Hillary Clinton spent more than a quarter-million dollars from her charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the former Secretary’s consulting and speech-making business, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.
Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Clinton’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Clinton may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.
In one case, from 2007, Clinton faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Martha’s Vineyard., resulting from a dispute over the height of a flagpole.
In a settlement, Martha’s Vineyard agreed to waive those fines — if Clinton made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Clinton sent a check from the Clinton Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.
In another case, court papers say Clinton’s PR agency in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Clinton Foundation, according to tax records.
The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Clinton used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting her speeches in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Clinton spent $10,000 of the foundation’s money on a portrait of herself bought at a charity fundraiser.
Or, rather, another portrait of herself.
Several years earlier, Clinton used $20,000 from the Clinton Foundation to buy a different, six-foot-tall portrait.
Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) railed against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton from the Senate floor Sept. 20. McConnell accused Clinton of being “incapable of making money honestly.” ( / C-SPAN)
If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Clinton violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require her to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on her behalf. Clinton is also facing scrutiny from the New York attorney general’s office, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.
More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Clinton ran her charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy