The State Department on Monday acknowledged it is aware of reports that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have failed to fully abide by the terms of an ethics agreement she made before joining the Obama administration, but declined to characterize the infringement as a “problem.”
Acting deputy spokesperson Jeff Rathke, when asked by reporters at a daily press briefing, said that the department was content to endorse Clinton’s self-regulatory approach to the revelations.
“We welcome the new commitments from the Clinton Foundation to disclose their donors, and from the Clinton Health Access Initiative to review their past tax filing, and welcome the additional efforts to make sure that all those donations are public, so I don’t have any problem to outline,” he said.
The back-and-forth came in the wake of a Saturday Washington Post report on the charitable activities of Clinton and her husband, the former President, and a Canadian mining tycoon. The story noted that the Clinton Foundation acknowledged activities with the $100 million benefactor may have violated “a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.”
“The foundation said the arrangement conformed with Canadian law. But it also opened a way for anonymous donors, including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, to direct money to the Clinton Foundation,” The Post stated.
Rathke reiterated the department’s claims that no evidence thus far has been presented to show that the Clinton Foundation and Former President Clinton’s activities were used as vehicles to peddle “undue influence” at the State Department under Secretary Clinton. He also said that the rules agreed to by the White House and Clinton “went well beyond, in some respects, what would have been required.”
He did, however, note that the building is “aware of media reports that the foundation did not meet some of the obligations to publish annually the names of new contributors.”
On Thursday, the department’s acting spokesperson Marie Harf had said that “if there were things that should have been submitted that weren’t, we obviously would have appreciated the opportunity to review them per the MOU.”
“But I am also not going to recreate history and sort of recreate the facts at the time about how a review would have played out if they had been,” she added.
