The Weekly Standard posted an article yesterday about a New York Times article about the University of Virginia’s Miller Center‘s newly released oral history project about the Clinton presidency.
The article reports:
In a five year span, the William J Clinton Foundation gave five grants totaling $851,250 to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. One year in particular, 2007, the Clinton gift was specifically marked: “Oral history project of Clinton presidency.”
Well, today the New York Times has a front page feature on the newly released oral history project about the Clinton presidency. The one the Clintons helped pay for. But nowhere in the 2,600 word piece do Times writers Amy Chozick (who is on the Clinton beat) and Peter Baker (longtime White House reporter) disclose the obvious conflict of interest.
On the Miller Center project, the authors only write, “Her triumphs and setbacks are laid bare in the oral histories of Mr. Clinton’s presidency, released last month by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The center has conducted oral histories of every presidency going back to Jimmy Carter’s, interviewing key players and then sealing them for years to come. But more than any other, this set of interviews bears on the future as much as the past.”
No other presidential foundation has given money to the Miller Center, according to a search of the database Foundation Search.
The article lists the grants given from the William J. Clinton Foundation to the Miller Center. It has become obvious in recent years that the William J. Clinton Foundation serves William J. and Hillary R. Clinton and little else. On August 13, 2013, The New York Times posted an article detailing concerns about the Clinton Foundation.
The Times article stated:
Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.
The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.
I am hoping that Hillary Clinton will not run for President. The Clintons have a history of playing right at the edges of the law, and there have been questions as to whether or not they have on more than one occasion stepped over the edge. We need honest, transparent people in Washington. I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton fits that description.