Hillary, Bill Clinton Earn More Than $139M Between 2007-14

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, earned more than
$139 million between 2007 and 2014, according to eight years of federal
income tax returns released by her campaign on Friday.

The returns show that the Clintons paid an overall federal tax rate of 31.6 percent during those years. The bulk of the Clintons’ income came from speeches delivered to corporate and interest groups by Bill Clinton and later by Hillary Clinton after she resigned as secretary of state in early 2013.

In a statement released by her campaign, Hillary Clinton said the couple has paid nearly $44 million in federal taxes on $139.1 million in income since 2006, and donated nearly $15 million to charity.

“We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas — and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” she said.

Clinton’s statement did not comment on the specifics of her earnings. Last May, financial disclosures released by her campaign reported that the couple had earned more than $30 million from speeches and book royalties since January 2014.

The Associated Press has estimated the Clintons made nearly $50 million in earnings from speeches alone since 2000.

The Clintons donated nearly 11 percent of their income to charity in 2014, according to her tax return. This year, the Clintons boosted personal donations to their global family charity, the Clinton Foundation, to between $5 million and $10 million.

Clinton used the occasion to reinforce her call from earlier this month for tax code reforms that would tighten restrictions on corporate profits and tax benefits for wealthy Americans. The federal tax code, she said, is “full of loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans and most powerful corporations to game the system and avoid paying their fair share.”

She has vowed, if elected, to revive a push in Congress to institute the so-called Buffett rule, named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, which would impose a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on anyone making more than $1 million a year.

Clinton also reaffirmed her pledge to close the “carried interest” loophole in federal taxes if elected president. Carried interest, or the share of profits from an investment fund paid to the fund manager, is taxed as the lower capital gains rate of 15 percent instead of as ordinary income, which could range between 20 and 36.9 percent.

She has also advocated for raising the tax on capital gains to as much as 28 percent for short-term investments.

The couple made nearly $23 million from speaking fees alone in 2013 — the year Clinton left the State Department — and collected an additional $20 million from paid events last year. The remainder of their income came largely from book royalties and consulting fees paid to Bill Clinton.

The returns also detailed Bill Clinton’s previously undisclosed earnings from recent consulting work for corporate and private interests both in the United States and abroad.

In 2014, the former president made more than $4.2 million in earnings from Laureate International Universities, where he was honorary chancellor for schools scattered across the globe. Clinton had a five-year deal with the organization, starting in 2010, but ended his relationship last April, two weeks after his wife announced her bid for president.

Bill Clinton had not previously detailed his work for Laureate, but he appeared in 2013 at events for the operation’s schools in Morocco, Brazil, Peru and Spain.

Bill Clinton was also paid $2.1 million from the Dubai-based Verkey GEMS Foundation, whose CEO, Vikas Pota, aims to provide educations to more than 100 million underprivileged children around the world through scholarships and teacher training.

Clinton’s precise role with GEMS has not been disclosed, but he named the enterprise a strategic partner of his foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative.

The earnings were paid to Bill Clinton through a shell company set up for his nonspeech work. The entity, WJC LLC, was set up in Delaware and New York, lapsed briefly and renewed in 2013. The existence of the LLC was disclosed by the AP earlier this year, but Bill Clinton’s office would not detail how it was used by the former president.

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This story has been corrected to show that the Clintons’ total income between 2007 and 2014 was reported at more than $139 million, not nearly $142 million; that their overall federal tax rate was at 31.6 percent, not 35.7 percent; and that their percentage of charitable contributions in 2014 was nearly 11 percent, not 11.4 percent.

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