The chief strategist for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign urged the Clinton Foundation to immediately stop taking money from foreign governments as investigative journalists closed in.
“I will leave all the defensive things to those who have and know the data for pushback,” Joel Benenson, a pollster and Clinton’s chief strategist, wrote to campaign staff in a February 2015 email.
“But there is a much larger strategic question that we need to resolve and stop this from spreading beyond today and probably tomorrow,” he wrote. “And that is how quickly foundation stops. Even if we don’t announce it immediately, we may want to stop immediately.”
“Obviously, doing this in the context of an overall strategy we can stick with is better than dealing with brush fires,” Benenson wrote in response to campaign staffers scrambling to deal with investigative reporters from the Wall Street Journal.
WSJ reporters contacted the Clinton campaign for comment on why foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation spiked after the nonprofit got rid of its ban on accepting foreign government donations. The spike came as Clinton geared up for a presidential run.
The Foundation had a self-imposed ban on foreign government donations while Clinton headed the State Department. The WSJ noted the ban, however, didn’t apply to foreign government funding approved by the State Department.
Foreign governments donated $17.7 million to the Foundation while Clinton headed the State Department, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
“The increase shows up on last year’s disclosure for a number of reasons, some of it related to ongoing programs, some because there was an uptick in foreign money after she left State and the MOU no longer applied,” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary wrote in the email chain.
Benenson urged the Foundation to stop taking foreign money, arguing it could be seen as “unseemly.”
“Sorry to be clear – foundation stops — means stop taking foreign gov’t money. Is that possible?” Benenson wrote.
“If not we’re going to be very vulnerable on that throughout and I think our opponents and some on our side will say at is unseemly for a potential U.S. President taking money from foreign governments for her private foundation,” he wrote.
Benenson’s email was one of more than 41,000 published online by WikiLeaks from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s hacked Gmail account.
Clinton has said her foundation would stop accepting foreign government donations while she’s president, but emails released by WikiLeaks suggest Clinton did not want to miss out on “unexpected opportunities” by banning such donors.
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