Clinton’s overwrought denials insisting not just that he didn’t know about Epstein’s crimes, but that he barely knew the man at all — honest! Nonetheless, just as we saw with Russiagate’s embarrassing flop in 2019, these expositions serve as a useful reminder that reality is often at least a degree or two more banal than the sometimes-wild conclusions that scraps of evidence seem to point to.

This is also a worthwhile lesson when it comes to the mystery at the centre of the book and, in retrospect, Epstein’s life: why and how he died. Anyone looking for a definitive answer to whether Epstein was killed by his own hand or someone else’s won’t find it here — indeed, it’s unlikely they’ll find it anywhere. But Goodman and Halper comprehensively lay out the facts of Epstein’s incarceration and death, devoting ample time to multiple theories.

There’s more than enough reason to believe Epstein may have marshalled his considerable resources to escape justice by killing himself, from his documented fear and unhappiness at the prospect of a life in squalid captivity, to changing his will in the eleventh hour, and the fact that he had already finagled some special privileges while in prison. There’s even evidence that Epstein may have viewed attempting suicide as a gambit to get transferred out of the facility. Still, too much exists to swallow the official story, from the series of mistakes and coincidences that gave Epstein the breathing room to die with no witnesses or surveillance footage, to the unusual — to say the least — autopsy results and treatment of the crime scene, to Epstein’s determination to fight the case, and various other inconsistencies.

One thing seems clear: whether it was negligence or foul play, keeping Epstein alive was far from a priority for many powerful people, given not just what he knew, but what was almost certainly a sprawling blackmail operation he was running. If the ruling class had wanted him alive, Epstein probably would still be here today.

Also read: US Financier Jeffrey Epstein Charged With Sex Trafficking of Minor Girls

Just look at how Chelsea Manning, who committed a crime the US power elite actually cared about —publicly revealing American war crimes — was placed on round-the-clock suicide watch from almost the moment she was arrested, locked for twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day in a tiny concrete hole with only a mirror, a lamp, and anti-suicide smock, stripped of all of her clothes, even her underwear and flip-flops, lest they be used in exactly the way Epstein allegedly used his clothing and bedding to off himself. Yes, they wanted her to suffer, but they also wanted to see her convicted in court, and they took no chances. Epstein didn’t get the same treatment because at the end of the day, the people who run the world didn’t care if — or perhaps even prayed that — he wouldn’t make it that far.

There is only one definitive conclusion the authors come to: “We don’t need to know what happened to know we’ve probably been lied to.” With Epstein gone, it’s now with his soul mate and alleged co-conspirator Maxwell that any further answers lie, though don’t hold your breath: if she is ever taken into custody, it’s not hard to imagine history repeating itself.

Without answers, there will be no end to speculation about the truth of Epstein’s life and death, and the true scale, depth, and nature of the criminal operation he was running. Whatever scenario you conjure, however outlandish, banal, or sinister it might be, never forget it could only be possible thanks to the economic and political system that Epstein — and all of us — were born into, but never asked for.

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

This article was published on Jacobin. Read the original here.

Undercooked: An Expensive Push to Save Lives and Protect the Planet Falls Short

Millions of lives were at stake. Hillary Clinton was on board. Money poured in. And yet the big aims behind an effort to tackle the plague of third-world cooking fires has produced only modest gains.

For many decades, it was one of the globe’s most underappreciated health menaces: household pollution in developing countries, much of it smoke from cooking fires.

The dangerous smoke—from wood, dung or charcoal fires used by 3 billion people in villages and slums across Africa, Central America and Asia—was estimated by health officials to shorten millions of lives every year. The World Health Organization in 2004 labeled household pollution, ‘The Killer in the Kitchen’. Women and children nearest the hearth paid the greatest price.

If the health costs were not ominous enough, many environmental advocates worried that what was known as “biomass” cooking also had potentially grave consequences for the planet’s climate. It was feared emissions from the fires were contributing to global warming, and the harvesting of wood for cooking was helping to diminish forests, one of nature’s carbon-absorbing bulwarks against greenhouse gases.

In 2010, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was formed to help mount a sustained effort at tackling the threats posed by household pollution. The alliance pledged to help engineer the distribution of 100 million cookstoves, small-scale appliances designed to cut fuel use and toxic emissions in impoverished households worldwide by 2020.

The United Nations Foundation was a founding partner in the effort. Hillary Clinton, then the US secretary of state, lent the support of the American government, promising money and the resources of a handful of agencies. “Millions of lives could be saved and improved,” said Clinton when the alliance’s formation was announced, adding that clean stoves could be as transformative as vaccines.

Eight years and $75 million later, however, the alliance has fallen well short of its ambitious health and climate goals.

An array of studies, including some financed by the alliance itself, have shown that the millions of biomass cookstoves of the kind sold or distributed in the effort do not perform well enough in the field to reduce users’s risk of deadly illnesses like heart disease and pneumonia.

The stoves also have not delivered much in the way of climate benefits. It turns out emissions from cooking fires were less of a warming threat than feared, and that—outside of some de-forestation hot spots—the harvesting of wood for cooking fires only modestly reduces the sustainability of forests.

The lack of impact on a warming planet, in turn, has undercut the alliance’s plan to raise additional millions in investments from corporations eager to underwrite the cookstove movement as a way of compensating for their own emissions or polishing their records for environmental responsibility.

The alliance’s top officials do not dispute that they have met with an array of disappointments. For one thing, they said, some of the countries and companies that pledged tens of millions of dollars early on failed to deliver, which they blamed on shifting priorities and agendas, not the alliance’s struggles.

Kip Patrick, the alliance’s senior director of global partnerships and communications, pointed to the effort’s benefits, saying the millions of biomass stoves distributed so far have cut both, the time women spend foraging for wood and costs to poor households of purchasing fuels such as charcoal.

A woman in Ghana cooks over a traditional, open fire. Photo: Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

Patrick added that the alliance had acknowledged its disappointing initial results and adjusted its strategy for going forward.

The alliance’s plans for the future come with something of an ironic twist: It will now make greater efforts to promote and distribute stoves that use propane, a fossil fuel, the same blue-flamed byproduct of gas drilling contained in cylinders under countless American backyard grills. (Outside of the US, propane is most commonly called liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG.) These stoves, it turns out, burn much more cleanly and efficiently than nearly all biomass stoves, reducing the harmful smoke given off during cooking while having a negligible impact on the climate.

In an interview last summer, Radha Muthiah, then the alliance’s chief executive, said the alliance was never against propane stoves, but should have been more direct about its openness to a fossil-fuel solution. “We really should have been launched as the Global Alliance for Clean Cooking,” she said. “You cannot talk about stoves without talking about fuels. It’s half the equation.”

Reid Detchon, the United Nations Foundation’s vice president for energy and climate strategy, said he, too, supports the push behind propane, though he acknowledged that, on the global scale, the foundation has a bias toward promoting renewable energy.

Kirk R. Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley, who has likely done more work on the health effects of cooking pollution in the developing world than anyone, said the Alliance’s setbacks reflected “a classic issue of identifying a problem and thinking you know the solution just because you know the problem.” Previous tries by outsiders to reinvent how the developing world cooks also yielded little, he acknowledged.

“Maybe there will be that magic stove eventually,” said Smith of the long push behind improved biomass stoves. “But after 60 years, it’s beginning to look a little doubtful.”

Public health researchers have long had concerns about the dangers of open cooking fires. When fuel is burned inefficiently—particularly hunks of solid fuel, like wood or dried dung—it produces a dizzying and dangerous array of noxious gases and particles containing traces of dozens of toxic constituents.

The main worry is with the tiniest motes known as PM 2.5, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns across. (An average human hair is 70 microns across.) These particles penetrate deeply into the lungs, and the smallest, as recent research shows, can cross into the bloodstream.

One of the earliest hints that rural cooking smoke was causing significant illness came in a 1959 paper written by the pioneering Indian cardiologist Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati (who, at 101, is still practicing). Padmavati and her collaborators were weighing possible causes of cor pulmonale, a failure of the right side of the heart linked to lung problems. The majority of cases were not city residents, according to the study.

“In the rural and semi-rural areas, the houses were mostly one or two roomed mud huts in which several members of the family lived together,” wrote the authors, adding, “There was no outlet for smoke with the result that the house was filled with smoke when the family meal was cooked.”

Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

A vast body of literature has accrued since, linking smoke from cooking on solid fuels to a host of diseases, with India’s toll alone estimated by some at from 1.1 million to 1.4 million premature deaths a year. It is a global loss of life that, by some estimates, is greater than that from all the air pollution from fossil fuels burned in power plants, factories and traffic jams.

The threat can be appreciated inside Sulabai Dhavkar’s home on the outskirts of Taleran, a village nestled against the Sahyadri, the Benevolent Mountains, 60 miles east of Mumbai in India’s Maharashtra state. The sculpted clay stove in the home—visited last summer by ProPublica—remains a prized fixture on the hearths of more than 150 million Indian households.

The wood for the stove comes from a pile near the house collected from surrounding scrub and forests and the bluish smoke that rises once the fire is lit engulfs Dhavkar. She spends hours in it as she cooks the morning meal and then repeats the experience at dinnertime.

Starting around 2000, worry about the dangers lurking in homes like Dhavkar’s began to resonate more widely. Early in President George W. Bush’s administration, the US State Department and Environmental Protection Agency launched the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air.

New designs for stoves that could burn the world’s oldest fuels more cleanly came from nonprofit organizations, academics and entrepreneurs who had been exploring how improved technology could curb deforestation or address the challenges of rural poverty.

Cookstoves seemed like an affordable and effective answer to the ‘Killer in the Kitchen’. The appliances, some as small as a Crock-Pot and costing as little as $25, gained wider currency in December 2009, when The New Yorker magazine ran an article by Burkhard Bilger subtitled ‘the quest for a stove that can save the world’. The article centered on ‘Stove Camp’ — an annual retreat in Oregon at which the engineers and entrepreneurs at the heart of the burgeoning cookstove movement refined their designs.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, an effort bringing together government efforts and private partners felt like a logical next step. The goal of distributing 100 million stoves by 2020 was audacious, some of the initiative’s developers cautioned, but the alliance’s partners were impressive and deep-pocketed.

A base of operations was offered by the UN Foundation, the charity created in 1997 with a billion-dollar pledge from Ted Turner. The Obama administration committed more than $50 million over five years to test stoves and spur innovation on cleaner designs. Another $10 million came in initial commitments from partners including the governments of Germany and Norway. The oil and gas giant Shell eventually ponied up a total of $13 million, with more money and support coming from its independent philanthropic foundation. Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, added an unspecified financial contribution from the company’s charitable foundation to help underwrite a study assessing the benefits of low-emission biomass-burning stoves on pneumonia rates and birthweight.

The alliance’s coming out party took place at the sixth meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual showcase and fundraising effort for anti-poverty projects built around the allure of the former president and first lady. At the New York Sheraton in late September 2010, Hillary Clinton spelled out the costs in lives, and women’s time and welfare from persistent reliance on smoky cooking fires.

Clinton credited past efforts involving cookstoves, but noted most had faltered. She stressed that one of the things that would distinguish the alliance’s approach would be a concentrated and rigorous push to make sure families that obtained stoves actually used them, and used them properly.

“Previous efforts have taught us that if local tastes and preferences are not considered, people will simply not use the stoves, and we’ll find them stacked in piles of refuse,” she said. “If we do this right, these new stoves will fit seamlessly into family cooking traditions while also offering a step up toward a better life.”

Credit: REUTERS/Andrew R.C. Marshall

“The next time you sit down with your own family to eat,” she pleaded, “please take a moment to imagine the smell of smoke, feel it in your lungs, see the soot building up on the walls, and then come find us at the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.”

Representatives for Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative did not answer questions about the alliance’s work.

Within two years of the alliance’s launch, evidence began to emerge suggesting its plan for biomass stoves improving health outcomes wasn’t working.

The alliance’s own records make clear that of the tens of millions of stoves its members sold or distributed, only two million were biomass stoves that met the standard it set for “clean.” And that standard, while a great improvement over an open, unvented fire, was still akin to secondhand smoke produced by burning 40 cigarettes an hour in a home.

In interviews, scientists credited the alliance for drawing attention and funding to the vast, underappreciated toll from cooking pollution. But some worried that the smoky standard for “clean” stoves was a regrettable compromise that flew in the face of established research about what was necessary to achieve a genuine health impact.

“Health-based discussions have to be based on peer-reviewed science,” said Rufus D. Edwards, a professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of California, Irvine, who has extensively assessed the health and climate impacts of stoves, including in studies for the Environmental Protection Agency. “If it’s a political standard, so be it, but don’t call it healthy.”

And too few of the stoves—clean or not—wound up being effectively and consistently used in poor households from Africa to South America. It was precisely the shortcoming Clinton had identified as having frustrated earlier cookstove efforts.

In 2013, Nandal, a village of 2,900 residents 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, had been proclaimed a “smoke-free village” after about 500 cookstoves were installed in homes under a project underwritten by Cummins, an Indiana-based manufacturer of diesel and alternative energy engines and related equipment. A year later, a report in Nature magazine found the stoves weren’t being used.

ProPublica found much the same thing last year. In one home, Sonali Maalan Kolekar explained that the new stove just didn’t perform like her old one.

“This one does things fast,” she said in Hindi, reaching to her left without breaking eye contact and nudging a handful of twigs further into the family’s age-old chulha, a hand-sculpted open-topped clay perch for a pot or two. Sparks flew, smoke rose and rice boiled.

“That one does it too slowly,” she added, gesturing behind her toward the abandoned newer stove.

Obulamma Budili cooks a meal for her sister outside her home in Mutyalacheruvu, India, February 6, 2018. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Anuradha Nagaraj

One study after another has found that the experience in Nandal has been replicated everywhere.

Early on, the alliance had said it would only count a stove as distributed if it had proof it was being used correctly and regularly in an actual home. Today, the alliance says it counts every stove it sends out as distributed, whether it’s being used or not.

Patrick, the alliance communications official, said making sure stoves are actually being “adopted” into everyday use is hard and expensive, but that he hoped the alliance would have numbers on how many stoves are regularly being used by 2020.

In 2012, the alliance funded a study in Ghana by Darby Jack, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, that, in part, would measure if the biomass cookstoves had improved health outcomes for women and children. In particular, Jack looked for changes in rates of pneumonia, the alliance’s top health target.

The study is not yet final, but Jack said that the basics of kitchen pollution science are clear-cut from his work and that of many other scientists.

“The notion was that low-cost, improved biomass cookstoves get you air improvements,” said Jack. “We can reject that hypothesis now with as much certainty as any hypothesis.”

Patrick acknowledged the lack of evidence of big health improvements in homes switching to improved biomass stoves. “Are we where we had hoped we’d have been seven or eight years ago?” he said. “Probably not.”

Other research has cast doubt on whether cookstoves have done much to improve environmental damage linked to traditional cooking fires.

By some estimates, traditional cooking fires contribute about one billion tons a year to global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — a small but substantial slice of the annual total.

Moreover, studies have shown cooking fires—particularly in South Asia—also produce a dark sooty smoke called black carbon that both warms the climate and darkens glaciers and snowfields, accelerating their melting. A scientific review published in 2013 concluded that black carbon was second only to carbon dioxide in exerting a warming push on climate and that biomass cooking fires produced about a quarter of human emissions of this pollutant.

So far, the science suggests cookstoves help with this in some ways and hurt in others. A 2016 study showed some “improved biomass” cookstoves actually produced greater emissions of black carbon than open fires, but also, in certain conditions and in certain seasons, produced another set of emissions that, surprisingly, had a cooling effect on the climate.

The alliance’s own research has shown that the proportion of non-renewable wood harvested for traditional cooking fires was far smaller than previously thought, thereby limiting cookstoves’s other main environmental benefit — reducing deforestation.

The alliance had been hoping to persuade wealthy individuals and corporations to invest in the cookstove distribution effort as a way to offset their carbon footprints. Their investments, in turn, could be used to bolster the number and quality of start-up companies building cookstoves around the world.

But the market for so-called “carbon credits” never really materialized. The reasons were many, but the fact that cookstoves weren’t having a clear, dramatic effect on the climate limited their appeal.

“Like a lot of organizations, we got excited about climate benefits and climate funding, and we went with what information we had at the time,” said Patrick. “Any time you learn more things, you adapt based on new information.”

In 2018, cooking fires remain a global problem not much dented by the biomass stove efforts. The percentage of the population with access to clean cooking grew almost imperceptibly from 2010 to 2016, according to research conducted in part by the United Nations and World Health Organization. A report by the International Energy Agency cited high fertility rates and persistent poverty in many Sub-Saharan countries as among the reasons for the scant progress.

The alliance has called these and other recent reports “sobering,” and said it and others concerned about household pollution still faced “an enormous challenge.” Officials say they remain optimistic, however, based in part on breakthroughs in the most recent generation of biomass cookstoves. And the Alliance says that continuing to provide biomass stoves is worthwhile because so many people won’t have access to propane anytime soon.

“The short answers is we’d love to be further along, but I think there’s a lot of innovation out there,” said Patrick. The alliance’s goal now, he said, is to get people the best stoves possible and encourage families to use improved stoves as a substitute for old-fashioned cooking fires instead of a supplement to them.

To accomplish these ends, the alliance and others are more openly supporting stoves that use propane. The alliance’s website and newsletters feature more propane stoves, which make up the vast majority of appliances that meet standards for being “clean.” The charitable foundation of Shell Oil Corporation, a major alliance supporter, has shifted in its own efforts to underwriting more pilot projects involving propane stoves.

Pradeep Pursnani, deputy director of the Shell Foundation, said that the delay in embracing propane made sense early on since most of the target users were accustomed to cooking on stoves that burned charcoal or wood.

“Other fuels at the time were more niche, so by focusing on biomass cookstoves we would have a higher impact,” said Pursnani, describing the alliance’s early approach. “We only really started working on it [LPG stoves] toward the end of 2016 and in 2017. “

Of the alliance’s shift in emphasis, Kirk Smith said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Smith, the professor at Berkeley, said he had begun to realize that propane cookstoves could be better for people’s health and the environment than biomass cooking as early as 1994.

He crystallized his concerns in the journal Science in 2002 with what he now says was an intentionally provocative commentary titled “In Praise of Petroleum?” “Rather than excluding petroleum, some of this one-time gift from nature ought actually to be reserved to help fulfill our obligation to bring the health and welfare of all people to a reasonable level,” wrote Smith.

The main reaction at the time?

“I never got so much hate mail,” he recalled.

That resistance has proved stubbornly persistent, said Smith. Those interested in clean cooking efforts have spurned propane simply because it seems politically incorrect. He called the alliance’s enduring and expensive belief in biomass stoves of a piece with that history.

“The major international and bilateral development agencies and donors have either ignored or unofficially opposed providing clean fuels to the world’s poor on flimsy and I would say unethical climate grounds,” said Smith in an interview.

For Smith and other disappointed advocates in the fight against household pollution, the story of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves seems depressingly familiar — another tale of well-meaning Westerners keen to help poor people in the third world, ignoring evidence that their methods might be ill-conceived.

Priyadarshini Karve—a noted Indian designer of low-emission stoves, including the now-abandoned stoves in the village of Nandal—said she’d focused too much on funders’s fuel-efficiency standards and not enough on what actual women cooks sought in a stove.

“The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves focused on replacing a traditional stove with a product made in a factory because that was the easiest thing to do,” said Karve in an interview in her gadget-cluttered office in the city of Pune. “Everyone jumped on it as a win-win situation. Poor households get something and we get money.”

The alliance brought resources and a spotlight to the effort, but she questions how much it accomplished.

“I really don’t know if, even with the megabucks and glamour, the situation at the ground level is quantitatively different than what was happening before,” said Karve. “Have people’s lives really changed? No one knows really.”

Andrew Revkin contributed to this report.

This article was originally published on ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

Is the FBI’s Latest Probe of the Clinton Foundation a ‘Witch Hunt’ – or Something More?

The foundation initially seemed well-suited for cleaning up Bill Clinton’s legacy after the Monica Lewinsky scandal’s ugliness. That’s no longer true.

Bill Clinton has shunned leisure time since his administration ended in January 2001. Credit: Reuters/Arne Dedert/Pool

With few exceptions, most presidents fade from public life once they step down.

Bill Clinton, however, has shunned leisure time since his administration ended in January 2001. Instead, he has whiled away the hours toiling for an eponymous foundation he established with his wife Hillary Clinton. At least initially, the foundation seemed well-suited for cleaning up his legacy, after the ugliness of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent impeachment and Senate trial tarnished it.

But now the FBI has reportedly reopened an investigation of the foundation’s alleged “pay-to-play” politics while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

At first blush, this might appear to be a purely partisan witch hunt launched by the Clintons’ conservative political enemies. Based on my scholarship regarding relationships between the government and nonprofits as well as philanthropists, I believe it’s fair to say that large foundations tend to be scandal-free.

That is not the case for the Clinton Foundation, however, which has repeatedly stirred controversy over its unusual fundraising practices.

Influence peddling

The Clintons launched their primary public charity in 1997. It has since grown from an organisation to raise funds for the Clinton Presidential Library into one of the nation’s most visible foundations. It runs ambitious programs in such areas as HIV/AIDS, climate change, healthy children, economic development and Haiti earthquake relief, along with a variety of other initiatives.

If reports that the FBI reopened its investigation are accurate, it would be the first time the foundation has been investigated since 2016 – and the first time since Donald Trump, whose campaign demonised his opponent Hillary Clinton with “lock her up” chants at his rallies, took office.

While it is highly inappropriate for a sitting president to call on his own Justice Department to investigate his political opponents, Trump has nevertheless openly pushed for investigations of the Clintons while in office. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the outs with his boss because of his recusal in the Russia investigation has, according to The Washington Post, begun to look “into matters that Trump has publicly complained are not being pursued.”

The charges against the foundation have ranged from ridiculous to serious. Two days after the initial reports of the Trump administration’s new probe, multiple conservative websites falsely claimed that 22 of the foundation’s employees had been arrested. There were no arrests.

Many charges are trivial. Fox News reported that a donor to the foundation, Terrence Duffy, asked then-Secretary Clinton for help in setting up business meetings in Singapore and Hong Kong. Yet U.S. embassies do this routinely.

Other accusations are far more troubling. Human rights-abusing governments, including Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman, have donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia alone has contributed US$10 million to $25 million.

Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk also gave the foundation $10 to $25 million. And he was by many accounts not shy about asking for help from Hillary Clinton when she served as secretary of state. While there’s been no indication of what the new FBI investigation is looking into, over the years these probes have usually focused on influence peddling allegedly enabled by the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising.

Poorly endowed

Why does the Clinton Foundation find itself in the position its in? Its structure under federal law regulating foundations has a lot to do with it.

The Clinton Foundation differs from most prominent foundations in that it is an operating public charity, which means it raises money on an ongoing basis and then funds its projects with those donations.

Like the nation’s largest foundations, such as Gates, Ford, Robert Wood Johnson and Packard, which push for goals such as environmental protection, expanded access to health care and social justice, the Clinton Foundation largely promotes liberal causes.

But those institutions are backed by substantial endowments donated by families with vast fortunes. The Gates Foundation’s endowment, worth at least $40 billion is the biggest. It funds much of what it does from the income that the endowment’s investments in stocks, bonds and other assets produce every year.

The Clinton Foundation’s endowment, worth only $109 million, is puny by comparison. Its investments returned just $2.9 million in 2015. Given the foundation’s ambitions, $2.9 million doesn’t go very far. From donations, though, the foundation has raised north of $2 billion over its lifetime, allowing it to spend more than $200 million a year on its programs.

Despite its vast donor base – more than 200,000 have contributed since its 1997 inception – much of its funding comes from major donors, including other foundations, wealthy individuals and, of course, foreign governments. The foundation’s own records show that it has received seven gifts of more than $25 million and another 19 worth $10 to $25 million.

Impressive score

The foundation has made notable contributions in global health, HIV/AIDS and women’s empowerment. Perhaps its most notable success was in negotiating a significant drop in the price of drugs used to fight AIDS and then bringing those drugs to Africa, where an epidemic was ravaging the continent.

Despite the suspicions conservatives have long raised about the Clinton Foundation, Charity Navigator, a group that rates the fundraising and spending practices of nonprofits, gives it high marks. The foundation spends 87% of what it raises on the programs it supports, a higher share than most of its peers.

But Charity Navigator doesn’t assess or compare the motives of donors. I believe that the foundation’s high ambitions and thirst for funds make it too open to unsavory gifts that, in turn, damage its reputation.

Foreign governments find the foundation attractive because they are limited in what they can otherwise do to improve their access and influence with American policymakers. The law prohibits their donations to American political candidates, although they may hire lobbyists.

With or without an indictment, fines or other punishment, the Clinton Foundation’s outlook will remain murky as long as its endowment remains small. Should the Clinton Foundation ultimately fold, its legacy is likely to be its fundraising practices, not its good works.

Jeffrey Berry, John Richard Skuse Professor, Department of Political Science, Tufts University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

US Justice Department Launches New Probe Into Clinton Foundation

Law enforcement officials stated that the new probe was examining whether the Clintons in return for contributions to their Foundation as well as promises of donations, had performed any policy favours during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

A Clinton Foundation souvenir is seen for sale at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, Arkansas,US, April 27, 2015.
Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

Washington: The US Justice Department has begun an investigation into whether the Clinton Foundation conducted “pay-to-play” politics or other illegal activities during Hillary Clinton‘s tenure as secretary of state, The Hill reported on Thursday, citing law enforcement officials and a witness.

The newspaper said FBI agents from Little Rock, Arkansas, where the foundation began, had taken the lead in the investigation and interviewed at least one witness in the past month. Law enforcement officials told The Hill that additional activities were expected in coming weeks.

In response to a request for confirmation, a Justice Department spokeswoman said the agency did not comment on ongoing investigations.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment by officials at the Clinton Foundation. The organisation previously said there was never any trade in policy decisions for contributions.

Democrats have accused Republicans of launching a spurious investigation of Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, to divert attention from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia.

The Hill reported that the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the probe was examining whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for contributions to their charitable efforts or whether donors promised to make donations in hopes of government outcomes.

The probe may also examine whether any tax-exempt assets were converted for personal or political use and whether the foundation complied with tax laws, the newspaper cited the officials as saying.

A witness recently interviewed by the FBI told The Hill the agents’ questions focused on government decisions and discussions of donations to Clinton entities during the time Hillary Clinton led President Barack Obama’s State Department.

US attorney general Jeff Sessions asked Justice Department prosecutors to decide if a special counsel should be appointed to investigate certain Republican concerns, including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the sale of a uranium company to Russia, according to media reports in November.

(Reuters)

Trump, Clinton Camps Both Offered Slice of Dossier Firm’s Work: Sources

Sources said the Fusion GPS work for Baker and Hostetler that produced the information Veselnitskaya offered Trump Jr and his associates were unrelated to the firm’s work for Perkins Coie.

US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton attend campaign events in Hershey, Pennsylvania, November 4, 2016 (L) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 22, 2016 in a combination of file photos. Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Carlos Barria/Files

Washington: The same political research firm that prepared a dossier on Trump campaign ties to Russia had unrelated information on Clinton Foundation donors that a Russian lawyer obtained and offered to President Donald Trump‘s eldest son last year, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The White House and Republican lawmakers have attacked the firm, Fusion GPS, over thedossier compiled by a former British spy that is central to investigations in Congress and by a special counsel into conclusions by US spy agencies that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election and wanted to help Trump win.

The sources told Reuters that the negative information that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya wanted to give to Republican Trump‘s campaign at a June 2016 meeting in New York had been dug up by Fusion GPS in an unrelated investigation.

Trump‘s congressional supporters have suggested that because Fusion also conducted research for lawyers representing a Russian firm in the unrelated matter, the dossier was part of a Russian campaign to help Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump backers call the 35-page report a “dodgy dossier” financed by Clinton supporters.

Russia has repeatedly denied allegations of meddling in the US election and Trump denies any collusion between his campaign and Moscow officials.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Veselnitskaya said she went to the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and top campaign adviser Paul Manafort to show them proof of tax evasion by major Democratic donors.

She said Donald Jr asked her for written evidence that illegal funds went to Clinton‘s campaign, Bloomberg reported.

Emails made public earlier this year by Trump Jr showed that a publicist for the son of one of his father’s Russian business contacts helped introduce Veselnitskaya and advised him that she and her associates had “sensitive” information that could damage Clinton.

“I love it,” Trump Jr responded, according to the emails.

In December 2014, the sources said, Veselnitskaya, who then was involved in litigation pitting her Russian client against British-American financier William Browder, received a legal research memo reporting that the Ziff Brothers, two New York financiers allied with Browder, had made a large contribution to a Clinton charity.

The memo had been prepared by Fusion, which had been hired to conduct legal research on Browder by Baker and Hostetler law firm. The firm represented Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, who was engaged in disputes with Browder and US prosecutors.

Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion GPS’ founders, met with Veselnitskaya about that litigation before and after her meeting with Trump Jr, Kushner and Manafort, according to a source familiar with the matter.

However, a source familiar with 10 hours of testimony Simpson gave the Senate Judiciary committee in August said he told investigators he did not know of Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower meeting until reports of it appeared in the media.

Representatives of the Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Manafort declined to comment.

Representatives for Trump Jr and Kushner could not immediately be reached for comment and neither could a US-based lawyer for Veselnitskaya.

Two sources said the Fusion GPS work for Baker and Hostetler that produced the information Veselnitskaya offered Trump Jr and his associates were unrelated to the firm’s work for Perkins Coie, a law firm that represented the Democratic National Committee and Clinton‘s campaign.

Perkins Coie has acknowledged that it paid $1.02 million to Fusion for research related to DonaldTrump and his campaign.

(Reuters)

Donald Trump Softens Stand on Clinton, Climate Change, Other Key Issues

In a conversation with the New York Times, the US president-elect appeared to have moderated his views on key issues, including prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

US president-elect Donald Trump at the New York Times headquarters. Credit: Twitter

US president-elect Donald Trump spoke on a wide range of issues with New York Times editors and reporters on Tuesday.

The following is a summary of some of his comments as reported by the newspaper or its reporters.

Clinton investigation

Trump said prosecuting Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for her handing of classified information while secretary of state or the dealings of the Clinton Foundation was “not something that I feel very strongly about.”

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump said. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”

“I think it would be very very divisive for the country,” he said, referring to prosecuting Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

During campaign rallies, Trump often fired up his supporters by calling for pressing for investigations of Hillary Clinton, spurring chants of “Lock her up!” by the crowd.

Climate change

Trump, who previously called man-made global warming a hoax, said: “I think there is some connectivity” between humans and climate change.

“I’m looking at it very closely,” Trump said about the 2015 Paris climate accord, which he had promised to quit during the presidential campaign. “I have an open mind to it.”

Alt-right and Steve Bannon

Trump condemned an alt-right conference in Washington over the weekend where some members performed a Hitler salute and yelled: “Hail Trump!” after a speech about white nationalism.

“I condemn them. I disavow, and I condemn,” he said.

“It’s not a group I want to energise. And if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”

Rejecting charges by some critics that his chief White House strategist Steve Bannon is a racist,Trump said: “I’ve known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist, or alt-right … I wouldn’t even think about hiring him.”

Critics say Bannon, a former head of the conservative Breitbart News, had made the website a forum for the alt-right, a loose grouping that rejects mainstream politics and includes neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.

Conflict of interest

The real estate mogul said he saw no conflict in his business dealings and being president.

“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly. There’s never been a case like this,” Trump said.

“I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t,” he said. But he added: “I would like to do something.”

“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

Dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Trump said his son-in-law and close aide, Jared Kushner, could help broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and that the president-elect himself could play a role in achieving what has eluded his predecessors.

“I would love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians,” Trump said. “That would be such a great achievement.”

New York Orders Trump’s Foundation To Halt Fundraising

The attorney general’s office said that the Trump Foundation would be “continuing fraud” if it did not stop fundraising in the state.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pauses before answering questions at the “Retired American Warriors” conference during a campaign stop in Herndon, Virginia, US, October 3, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar

Washington: New York’s attorney general ordered Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s charitable foundation to immediately stop fundraising in the state, warning that a failure to do so would be a “continuing fraud.”

For Trump, the cease-and-desist order was the latest in a series of blows that has sent his campaign reeling. The New York businessman and his aides spent much of the weekend dealing with the fallout from a New York Times report that said Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for almost 20 years.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s office said the Donald J. Trump Foundation was violating a state law requiring charitable organisations that solicit outside donations to register with the office’s Charities Bureau.

The order followed a series of reports in The Washington Post that suggested improprieties by the foundation, including using its funds to settle legal disputes involving Trump businesses.

“The failure immediately to discontinue solicitation and to file information and reports required under Article 7-A with the Charities Bureau shall be deemed to be a continuing fraud upon the people of the state of New York,” according to a letter dated on Friday that the office posted online on Monday.

Trump’s campaign has suggested that the probe launched by Schneiderman, a Democrat, was politically motivated.

While again putting Trump’s campaign on the defensive, the order could also undercut his efforts to make the Clinton Foundation, the family charity of Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton, a primary target in his campaign against her for the November 8 election.

Trump has sought to paint the Clinton Foundation as a “pay-to-play” operation under which the former US secretary of state and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, rewarded big donors to the foundation with access.

The Clinton Foundation, which has $354 million in assets and almost 500 staffers, is a radically different charitable vehicle from the small-scale Trump nonprofit. It has worked to reduce the cost of drugs for people with HIV in developing countries, eradicate childhood obesity in US and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

There has been no evidence that foreign donors to the foundation obtained favours from the state department while Clinton headed the agency. While some donors were able to obtain meetings with her or senior state department officials, Clinton has said the fact that they had donated to the foundation did not play a role in her decision to meet with them.

‘Political motives’

The scrutiny of the Trump Foundation came as the Republican candidate was dealing with a torrent of bad news, including his shaky performance in his first debate with Clinton on September 26 and the release by the New York Times of tax records that showed Trump taking an almost $1 billion loss in 1995 that may have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

In its series on the Trump Foundation, The Washington Post reported that Trump may have violated US Internal Revenue Service rules against “self-dealing” by using foundation money to purchase two portraits of himself, which were then hung at his private golf clubs in New York and Florida.

The newspaper also said that Trump may have improperly used the foundation to settle legal disputes, including one at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, diverted income from his business to the charity to avoid paying income tax and donated foundation money to support Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, a Republican, who was considering launching an investigation into Trump University, Trump’s for-profit education venture.

The foundation ended up paying a $2,500 fine to the IRS for that donation. A Trump organisation representative told the Post the donation was meant to be from Trump’s personal account and that it came from his foundation‘s account by clerical error.

In response to the Post‘s reporting, Schneiderman’s office began a probe into the Trump Foundation.

The Trump campaign said in a statement on Monday that the charity would cooperate with the investigation.

“While we remain very concerned about the political motives behind AG Schneiderman’s investigation, the Trump Foundation nevertheless intends to cooperate fully with the investigation,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks.

“Because this is an ongoing legal matter, the Trump Foundation will not comment further at this time,” she added.

The New York attorney general’s office is the sole regulator of charities in the state. A spokesman for the office said it was not unusual for the regulator to send notices to charities whose filings were overdue or incomplete but that a cease-and-desist letter was more serious.

While letters such as the one the Trump Foundation, which is based in Woodbury, New York, on Long Island, received are not judgements of wrongdoing, they are sent only after the office gets “a clear indication of wrongdoing,” the spokesman said.

Trump established the charitable foundation in 1988, but it runs no programs of its own. Instead, it donates money to other nonprofit groups such as the Police Athletic League for youths. Once the foundation began soliciting money from other donors beyond the Trump family, it was required by New York law to register with the state and file regular reports.

(Reuters)

What Do the Clinton Charities Actually Do?

The Clintons’ charities have recently come under scrutiny, leading its largest arm to promise to spin off into an independent organisation if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

A Clinton Foundation brooch is seen for sale at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States April 27, 2015. Credit: Reuters/ Lucy Nicholson

Charities tied to the Clinton family have received seemingly endless scrutiny throughout the presidential campaign. They’ve been accused of wasting funds, offering access to donors and even serving as a personal “piggy bank” for the Clinton family. As a result, the largest arm of their charitable organisation this week said it would become an independent organisation if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

The scrutiny of the Clintons’ charities has extended to Trump’s much smaller foundation as well, including a just-announced investigation by the New York attorney general and a series by the Washington Post.

As a researcher focused on nonprofit finances, I am not accustomed to seeing such widespread interest in the sources and uses of funds by charities. Even if often wrapped up in political rancour, the public interest in the Clinton family’s charities provides an opportunity to look closely at what they actually are, what they do and how their money is used.

While the inner workings of the organisation are left to insiders, we fortunately have access to public financial disclosures that help provide answers to these questions. As we will see, the answers reveal an interesting and complex organisation that may warrant critique but also deserves credit for its ambition and innovation.

What are the Clinton charities?

We start with what organisations make up the network of Clinton charities.

First up is the Clinton Family Foundation, which was set up in 2001 as a private foundation to direct the family’s own personal giving but doesn’t engage in any charitable activities of its own.

It acts like any other private foundation in that the family makes donations to it and the organisation (over time) disburses funds to operating public charities.

From 2010 to 2014, the Clintons gave US $10.2 million of their income to the Family Foundation, which disbursed $9.8 million to charities over the same period. Of that, $2.86 million (29%) went to initiatives tied to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the main operating public charity they founded in 1998. The remaining $6.96 million went to a variety of charities, both local and national, aimed at varied causes ranging from education to health care to the environment.

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation is essentially the ‘parent’ organisation of various initiatives and offshoots, a few of which have been (at times) legally distinct from yet remain controlled by the parent. This group of organisations, which includes the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP), is collectively called ‘The Clinton Foundation’.

The many different initiatives reflects the wide and often shifting goals of the organisation, which we discuss next.

So what does the Clinton Foundation do?

The activities of the Clinton Foundation are a source of many misconceptions, which is understandable given the wide range of them.

For starters, it’s important to stress that the Clinton Foundation (unlike the Family Foundation) is an operating public charity, which means (1) it relies heavily on donations from the general public and (2) it does not primarily act to disburse funds to other charities but rather engages in direct ‘on-the-ground’ services.

The first point is noteworthy because the Clintons’ personal giving of about $2.86 million to the foundation accounted for just 0.4% of its $807 million in contributions from 2010 to 2014.

Other funders include individuals (Gateway co-founder Theodore W. Waitt and former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher), foundations (Gates and Rockefeller), businesses (Coca-Cola and Barclays) and even foreign governments (Norway, Australia and Saudi Arabia).

It’s also important because soliciting donations from so many other individuals and entities – some of whom had personal connections with the Clintons or interest in state department business – is what has fuelled many criticisms levied at the organisation.

The second point matters because some rival politicians have used the low percentage of donations or grants that it gives to other charities as evidence it spends little on charitable works. In this case, however, the lion’s share of the organisation’s programmeme spending is for on-the-ground efforts. Research I conducted with a colleague demonstrates that this can actually be an indicator of greater effectiveness than grants alone.

Some of the foundation’s most notable activities – and where much of its money is spent – are run by the three organisations I mentioned earlier.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative has long been the largest of the organisation’s initiatives and is now run as a separate legal entity. While the foundation currently retains control by appointing a majority of the board, the charity vowed on September 14 to end this link and separate CHAI completely if Clinton wins in November.

CHAI has worked to secure discounted pharmaceuticals and other supplies for distribution, as well as increase opportunities for health care in over 70 countries, including India, South Africa, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

The Clinton Global Initiative represents both the most innovative and most controversial programmeme of the organisation. CGI serves to match individuals and organisations willing to invest in projects aimed toward key public goals with charities and businesses seeking funding for their enterprises. Examples include funding loans to disabled veteran entrepreneurs and providing money for clinics in small villages in China.

In a sense, CGI serves a role similar to Uber’s in providing a platform to facilitate a mutually beneficial match. In this case, the match is aimed at securing funds to achieve social goals. Like Uber, the approach has the potential to accelerate activity (as evidenced by hundreds of millions of dollars in CGI commitments in 2015 alone). Also like Uber, the organisation has faced the challenge of vetting the parties it matches (as evidenced by concerns about funding being secured for a for-profit enterprise run by friends of the Clintons).

Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership also brings both praise and criticism for its unique approach. With funding from Canadian billionaire Frank Giustra and partnerships with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, CGEP represents a hybrid model that provides capital to enterprises, many of which are for-profit, that seek to achieve Clinton Foundation goals.

Blurring the boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit activities, CGEP is ahead of the curve in seeking new ways to achieve social good (the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is another notable newcomer to this arena). Yet, its approach, both in terms of its funding sources and its funding uses, also subjects the organisation to criticism.

The Clinton Foundation’s other on-the-ground efforts run the gamut from helping schools develop and deliver healthy food choices (Alliance for a Healthier Generation) and providing farming and economic assistance in underdeveloped countries (Clinton Development Initiative) to supporting the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas.

Along with CHAI, many of the foundation’s other initiatives will likely be spun off or eliminated if Clinton is elected president.

How does the Clinton Foundation spend its money?

The last area of common misunderstanding is how the organisation’s funds are spent.

To address this question best, the place to go is their audited financial statements, which consolidate the activities of all the entities that make up the Clinton Foundation.

As a point of context, consider the organisation’s size. In 2014, the Clinton Foundation had expenses of $250 million, which puts it smaller than its venerable peer the Carter Center at $332 million but much larger than the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which spent $597,000 in its most recent year.

As for where those funds went, the first thing to note is what it doesn’t spend a lot of money on: overhead. In its most recent audited financials, the Clinton Foundation reported spending 87.2% on programmemes and services, which means 12.8% is going to ‘overhead’ – administrative and fundraising costs. While not the ultimate arbiter of effectiveness, such a figure is well above the 65% to 75% range of programme spending often suggested as a rule-of-thumb.

CHAI alone accounts for nearly two-thirds of all programme spending, or $143 million. That’s perhaps no surprise given global health has been a longstanding focus of the organisation. The rest goes to the Global Initiative (11%), the Giustra Enterprise Partnership (3%) and a variety of other projects.

This tells us where the money goes in terms of the split among different goals, but another key question is what is the money used for specifically. While some may think that on-the-ground activities means supplies and cash aid, charitable organisations also spend much of their money on labour, meetings and travel. The Clinton Foundation is no exception, with labour, meetings and travel accounting for 37%, 12% and 8% of programme spending, respectively.

Evaluating a charity

So where does this leave us?

Clearly the Clinton Foundation is a complex organisation that does a wide variety of charitable activities, is funded by many individuals and organisations and spends the majority of its money on the programmes and initiatives that meet its goals. That said, its choices over where to spend money on the ground are open to criticism over whether donor resources are being used to their best potential. It’s a difficult question that financial statements aren’t detailed enough to provide (and is really something that all charities grapple with internally).

Still, being focused on developing relationships with funders and partner governments, offering on-the-ground training and assistance and convening meetings of funding providers suggest labour, travel and meeting costs should be key components of any charity. And in that regard, the Clinton Foundation’s spending looks like you may expect it to given its methods and goals.

These are all things worth bearing in mind the next time you read a headline about the Clinton Foundation.

Brian Mittendorf is a Fisher College of Business Distinguished Professor of Accounting at Ohio State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Clinton Email Scandal: Trouble Ahead for Democratic Presidential Candidate?

State department lawyers expect to make the nearly 15,000 emails – recently recovered by the FBI – public in batches starting three weeks before election.

US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, United States, June 14, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Jim Young

The FBI recently recovered nearly 15,000 e-mails that were cached on the private server that was used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she was the secretary of state. The e-mails are set to be made public just before the US presidential election in November.

US district court judge James E. Boasberg directed the state department to assess the 14,900 documents that it received from the FBI as part of the now-closed investigation into Clinton’s use of her private e-mail server. He ordered the department to determine a plan to review and release the documents, and report back to the court by September 23.

Boasberg is supervising the production of emails as part of a federal public-records lawsuit filed by conservative watchdog organisation Judicial Watch, which advocates high standards of ethics and morality in the nation’s public life.

Lawyer Lisa Olson, who is representing the state department, told the judge that the officials had not yet concluded which parts of Clinton’s e-mails were work related and which parts were personal.

In a statement after a hearing at the US district courthouse, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the group was “pleased” that Boasberg rejected the department’s plans to start the release of the documents on October 14 and ordered it to prioritise Clinton’s e-mails. “We’re trying to work with the state department here, but let’s be clear, they have slow-walked and stonewalled the release of these records. They’ve had many of them since July 25 and not one record has yet been released and we don’t understand why that’s the case.”

The tentative timetable suggests that the earliest the new emails could be released is October. The state department released the original emails in monthly installments over a year ago, although it missed several court-ordered deadlines owing to its staff and additional agencies examining the documents for classified material. The e-mails have raised multiple questions about possible conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s position as the secretary of state.

Judicial Watch also released 725 pages of correspondence from one of Clinton’s closest aides – Huma Abedin – revealing how the Clintons’ international network of friends and donors was able to connect with her and her inner circle during her time at the state department.

They claimed that Abedin “provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000-$10 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

The new set of e-mails are a sizeable addition to the 30,000 e-mails that Clinton’s lawyers deemed to be work-related and handed in to the department in December 2014. While the e-mails were not included in the initial trove of 55,000 pages that Clinton’s lawyers sent to the state department in 2015, FBI director James B. Comey stated that he did not believe the e-mails had been “intentionally deleted.” Nevertheless, he postulated that Clinton’s handling of classified information during her years at the state department was “extremely careless.”

State department spokesman Mark Toner stated that the agency had earlier agreed to willingly hand over e-mails sent or received by Clinton in her official capacity as secretary of state between 2009-2013, but that thousands of documents still needed to be “carefully appraised at state” to separate official and personal records. “The state has not yet had the opportunity to complete a review of the documents to determine whether they are agency records or if they are duplicative of documents [that the] state has already produced through the Freedom of Information Act,” Toner said.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, stated, “As we have always said, Hillary Clinton provided the state department with all the work-related emails she had in her possession in 2014. We are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located. But if the state department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publicly as well.”

Republicans, who have pushed to keep the issue of Clinton’s e-mail use alive, even after the FBI officially closed its investigation in July without recommending any criminal charges, commented on the release of the new e-mails. “Hillary Clinton seems incapable of telling the truth,” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said. “Clinton’s pattern of serial dishonesty is completely unacceptable for a candidate seeking the nation’s highest office and her refusal to tell the truth and own up to her poor judgment is a preview of how she would conduct herself if elected president.”

“The process for reviewing these emails needs to be expedited, public disclosure should begin before early voting starts and the emails in question should be released in full before election day,” he said.

The existence of the e-mails marks further trouble for the Democratic presidential nominee, who claimed that she turned over all of her work-related messages in December 2014. Certain critics fear the Obama administration may attempt to delay the release of a majority of the e-mails until after the presidential election in November. “If they wanted the records out quickly, they’d be out quickly. If they don’t want the records out quickly, they’ll let politics intrude on the process and the American people won’t see them until election day,” said Fitton.

The state department has yet to sift through the documents contained in the newly discovered e-mails to decide whether any will be withheld or redacted owing either to their personal nature, or for security reasons. Additionally, certain emails may be duplicates of ones that have previously been released. The agency has undertaken the release of e-mails and documents every week beginning October 14. They will also provide a status update so that judge Boasberg can decide which ones would require being produced under the Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch.

Clinton Foundation: No Foreign, Corporate Funds If Hillary Wins

Former President Bill Clinton told staff members on Thursday he would resign from the foundation’s board and that it would only accept donations from US citizens and independent charities.

US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton delivers remarks at a gathering of law enforcement leaders at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, US, August 18, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

Washington: The Clinton Foundation will stop accepting foreign and corporate donations if Hillary Clinton is elected president and will stop holding the annual Clinton Global Initiative meetings whatever the outcome of the November election, a foundation spokesman said on Thursday.

Former president, Bill Clinton, told staff members on Thursday he would resign from the foundation’s board and that it would only accept donations from US citizens and independent charities.

The former president also said he would hold the 12th and final Clinton Global Initiative in September. The annual meetings have included current and former heads of state, corporate leaders and celebrities who discussed poverty, healthcare, development and other issues.

Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian confirmed the moves, which were first reported by the Associated Press.

The foundation has come under fire during Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign, with Republicans charging that donors were rewarded with access to her and her aides as well as her husband while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Other critics have said the foundation’s reliance on millions of dollars from foreign governments created conflicts of interest for a would-be US president.

Clinton resigned from the foundation’s board after launching her successful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. She will face Republican Donald Trump in the November 8 election.

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, founded in 2001, has raised more than $2 billion for causes that focus on health and environmental issues, mainly in the developing world.