Only days before signing an ethics agreement with President-elect Barack Obama in 2008, Clinton Foundation officials got a blistering internal review saying the charity “must act immediately to bring the foundation into compliance with the law and standards that govern not-for-profits …”
The review pointed to a high-ranking but unnamed foundation executive who was “being paid by [former President Clinton], the government and the foundation” who “allowed the foundation to host what may have been (or may have been viewed as) a political event, apparently without official pre-approval from the foundation’s legal department and without regard, before the fact, to the impact of that decision on the foundation’s tax exempt status.”
The review report was provided Nov. 10, 2008, to Bruce Lindsey, the long-time Clinton political insider who was then the foundation’s chief executive officer. It was attached to a Nov. 1, 2011, email made public Saturday by Wikileaks from Cheryl Mills to John Podesta, fellow long-time Clinton insiders.
The Clinton Foundation signed the ethics agreement with Obama’s transition office Dec. 12, 2008, as part of the president-elect’s decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as the nation’s chief diplomat. Obama wanted assurance that no conflicts of interest would arise between Clinton’s global work as Secretary of State and the foundation, which had operations in numerous foreign countries.
Mills was then chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while Podesta is Clinton’s national campaign chairman.
It is illegal for tax-exempt non-profit foundations like the Clinton charity to be linked in any fashion with partisan political events as described in the review report.
