The Boston Globe editorial board wrote Tuesday that the Clinton Foundation should not only stop accepting donations but also shut down completely if Hillary Clinton is elected president, citing the foundation as a political liability for her and her family.
Although the charity founded by former President Bill Clinton has done admirable work over the last 15 years, the Clinton Foundation is also clearly a liability for Hillary Clinton as she seeks the presidency. The once-and-maybe-future first family will have plenty to keep them busy next year if Hillary Clinton defeats Donald Trump in November. The foundation should remove a political–and actual–distraction and stop accepting funding. If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down.
The Globe explained that the foundation has become a very prominent conflict of interest for the Clintons, despite supporting relief efforts in struggling countries like Haiti.
Controversy surrounding the foundation has come to the forefront of the 2016 presidential campaign after newly publicized emails from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state show overlapping interests between the foundation and State Department. The Globe noted that the foundation has provided Clinton aides with positions and paychecks, naming Cheryl Mills, Douglas Band, and Huma Abedin as examples.
The inherent conflict of interest was obvious when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009. She promised to maintain a separation between her official work and the foundation, but recently released emails written by staffers during her State Department tenure make clear that the supposed partition was far from impregnable. That was bad enough at State; if the Clinton Foundation continues to cash checks from foreign governments and other individuals seeking to ingratiate themselves with a President Hillary Clinton, it would be unacceptable.
The piece then calls for the donors to continue donating to charity, just not to the Clinton Foundation.
If the foundation’s donors are truly motivated by altruism, and not by the lure of access to the Clintons, then surely they can find other ways to support the foundation’s goals. And in four or eight years, the Clinton family could always form a new foundation and reestablish their charitable efforts.
Bill Clinton said in June that there will be some changes made to their charity, but they will "cross that bridge when we come to it."
Why wait? The Clintons should move now to end donations to the foundation, and make plans to shut it down in November. Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort.