In a piece which devastates the Clinton campaign’s efforts to dismiss questions about her family’s foundation, the New York Times’ editorial board calls Hillary’s failure to disclose large donations, despite an agreement with White House to do so, an “inexcusable violation of her pledge.”
The Times emphasizes that “nothing illegal has been alleged,” but then highlights the blockbuster reporting done by its own Jo Becker and Mike McIntire. Their story, and an earlier one published in 2008, raised questions about the Clintons and their foundation’s connections to a mining company called Uranium One. The company is now owned by the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom but got its start after the company’s founder and former President Bill Clinton flew to Kazakhstan a decade ago.
One of the major revelations from yesterday’s piece was the donation of $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation from Uranium One’s Chairman Ian Telfer, even as the company needed the State Department’s approval for a sale to the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom. As the Times’ editorial board notes, those donations did not appear in her foundation’s records, “even though Mrs. Clinton had signed an agreement with the Obama administration requiring the foundation to disclose all donors as a condition of her becoming secretary of state.”
The Times calls this failure of disclosure, which was only uncovered by reporters digging through Canadian tax records, “an inexcusable violation of her pledge.”
Yesterday Politico’s Dylan Byers cited a piece by progressive writer Jonathan Chait as the moment when the Clinton campaign’s attempts to dismiss questions about her family foundation as partisan went “dead in the water.” If Chait’s piece was the the campaign going dead in the water, the NY Times’ piece is more like a wrecking ball dropped on the deck. The Times puts the onus for answering outstanding questions about apparent conflicts of interest on Hillary herself, concluding, “this problem is not going away.”