Clinton Says All Money From Colleges Has Gone To Family’s Foundation

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., waits to speak residents during a campaign stop, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007, in Independence, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Hillary Clinton defended her high-dollar speaking fees on Friday, telling ABC News that she’s donated every penny earned from colleges over the last year-and-a-half to her family’s eponymous foundation.

“All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation,” Clinton said.

Clinton’s gaffes about her personal wealth during her book tour have brought renewed scrutiny to her lofty speaking fees, with Republicans and conservatives eager to brand the former secretary of state as out of touch.

The New York Times reported last year that Clinton makes $200,000 per speech.

Students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas asked her to return the $225,000 that she will make for a speech at an October fundraiser at the school.

According to ABC, Clinton didn’t indicate in the interview on Friday how she would respond to the students.

Latest Livewire

Notable Replies

  1. Hope she’s not exaggerating. Because if she is, we’ll never ever hear the end of it.

  2. If HRC went to an impoverished city in this country or an impoverished country anywhere for the purpose of building housing with her own hands, and then canning and preserving food for them with her own hands, and then sewing up clothing for all those in need, and then she stood down guerilla armies with nothing more than a slingshot, it still wouldn’t stop the criticism of her because it’s all they got. She’s the grist for their hate mill.

  3. It’s not so much her money as her reality-based from the hip candor.
    If cashing in is a crime in this corrupt age of cashing in then indict all political Washington, their families and their sugar daddies/mommies.

  4. Just don’t expect her to bake cookies.

  5. I am sure that will make the students feel better about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to hear Hillary spout some more lies. Because the Clinton Foundation is Godly!

    Kinda.

    The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

    And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

    The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation — and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty — would survive its founder.

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

    At UNLV, where officials have agreed to raise tuition by 17 percent over the next four years, student government leaders wrote a letter to Clinton last week asking her to return the planned $225,000 fee to the university. If she does not, they say, they intend to protest her visit.

    “The students are outraged about this,” said Elias Benjelloun, UNLV’s student body president. “When you see reckless spending, it just belittles the sacrifices students are consistently asked to make. I’m not an accountant or economist, so I can’t put a price tag on how much we should be paying her, but I think she should come for free.”

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

24 more replies

Participants

Avatar for system1 Avatar for amylola Avatar for jw1 Avatar for littlegirlblue Avatar for marby Avatar for feathered_head Avatar for pac Avatar for UnfadingGreen Avatar for leftflank Avatar for theod Avatar for ctvoter Avatar for scalfin Avatar for invitedguest Avatar for mantan Avatar for baffie2 Avatar for jimmy_tx Avatar for magical_panda Avatar for ignoreland Avatar for Don1Carter Avatar for hugopreuss Avatar for occamsrazor2 Avatar for maric771

Continue Discussion
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Deputy Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: