Alana Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon (disclosure: another former NewsBuster at the WFB) reported that Bill and Hillary Clinton's Family Foundation (CFF) gave $100,000 to a New York Times charitable fund in 2008, the same year that the paper resisted the Obama-mania and endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.
It's a bit confusing: "The Clinton Family Foundation is a separate entity from the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, has been the family’s vehicle for personal charitable giving since 2001."
In an email to Politico, Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy categorically rejected the report: "The Free Beacon story is preposterous from start to finish," she wrote. She seemingly didn't contest the donation, just any connection to the 2008 endorsement.
Goodman tweeted in disgust: “It's outrageous that once again we contacted the @nytimes for comment prior to our story and instead they commented to another outlet.”
She added: “It's also a useless snarky comment that answers none of the questions about potential conflicts raised by the piece.”
The gift from the Clinton Family Foundation, the family's charitable giving arm, went to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, a charity run by members of the Times Company’s board of directors and senior executives. Apparently, they never considered the potential conflicts of interest from taking massive amounts of money from the foundation of a presidential candidate.
The six-figure contribution was bigger than most Clinton Foundation donations: “Of the 47 organizations the CFF donated to in 2008, only six groups received more than $50,000. Most received between $2,000 and $25,000. The CFF has not donated to the Neediest Cases Fund since 2008.”
Goodman reminded readers that the Times endorsement was a controversy seven years ago:
In February 2008, The New Republic reported that the Times editorial board had had two contentious meetings that January before Sulzberger “tipped the scales in [Clinton’s] favor.”
Vanity Fair also reported that May that Sulzberger intervened in favor of Clinton after he was lobbied heavily by one of Clinton’s top financial backers.
“The Times editorial board was, apparently, planning to endorse Barack Obama in the New York primary; the Clinton campaign, getting wind of this, called upon one of its major financial supporters [Steven Rattner], the best friend and principal adviser of Arthur Sulzberger Jr.,” Michael Wolff wrote in Vanity Fair.
“Rattner is thought to have petitioned Sulzberger, and Sulzberger thereupon overruled his editorial board, which then backed Clinton.”
Andrew Rosenthal, the New York Times editorial page editor, denied the Vanity Fair story at the time, calling it “completely false.”
The CFF’s largest contribution in 2008 was $1 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (then named the William J. Clinton Foundation). The donation made up almost half of the $2.4 million the foundation distributed that year.
