The Bill and Hillary Clinton Money Machine Taps Corporate Cash By Brody Mullins, Peter Nicholas and Rebecca Ballhaus
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-bill-and-hillary-clinton-money-machine-taps-corporate-cash-1404268205#printMode
Couple Has Raised More Than $1 Billion in Two Decades; Republicans Worry of Early Lead in 2016
Bill and Hillary Clinton helped raise more than $1 billion from U.S. companies and industry donors during two decades on the national stage through campaigns, paid speeches and a network of organizations advancing their political and policy goals, The Wall Street Journal found.
Those deep ties potentially give Mrs. Clinton a financial advantage in the 2016 presidential election, if she runs, and could bring industry donors back to the Democratic Party for the first time since Mr. Clinton left the White House.
Republicans, while capable of raising similar sums, worry the Clintons will take an early lead in the next presidential race, which is expected to total well above the $2 billion spent in 2012.
“Clinton Inc. is going to be the most formidable fundraising operation for the Democrats in the history of the country. Period. Exclamation point,” said Rick Hohlt, a lobbyist and fundraiser for Republican Party presidential candidates. “It sure causes concern.”
The Journal tallied speaking fees and donations to Mr. Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns; the Democratic National Committee during Mr. Clinton’s eight years in the White House; Mrs. Clinton’s bids for Senate and president; and the family’s nonprofit entity—The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
The Journal was aided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks election contributions. The center provided an industry breakdown of campaign donations.
Finding an exact total is difficult because the Clintons aren’t required to make public any details about donations to their foundation. They voluntarily report donor names, however, and donation amounts within broad ranges.
In total, the Clintons raised between $2 billion and $3 billion from all sources, including individual donors, corporate contributors and foreign governments, the Journal found. Between $1.3 billion and $2 billion came from industry sources.
By comparison, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush raised a total of $2.9 billion for their four presidential bids, their presidential foundations, as well as for the Republican National Committee when they were in the White House. Another member of the Bush family—Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor—has said he would decide by year’s end whether to enter the 2016 race. If he runs, he could challenge Mrs. Clinton’s potential dominance of industry donors.
Mrs. Clinton’s office didn’t comment on the Journal’s findings. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton declined to comment, neither confirming nor disputing the findings. In past interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have said she would neither favor business nor shy away from rooting out Wall Street abuses.
The donated funds were split among the Clintons’ political operations, which raised $1.2 billion; their nonprofit foundation, which collected between $750 million and $1.7 billion; and speaking fees, which totaled about $100 million.
Not counting about $250 million the Clinton foundation has received from foreign donors, at least 75% of the money arrived in large donations from industry sources, a category defined by federal regulators and the Center for Responsive Politics. President Barack Obama, by contrast, raised less than half of his campaign funds from such donors. Industry sources gave two Bushes no more than 60% of the money they raised for their political operations and presidential foundations, according to the Journal’s analysis.
Financial services, including Wall Street, have been one of the single largest sources of money for the Clintons since the 1992 presidential campaign. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has been the couple’s No. 1 Wall Street contributor, giving nearly $5 million.
Individual labor unions also were top Clinton donors, but their $40 million total was small compared with industry. The biggest givers in labor were the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, $5.3 million, the Service Employees International Union, $3.8 million, and the Communications Workers of America, $3.7 million.
Business has long hedged its bets in politics, supporting candidates of both parties. Mr. Clinton won industry support during eight years in the White House by helping balance the budget and steering the U.S. to a period of economic growth. For Wall Street, Mr. Clinton enacted several legislative priorities, including the elimination of barriers between commercial and investment banking in 1999.
After the Clintons left the White House in 2001, Mrs. Clinton became the junior senator from New York state, the heart of finance in the U.S. When she ran for re-election in 2006, Mrs. Clinton raked in $5.7 million from financial services firms, which was more than all but one other member of Congress that year, according to the CRP.
The family foundation also has sought partnerships with business—for example, negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to discount AIDS drugs in hard-hit countries.
The couple’s roster of industry donors could fuel another Hillary Clinton candidacy—especially Wall Street, which shifted toward the Republican Party during Mr. Obama’s presidency.
“She has the credibility among Wall Street donors that could make it likely that Wall Street moves back into the Democratic fold,” said Sam Geduldig, a Republican lobbyist and fundraiser who represents Wall Street firms.
Financial-services firms accounted for about 12% of the total amount raised by the Clintons. By comparison, Mitt Romney raised 13% of his 2012 campaign funds from financial-services firms; Mr. Obama’s share was 6%.
Such firms as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. have funneled at least $208 million into the Clintons’ accounts since 1992 and the DNC when Mr. Clinton was president, the Journal found.
“Obviously, since Secretary Clinton was a senator from New York, she has strong personal relationships with the business community in the state,” said Tom Nides, the vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who took a two-year leave to serve as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy at the State Department.
The financial sector has paid Mr. Clinton $23 million for speeches since he left office, financial disclosure statements show, including $1.35 million from Goldman Sachs for eight speeches. The Clintons met with donors last month at the investment banking firm’s New York office. The family’s foundation once subleased office space from Goldman in Manhattan.
The Clintons’ personal wealth has caused them headaches in recent weeks. Mrs. Clinton told ABC News last month that she and her husband left the White House “dead broke,” a comment that drew criticism given Mr. Clinton’s earning potential as a former president. Later, she said “dead broke” wasn’t the most artful description of the family’s finances in 2001. Still, she said, her family was $12 million in debt when they left the White House and she was unable to help close the gap because she was serving in the Senate.
At the end of 2012, the Clintons were worth between $5 million and $25.5 million, according to the most recent financial disclosure statements they were required to file when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. Precise figures aren’t required by the government, only broad ranges.
The Clintons made between $16.3 million and $17.3 million, mostly from speaking fees earned by the former president in 2012, the last year they were required to disclose the information.
After stepping down as secretary of state in 2013, Mrs. Clinton has collected fees for speeches from many companies, including Bank of America Corp. and the Carlyle Group. In February, she spoke at a retreat hosted by Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat for 250 top executives, a company official said. Her office said some fees go to the family foundation.
Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday, Mrs. Clinton said, “Bill and I are so grateful for the success we’ve had, but we remember where we started and where we came from and what the contributing factors were that gave us the opportunity to be successful.”
The Clintons’ fundraising strength could cut two ways for Mrs. Clinton. Americans still blame large companies and Wall Street banks in particular for the financial crisis and the country’s lingering economic troubles. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this spring, just 13% of respondents said they were confident in large corporations and the financial industry—lower than even the Internal Revenue Service.
The Clintons’ big donors also disturb some liberal Democrats. “It’s hard to imagine someone being willing to jail Wall Street bankers who broke the law if that same person is getting paid a lot of money by Wall Street bankers,” Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches.
And some Democrats pine for Mrs. Clinton to show more gusto in criticizing the practices of financial firms. “Frankly, she would do well to get in touch with her inner Elizabeth Warren, ” said Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America, a liberal group, referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who built a reputation skewering banking and credit-card industries but has said she won’t run for president in 2016.
Asked about her ties to American corporations, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton said her advocacy for business has never come “at the expense of the individual.” More broadly, he said, “one thing you can’t say about Hillary Clinton is that she has not spent her entire life battling against inequality.”
Mrs. Clinton’s aides cited her March 2007 warnings about subprime mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 financial collapse. And, in an op-ed she wrote for the Journal in September 2008, Mrs. Clinton said homeowners shouldn’t be forgotten in the rush to bail out banks.
“If we are going to take on the mortgage debt of storied Wall Street giants,” she wrote, “we ought to extend the same help to struggling, middle-class families.”
But in tone, the Clintons have been less confrontational with business, compared with Mr. Obama, Ms. Warren and others.
Mrs. Clinton, as secretary of state, redefined the job in ways that promoted the interests of U.S. business. She said she wanted her portfolio to include helping U.S. businesses flourish overseas so as to promote the economic recovery back home.
In her new book, “Hard Choices,” she wrote, “I was determined to do everything I could to help American businesses and workers seize more of the legitimate opportunities already available. We faced strong headwinds from countries that wanted a different system altogether.”
She touted Boeing‘s efforts to sell planes to the Russians during a 2009 trip to Moscow. “I made the case that Boeing’s jets set the global gold standard, and, after I left, our embassy kept at it,” she wrote in her book. The following year, she said, the Russians bought $4 billion worth of planes from Boeing, “which translated into thousands of American jobs.”
Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com, Peter Nicholas at peter.nicholas@wsj.com and Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com
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