Corruption: Throughout the presidential campaign there was plenty of talk about whether the Clinton Foundation was a legitimate charity or a pay-to-play scam. The latest financial data from the charity provides the answer.
 
01:51
01:51
Controversy over the foundation erupted after Peter Schweizer's 2015 book — "Clinton Cash" — suggested that the foundation served as a way for donors to curry favor with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Coincidences?

And, indeed, the multitude of connections that slowly turned out became hard to dismiss as coincidental. There was the fact that 85 of the 154 private interests who'd met with Clinton during her tenure at state were Clinton Foundation donors.
Emails turned up showing how the foundation intervened to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country that had been a major foundation donor. A Chicago commodities trader who donated $100,000 to the foundation got a top job on a State Department arms control panel, despite having no experience in the area. On and on it went.
Earlier this year, news broke that the FBI was investigating whether the foundation violated tax laws by converting donations to personal or political uses. In December, Republicans plan to hold a hearing into the probe, before handing control of the House to Democrats.
Throughout all this, the Clinton's and their defenders insisted that foundation was doing great work for mankind. It was helping the poor and sick around the world. It got top ratings from charity rating agencies. They said there wasn't any hard evidence of wrongdoing.

Donations Evaporate

But the most glaring indictment of the Clinton Foundation came from what happened last year, afterHillary Clinton lost the election — and effectively ended her political career.
First, the Clinton's almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.
Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See the nearby chart below for a timeline.)
If the Clinton Foundation was as good as defenders claimed, why did all its big-time donors suddenly lose interest? The only reasonable explanation is that donors weren't interested in what the foundation supposedly did for humanity. They were interested in the political favors they knew their money would buy.