The Clinton family foundation turned out to be a liability for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it wasn’t foreordained. Here’s how it happened.
After serving as Mitt Romney’s campaign manager in 2012, I formed an outside political group called America Rising tasked with doing opposition research on Clinton. She left the State Department in 2013 with sky-high favorable ratings, but we knew that popularity (which might soon doom any 2016 GOP nominee) was the result of a general lack of scrutiny in the previous four years.
When we first started talking to reporters about the Clintons’ vulnerabilities, to their credit, they were almost always interested in the Clinton Foundation. Already, there were suspicions about the foundation unethically blurring the lines and bending the rules. The organization represented the intersection of politics and money, the favorite topic of any good political reporter.
In August 2013, the New York Post broke a story showing the Clinton Foundation had spent $50 million on private travel. Former President Bill Clinton had apparently become addicted to private jets. The general election was still more than three years away, and already the Clinton Foundation was transforming from a well-meaning charity to a private slush fund enriching the Clintons, making a mockery of Hillary’s claim the next year that her family was “dead broke.”
Uncovering this information was a challenge. Despite its lofty campaign promises about transparency, the Obama administration refused to cooperate with many of America Rising’s Freedom of Information Act requests.
Enter the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, whose president, Dave Bossie, went on to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager. When our public-record requests for Clinton’s State Department correspondence were denied, Bossie took legal action, arguing that the public had a right to see this information.
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