(Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
The list of Bill Clinton’s foreign donors could prove to be embarrassing
Tim Reid in Chicago
Abner Mikva, a former federal judge who was Mr Clinton’s White House counsel – and an early supporter and close friend of Mr Obama – told The Times that the choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State worried him because of her husband.
Although not a member of the White House transition team, Mr Mikva was once one of Mr Obama’s most powerful patrons in Chicago, and is the first person with ties to the President-elect to express misgivings publicly about Mr Clinton’s impact on the new administration.
“I worry about the difficulty not that she brings, but that her husband brings,” he said over breakfast at the University of Chicago, where he recently retired as a law professor. “His entire career since leaving the White House has involved foreign contacts, foreign speeches and foreign contributions,” Mr Mikva, also a former US congressman, said.
“I don’t know how you separate her activities from his – how you vet those. As far as I’m concerned they will all have to be made public. I think that will be very embarrassing to President Clinton and to the donors.”
One of the main stumbling blocks to Mrs Clinton’s nomination as Mr Obama’s Secretary of State – which will be announced formally next week – was Mr Clinton’s financial ties to foreign governments, and the list of donors to his philanthropic foundation and presidential library.
After negotiations between both camps last week, Mr Clinton agreed to hand over the names of more than 200,000 donors to the Obama White House transition team, and to have future foreign speeches and engagements vetted so as to avoid any potential conflicts of interest with his wife.
Mr Mikva added: “I’m not saying there is anything illegal. But it causes complications trying to make clear that what they do in private has nothing to do with our foreign policy.”
Mr Mikva, 82, said he had a “tremendous amount of confidence” in Mr Obama’s ability to confront the challenges he faces. “It transcends the confidence I’ve had in any other political figure, and I’ve been around.”
Yet he said he was worried that the expectations for him were too great, and that some of the biggest problems that Mr Obama will face will be from within his own party, particularly as the President-elect is going to “be doing some unpopular things”.
He spoke an hour before Mr Obama told Democrats and Republicans that “the old way of doing business” was over.
He declared his intention to pour over the federal budget “page by page, line by line”, to cut wasteful spending programmes.
Having announced a huge economic spending package on Monday to “jolt the economy back into shape” – it could reach at least $700 billion – Mr Obama said: “If we’re going to make the investments we need, we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t.” Mr Obama wants to forge an economic policy combining massive spending, which will lead to a ballooning federal deficit, with a targeted and disciplined spending strategy.
He will take office with the US Government already awash in red ink. A record deficit of $237.2 billion was reported in October, which reflected only a portion of the $700 billion (£542 billion) financial rescue package passed by Congress last month.
“In these challenging times, when we are facing both rising deficits and a sinking economy, budget reform is not an option,” Mr Obama said. “It is an imperative. We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programmes that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist or interest group. We simply cannot afford it.”
Mr Obama introduced Peter Orszag as his choice for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who will be responsible for overseeing the federal budget and cutting spending.
Mr Orszag is currently director of the Congressional Budget Office. “He doesn’t need a map to see where the bodies are buried in the budget,” Mr Obama said. “He knows what works, and what doesn’t.”
Mr Obama also chose Robert Nabors to be Mr Orszag’s deputy. Mr Nabors has been a top staff aide on the House Appropriations Committee, from where spending Bills initiate.
Echoing Abraham Lincoln once again, Mr Obama said that his new economic team will have to “think anew and act anew”. They will.
His chief economic advisers Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, as well as Mr Orszag, all have ties to Robert Rubin, Mr Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. His mantra was balanced budgets. They are about to plunge America even further into debt.
Peace and Justice Post 
In Clinton List, a Veil Is Lifted on Foundation
December 19, 2008Former President Bill Clinton with Bill Gates at the Clinton Global Initiative in September.
WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton has collected tens of millions of dollars for his foundation over the last 10 years from governments in the Middle East, tycoons from Canada, India, Nigeria and Ukraine, and other international figures with interests in American foreign policy.
Lifting a longstanding cloak of secrecy, Mr. Clinton on Thursday released a complete list of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation as part of an agreement to douse concerns about potential conflicts if Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is confirmed as secretary of state in the Obama administration.
The donor list offers a glimpse into the high-powered, big-dollar world in which Mr. Clinton has traveled since leaving the White House as he jetted around the globe making money for himself and raising vast sums for his ambitious philanthropic programs fighting disease, poverty and climate change. Some of the world’s richest people and most famous celebrities handed over large checks to finance his presidential library and charitable activities.
With his wife now poised to take over as America’s top diplomat, Mr. Clinton’s fund-raising is coming under new scrutiny for relationships that could pose potential conflict-of-interest issues for Mrs. Clinton in her job. Some of her husband’s biggest backers have much at stake in the policies that President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration adopts toward their regions or business ventures.
Saudi Arabia alone gave to the foundation $10 million to $25 million, as did government aid agencies in Australia and the Dominican Republic. Brunei, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar and Taiwan each gave more than $1 million. So did the ruling family of Abu Dhabi and the Dubai Foundation, both based in the United Arab Emirates, and the Friends of Saudi Arabia, founded by a Saudi prince.
Also among the largest donors were a businessman who was close to the onetime military ruler of Nigeria, a Ukrainian tycoon who was son-in-law of that former Soviet republic’s authoritarian president and a Canadian mining executive who took Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan while trying to win lucrative uranium contracts.
In addition, the foundation accepted sizable contributions from several prominent figures from India, like a billionaire steel magnate and a politician who lobbied Mrs. Clinton this year on behalf of a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement between India and the United States, a deal that has rankled Pakistan, a key foreign policy focus of the incoming administration.
Such contributions could provoke suspicion at home and abroad among those wondering about any effect on administration policy.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said donations from “countries where we have particularly sensitive issues and relations” would invariably raise concerns about whether Mrs. Clinton had conflicts of interest.
“The real question,” Mr. Levitt said, “is to what extent you can really separate the activities and influence of any husband and wife, and certainly a husband and wife team that is such a powerhouse.”
Mr. Clinton’s office said in a statement that the disclosure itself should ensure that there would be “not even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, said the president-elect had chosen Mrs. Clinton for his cabinet because “no one could better represent the United States.”
“Past donations to the Clinton foundation,” Ms. Cutter said, “have no connection to Senator Clinton’s prospective tenure as secretary of state.”
Republicans have addressed the issue cautiously, suggesting that they would examine it but not necessarily hold up Mrs. Clinton’s confirmation as a result. Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, which will consider her nomination, was in Russia on Thursday and unavailable for comment, according to Mr. Lugar’s office.
But in an interview on Nov. 30 on “This Week” on ABC, Mr. Lugar said Mr. Clinton’s activities would raise legitimate questions, adding, “I don’t know how, given all of our ethics standards now, anyone quite measures up to this who has such cosmic ties.”
Still, he indicated that he would vote for Mrs. Clinton and praised Mr. Obama’s team for doing “a good job in trying to pin down the most important elements” in its agreement with Mr. Clinton.
To avoid potential conflicts, the Obama team, represented by its transition co-chairwoman, Valerie Jarrett, signed a memorandum of understanding on Dec. 12 with the William J. Clinton Foundation, represented by its chief executive, Bruce R. Lindsey. The five-page memorandum, provided to reporters on Thursday, required Mr. Clinton to disclose his past donors by the end of the year and any future contributors once a year.
The memorandum also requires that if Mrs. Clinton is confirmed, the Clinton Global Initiative, an offshoot of the foundation, will be incorporated separately, will no longer hold events outside the United States and will refuse any further contributions from foreign governments. Other initiatives operating under the auspices of the foundation would follow new rules and consult with State Department ethics officials in certain circumstances.
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Tags:Bill Clinton, collections, conflict-of-interest issues, Hillary Rodham Clinton, list of donors
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