Bill Clinton reportedly made nearly $50 million from more than 220 paid events that the State Department approved while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, according to an Associated Press report.
Mainstream media outlets have been scrutinizing the Clintons, especially Bill Clinton’s speaking fees that doubled or tripled after his wife became Secretary of State, after the many revelations in Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell said Schweizer’s blockbuster book was a “playbook” for any news organization investigating the Clintons and was “overshadowing” Hillary Clinton’s campaign rollout.
According to the Associated Press, the Office of Government Ethics reportedly warned that the State Department’s office “has extremely limited capacity to respond to the increased demands on its program” and said that it was “concerned about the lack of compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements in the areas of financial disclosure, annual training and ethics agreements.”
Foreign governments with atrocious human rights records and banks dealing with scandals paid Clinton hefty sums for appearances.
Barclays paid Clinton $650,000 for two appearances in 2011 just months after it “agreed to pay nearly $300 million in penalties for violating financial sanctions against Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya and Burma.” The Associated Press also found that UBS Bank paid Clinton $840,000 for five events in 2011 and 2012 “less than two years after the Swiss bank had acknowledged a massive tax evasion scheme aiding American clients and paid $780 million in penalties.”
In December of 2011, the United Arab Emirates reportedly paid Clinton $600,000 to appear at a “government-sponsored event.” In 2010, the State Department approved a Bangkok event that was reportedly “sponsored by a Thai government energy ministry and state gas firm.”
The report found that the State Department did not approve of an event at the China Philanthropy Forum in 2012 because of “concerns that the event’s sponsor was an association made up of former and current senior Chinese government officials.” But nine months after Hillary Clinton left the agency, Bill Clinton “eventually spoke at the forum’s annual conference.”
Bill Clinton has vowed to continue his paid speeches and appearances while his wife runs for president, telling NBC News, “I got to pay our bills.”