Former President Clinton’s charity drew an international roster of donors last year, ranging from Norway and Oman to foreign lotteries, businessmen and celebrities, a contributor list released under an ethics promise by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton showed.
A donor rundown disclosed on New Year’s Day by the William J. Clinton Foundation shows that in all, Norway has given $10 million to $25 million to the charity since its founding roughly a decade ago. Oman donated $1 million to $5 million over the years. The list gave cumulative donation totals and didn’t say how much each contributor gave last year.
The foundation provided the Associated Press with a donor list Friday morning under the heading “William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of 2009 Contributors on Foundation Web site” but later said the disclosure, which included many more foreign governments, covered donors dating back to the charity’s inception, and that it wouldn’t say who gave in 2009. The foundation changed course Friday afternoon and updated the list to specify 2009 donors.
The Clintons agreed to annually disclose the names of donors to the foundation to address concerns about potential conflicts of interest between the former president’s fundraising abroad and his wife’s role in helping direct Obama administration foreign policy.
Then-President-elect Barack Obama made the disclosure a condition of his selection of Hillary Rodham Clinton for the post, and the two senior lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said when the first list was released in December 2008 that the disclosure “is designed to establish greater transparency and predictability with regard to the activities of the Clinton Foundation in the context of Sen. Clinton’s service as secretary of state.”
