Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Are Hillary's big speaking fees being used to help fund her campaign?
Recently filed campaign finance reports may shed light on how Hillary Clinton is using some of the money she collected from her hefty speechmaking fees from Wall Street banks and other special-interest groups: She is plowing an increasingly large amount of her funds, $560,983 as of last month, back into her presidential campaign.
A Yahoo News review of Clinton’s campaign disclosure reports finds that in the weeks after launching her bid for the presidency in April 2015, the former secretary of state paid $278,821 to her campaign to cover so-called testing the waters expenses. These included consulting and legal fees, travel bills and salaries for top staffers like personal aide Huma Abedin and deputy political director Brynne Craig that were incurred during the early months of last year, when Clinton was officially weighing whether to run for president.
Since then, the reports show, Clinton has kicked another $282,162 into her campaign, with payments to her campaign committee, Hillary for America, averaging about $90,000 a month. Most of that revenue ($228,837) has gone to the Clinton Executive Services Corp., a Clinton family payroll operation that is compensating staffers engaged in campaign-related work for her chief surrogate, her husband and former president Bill Clinton, according to campaign reports and a Clinton campaign official.
-snip-
During this period, Clinton collected $674,500 for three speeches in Canada on Jan. 20 and 21, 2015 (one of them paid for and two of them co-sponsored by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.) On March 11, 2015, she received $315,000 for a speech to eBay employees in San Jose. That was followed by a $260,000 payment from the New York chapter of the American Camping Association for a talk in Atlantic City on March 19, her last speech before her April 12, 2015, formal announcement that she was a candidate. (Clinton began writing checks to her campaign the next day, on April 13.)
“It certainly seems like what she was doing was raising money for her campaign,” said Anne Weismann, executive director for Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog group that advocates for greater transparency in politics. “Everybody knew she was going to run at that point.”
-snip-
But she said the most problematic talk appeared to be the final speech before the camping association. The group is a small nonprofit whose $260,000 payment to Clinton (more than the $225,000 she received for talks to the Bank of America or Morgan Stanley) amounted to more than 10 percent of the group’s $2.1 million budget. That recently prompted the organization to add a special note in its annual tax filing with the charities bureau of the New York attorney general’s office, calling the payment to Clinton (described only as a “high-profile politician”) as a “one-time expense” that is “not expected to occur in the subsequent year.”
“It’s hard to see how it fits with the mission of that organization to pay $260,000 for a speaker who is about to run for president,” said Weismann. “It all kind of stinks.”
A Yahoo News review of Clinton’s campaign disclosure reports finds that in the weeks after launching her bid for the presidency in April 2015, the former secretary of state paid $278,821 to her campaign to cover so-called testing the waters expenses. These included consulting and legal fees, travel bills and salaries for top staffers like personal aide Huma Abedin and deputy political director Brynne Craig that were incurred during the early months of last year, when Clinton was officially weighing whether to run for president.
Since then, the reports show, Clinton has kicked another $282,162 into her campaign, with payments to her campaign committee, Hillary for America, averaging about $90,000 a month. Most of that revenue ($228,837) has gone to the Clinton Executive Services Corp., a Clinton family payroll operation that is compensating staffers engaged in campaign-related work for her chief surrogate, her husband and former president Bill Clinton, according to campaign reports and a Clinton campaign official.
-snip-
During this period, Clinton collected $674,500 for three speeches in Canada on Jan. 20 and 21, 2015 (one of them paid for and two of them co-sponsored by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.) On March 11, 2015, she received $315,000 for a speech to eBay employees in San Jose. That was followed by a $260,000 payment from the New York chapter of the American Camping Association for a talk in Atlantic City on March 19, her last speech before her April 12, 2015, formal announcement that she was a candidate. (Clinton began writing checks to her campaign the next day, on April 13.)
“It certainly seems like what she was doing was raising money for her campaign,” said Anne Weismann, executive director for Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog group that advocates for greater transparency in politics. “Everybody knew she was going to run at that point.”
-snip-
But she said the most problematic talk appeared to be the final speech before the camping association. The group is a small nonprofit whose $260,000 payment to Clinton (more than the $225,000 she received for talks to the Bank of America or Morgan Stanley) amounted to more than 10 percent of the group’s $2.1 million budget. That recently prompted the organization to add a special note in its annual tax filing with the charities bureau of the New York attorney general’s office, calling the payment to Clinton (described only as a “high-profile politician”) as a “one-time expense” that is “not expected to occur in the subsequent year.”
“It’s hard to see how it fits with the mission of that organization to pay $260,000 for a speaker who is about to run for president,” said Weismann. “It all kind of stinks.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/are-hillarys-big-speaking-fees-being-used-to-help-205257476.html
