Appearing on ABC’s The View on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook falsely asserted that all donors to the Clinton Foundation are public.
When host Whoopi Goldberg asked if “all the information on the donations” has been made clear, Mook replied, “All the donations are public.”
“They know where the donations went, who they came from, what they did, so those are not in question? That’s all there? All the money that she’s earned, where it came from?” Goldberg pressed.
“It’s all public, yep,” Mook insisted.
As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pointed out with an instant fact check, this is not entirely accurate.
For one thing, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, a Canadian operation run by Bill Clinton’s friend Frank Giustra, is not required to disclose its donors to tax authorities under Canadian law. It’s not even clear exactly how much money this partnership has taken in.
A few of the CGEP donors were named after press scrutiny in 2015, but at least a thousand of them were not disclosed.
The Hill reported on September 1st that the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership “sent more than $25 million of largely untraceable donations to the Clinton Foundation before being pressured into revealing some of its donors.”
Giustra insists he will not reveal all of the donors because “under Canadian laws and charitable best practices, charitable donors have a right to privacy.”
As The Hill put it, this means “the American public has to instead take Giustra at his word” that none of the money flowing into the Clinton Foundation comes from “foreign or Canadian governments or government-controlled entities.”
Also problematic is the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which did not fully disclose its donors throughout Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, despite promises to the contrary. According to a 2015 Reuters report, no complete list of donors was provided between 2010 and 2013.
The CHAI does post a donor list now, but The Hill reports on a lingering mystery: “a line item in the organization’s disclosure form — within the $100,000 to $1 million bracket — that simply says ‘individual and unsolicited donations,’ without revealing the identities of these donors.”
In a previously published list of broken Clinton transparency promises, The Hill also noted that the Clinton Health Access Initiative was supposed to submit foreign government donations to the State Department ethics office for review, but “blatantly” failed to keep that commitment, which was made by Hillary Clinton herself during her confirmation hearings. None of the foreign donations made to the CHAI between 2009 and 2013 were submitted for such a review.
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