On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” former President Bill Clinton responded to a question on whether his daughter Chelsea would be a “conduit” to his wife by remaining at the Clinton Foundation even if Hillary Clinton is elected president by stating, “Well, we all know people, but you know they made that conduit argument, the State Department said that there there was nothing to it, the career people at the State Department.”
Clinton was asked, “You’re stepping down from the foundation, though, Chelsea is not at this point, and she seems to me to be a conduit, who would essentially get through to Hillary Clinton too.”
He answered, “Well, we all know people, but you know they made that conduit argument, the State Department said that there there was nothing to it, the career people at the State Department. And I think it’s quite different if you have the — if it’s — the foundation’s operating in America, taking no corporate contributions, only individual contributions, and disclosing them every three months, as we do now, and confining ourselves basically to health and education and service work.”
Clinton continued, “We are doing some — we got to finish some of our projects. Our foundation has the large private infrastructure program in the country, where we got — with public employee unions putting in $16 billion to promote building retrofits and other things that are part of the LaGuardia Airport improvement, and in the first $12.5 billion that they’ve spent, more than 100,000 jobs have been created. I kind of think people don’t want to stop that. There’s not any kind of conflict between the public interest and that, but we do — we are going to give up — I’m going to get off the board. We’re going to give up corporate contributions, and the individual contributions will be reported on a regular basis. And Chelsea’s got to decide what she’s going to do, but somebody has to stay there, as I explained when I said we were going to get out of most of our — almost everything we’re doing overseas, our everything, that somebody has to superintend the handing off of all this. We’re going to set up some things as individual foundations, without any of our being involved. We’re going to transfer the operations to — of others — to other operations. And we’re just going to terminate, finish the commitments we’ve made in some cases, and that takes some time to do. You just can’t — there’s no way in the world, and we’ve got a couple thousand people working for us around the world, and you know we’ve got to — we owe them something. They did great work.”
(h/t GOP War Room)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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