Clintons' Charity Not Listed On Senate Disclosure Forms

Tax records show the Clinton Family Foundation was created during Hillary Clinton's first year in the Senate, when the couple gave $800,000 to launch the organization in early December 2001. The charity distributed no funds that year. The next year, the Clintons made $170,000 in donations while adding $100,000 of their own funds.

The Clintons donated much larger amounts in recent years as legal bills from Bill Clinton's impeachment were paid off and their personal fortunes soared. At the end of 2005, the Clinton family foundation had nearly $4 million in cash assets.

Jay Carson, a spokesman for Bill Clinton, said all of the foundation's remaining money will eventually go to charities and other institutions. He said the Clintons' other charitable efforts include raising millions a year for other nonprofits and making donations of their own money. He said the Clintons helped raise nearly $11 million the past two years for other nonprofits.

"It is hard to beat the Clintons' devotion to charitable work, unless you founded Microsoft or are the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway," he said.

The retired chief of the IRS branch that oversees tax-exempt nonprofits said family-run foundations are commonly created by wealthy Americans, allowing them to earn tax breaks by donating to a charity whose future good works they can control. Such charities need only to give 5 percent of proceeds each year to maintain a tax exemption.

"There are certain tax advantages to having your own foundations and not having the money as part of your estate," said Milton Cerny. "They can take the tax deduction up front, as soon as they put the money into the foundation."

Private family foundations vary in amounts they give away each year. The Clintons have given away a quarter of their money. The family foundation of record producer David Geffen, by comparison, has been giving away most of what it takes in -- roughly $1 million a year -- leaving it with a balance of $400,000 at the end of 2005.

The Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, put $415 million in new money into its foundation in 2005. It gave $158 million to charitable causes, leaving the foundation with a $1.3 billion balance.

The Clinton foundation's donations range from $100,000 to the Asian tsunami relief fund in 2005 to causes in the former president's home state of Arkansas.

The Clintons have been generous to their alma maters, with donations going to Yale Law School, Georgetown University, Wellesley College and Oxford University, which Bill Clinton attended on a Rhodes Scholarship.

The foundation has also paid considerable attention to Arkansas, providing the bulk of the support for the Clinton Birthplace Foundation, which maintains the former president's boyhood home in Hope, Ark. They have donated $225,000 to the Little Rock Baptist church they attended, and to organizations devoted to the needs of children in the state.

One Arkansas recipient was the Diane Blair Foundation. Diane Blair is the late wife of James Blair, the businessman who helped Hillary Clinton with controversial commodities trades in the late 1970s that netted her about $100,000. There are two foundations in Diane Blair's name. One is a private family charity; the other funds a center for the study of Southern politics at the University of Arkansas.

The Clintons' tax form indicates the money went to the private charity, but James Blair said in an interview yesterday that the Clintons "miscoded" the entry. The check actually went to the university fund, he said.

"She was Hillary's closest friend," Blair said of his wife, who died in June 2000.

At least three beneficiaries were from the Middle East, where the former president worked to forge an elusive peace agreement during the 1990s. They include $50,000 to the King Hussein Foundation, named in honor of the late Jordanian king, who was a key player in Clinton peace talks; $50,000 to American Friends of Yitzhak Rabin, honoring the assassinated Israeli prime minister; and the American Friends of Peres Center, honoring former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres.

The Clintons also gave $50,000 to the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a group aimed at empowering women worldwide. Hillary Clinton is an honorary chair.

Such omissions deprive the public of the right to scrutinize their political leaders' financial dealings and identify possible conflicts of interest, the former chief of disclosure for the Federal Election Commission said.

Kent Cooper, who retired after two decades overseeing the FEC's public disclosure office, said congressional ethics committees have not enforced the ethics disclosure requirements forcefully. As a result, he said, candidates "know there is no great consequences, and so the habit has developed that people dismiss an omission as a clerical error, when in fact it is a crucial piece of the puzzle about a member's finances that is being hidden."