2016 Postmortem

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(85,996 posts) Wed Sep 14, 2016, 11:37 AM Sep 2016

The Clinton Foundation You’ve Never Heard Of

Andrew S. Ginsburg ‏@GinsburgJobs 2h2 hours ago
The Clinton Foundation You’ve Never Heard Of http://thebea.st/2cmpIcS via @thedailybeast

The Clinton Global Foundation is out to change the world, but the Clintons’ other foundation has spent more than $20 million on smaller goals: supporting their local firehouse, the Arkansas Ballet, and a longtime friend’s tribute to a daughter who died tragically 15 years ago.

When 17-year-old Thea Leopoulos was killed in a car accident in Arkansas on Memorial Day of 2001, her father’s friend, Bill Clinton, left a round of golf at St. Andrews, Scotland, to fly to Little Rock to be with Thea’s father, Paul. Paul Leopoulos and Clinton had met in the third grade in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and had been friends ever since. The former president delivered Thea’s eulogy. Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, flew to Little Rock and stayed for three days.

In Thea’s memory, the Leopoulos family began a foundation to support the arts in schools. The largest single donor since it launched has been the Clinton Family Foundation, the little-known private family foundation of Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, which has sent more than $1 million to the Thea Foundation to fund college scholarships, art supplies, and art in schools.

“We would not be at the level we are today, not even close to it, if it weren’t for his donations and for his believing in us,” Leopoulos said of Bill Clinton’s support over the years. “I don’t ever count on it. There are so many other people he could support, but there it comes every year.”

...While the larger Clinton Foundation grew to become an ambitious, often controversial, multibillion-dollar operation, the family foundation has remained a below-the-radar mechanism for the Clintons and their daughter, Chelsea, to donate to charities they personally support.

Unlike the Donald J. Trump Foundation, to which according to The Washington Post Donald Trump has donated less than $10,000 of his own money since 2008, the Clintons have given $22.5 million to the Clinton Family Foundation since 2001, according to 15 years of the foundation’s IRS 990 forms reviewed by The Daily Beast. Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton have been the only officers, have taken no salaries, have accepted no outside donations, and have no staff working for it.

read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/14/the-clinton-foundation-you-ve-never-heard-of.html?via=desktop&source=twitter