Clinton Opens Up on Health, Money By John D. McKinnon and Laura Meckler
Hillary Clinton released a flurry of documents Friday that included a physician’s declaration of her personal health and a batch of financial information, in a bid to rebut accusations of secrecy surrounding her presidential campaign.
The financial documents showed Mrs. Clinton and her husband earned $139 million in adjusted gross income over the past seven years, including $28 million last year, when they paid an effective tax rate of more than 35%. The release coincided with a voluminous release of Clinton emails from her time as secretary of state.
The disclosures helped illuminate both her personal finances and some lingering questions regarding her health. According to a Clinton aide, they were designed to demonstrate the campaign’s commitment to transparency, at a time when Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism over secrecy.
In a statement accompanying the tax release, Mrs. Clinton noted that she and her husband have now made public the details of their personal finances going back to 1977. Mrs. Clinton also became the first candidate to release a personal health summary.
The tax disclosures underscored the lofty incomes of the Clintons in recent years, thanks largely to big fees for speeches made around the world. The returns also reflected the relatively high tax rates for the couple, largely because much of their income is taxed as wages and not as investment income, such as capital gains or dividends.
The Clintons’ 2014 return showed they earned about $28 million and paid tax of almost $10 million that year. Gifts to charity totaled about $3 million, almost all of it to the Clinton Family Foundation. Mrs. Clinton reported gross speaking fees of about $10.5 million before expenses, and gross earnings as an author of about $5.6 million.
The former president reported about $9.7 million in gross speaking fees and about $6.4 million in gross consulting fees.
The statement said the Clintons paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 35% in both 2013 and 2014 and about $44 million in federal taxes since 2007. During that period they made almost $15 million in charitable contributions, the campaign said.
Mrs. Clinton gave 41 speeches for which she received an honorarium in 2013, according to the newly-released details. Almost all of the speeches were for $225,000 each. More than a dozen were sponsored by financial services firms. The former president gave a similar number of speeches. At least nine overseas speeches were for fees of $500,000 or more. The Clintons previously released details of their speaking fees for 2014 and part of 2015.
In a statement, Mrs. Clinton said she and her husband have “come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas—and we owe it to the opportunities America provides.”
She also made another pitch for a tax-code overhaul to help more middle-class families achieve financial success—a theme she has been pushing in recent weeks. “I want more Americans to have the chance to work hard and get ahead, just like we did. And reforming the tax code can help,” she said.
Clinton aides made a point of declaring the Mrs. Clinton has now released more financial information than former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
The Bush campaign replied with a statement of its own, calling the Clinton financial disclosures “a failed attempt to distract from the fact that Secretary Clinton’s emails—which she has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide from the American people—are now being released under a federal court order. Governor Bush is running the most transparent campaign in the entire field.”
Mrs. Clinton also sought to clear up any unease over her physical condition. In a public letter, her personal physician declared Mrs. Clinton to be in “excellent physical condition,” saying she had overcome a blood clot discovered in her head after she suffered a concussion in late 2012.
The Democratic presidential candidate currently has a thyroid condition and seasonal allergies but is “fit to serve as president of the United States,” according to the letter from Dr. Lisa Bardack, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Mount Kisco Medical Group in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and Mrs. Clinton’s personal physician since 2001.
She described Mrs. Clinton as a healthy 67-year-old woman who has suffered from deep-vein thrombosis in 1998 and 2009, an elbow fracture in 2009 and a concussion, which was well documented in 2012.
The symptoms of the concussion, including double vision, resolved within two months, allowing her to stop using special glasses. Testing in 2013 found no lasting effects, the doctor said, and she tested negative for clotting disorders. However, Dr. Bardack wrote that as a precaution she continues to take a daily drug to prevent clotting.
The Clinton campaign released the medical summary just hours before the tax forms and on the same day the State Department made public thousands of Mrs. Clinton’s emails as secretary of state. The campaign cast the releases as part of an unprecedented disclosure, but critics saw a flood of information on a summer Friday afternoon that would be challenging to absorb all at once.
Comments are closed.
