The Clinton Foundation acknowledged on Sunday that it had made a few “mistakes” in how it filed its taxes but said it is “acting quickly to remedy them.” In a statement posted on the Clinton Foundation’s website, acting CEO Maura Pally, denied the group had failed to accurately report its total revenue. Instead, she specified that the reason why the foundation would likely refile some tax forms has to do with how it reported donations from foreign governments.
“Our total revenue was accurately reported on each year’s form—our error was that government grants were mistakenly combined with other donations,” she wrote. “Those same grants have always been properly listed and broken out and available for anyone to see on our audited financial statements, posted on our website.”
Despite the mistakes, Pally insisted that the foundation has been committed to transparency from the beginning, noting that the group has gone beyond what is required by law. And it is going even further now that Hillary Clinton is running for president. “Today, our donor disclosure and foreign government contributor policy is stronger than ever,” Pally writes. “Since Secretary Clinton decided to run for President, we have committed to disclosing all of our donors on a quarterly basis.” The foundation has also decided to only accept funding “from a handful of governments” that are helping to pay for continuing programs.
The statement was released as Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, has been publicly calling for an investigation, saying he has uncovered a pattern in which foreign governments gave cash to the foundation and then the State Department made decisions that favored those countries. In several interviews on Sunday though Schweizer made it clear he did not have “direct evidence” of any wrongdoing, emphasizing it was more about a “pattern of behavior.”
“The smoking gun is in the pattern of behavior,” Schweizer said on ABC News when George Stephanopoulos challenged him on his evidence. Even Fox News challenged Schweizer and at one point Chris Wallace even told him he did not “have a single piece of evidence” that Clinton herself was involved in a particular deal. Still, Schweizer insisted, it was all about the patterns. “It’s a very extensive pattern,” Schweizer told Fox News. “There are 11 instances. And I think, when you have one or two examples, it’s coincidence. When you have this many, to me it’s a trend. … I think this warrants an investigation.”
