CHAI HDQ--BOSTON
Clinton Charities (and CHAI) Raked in Millions of Taxpayer Dollars
freebeacon.com ^ | 5/1/15 | Elizabeth Harrington
EXCERPT The Clinton Foundation and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) its major health-related offshoot received over $7 million from the US government in recent years, according to an analysis of public records conducted by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), chaired by Bill Clinton and run by the former president’s long-time associate Ira Magaziner, has received $6,010,898 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) since 2010. CHAI, the biggest arm of the Clinton family’s charitable efforts, accounting for 60 percent of all spending, received $3,193,500 in fiscal years 2010, 2011, and 2012, according to federal contracts, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The organization received an additional $2,817,398 from the CDC in FYs 2013, 2014, and 2015.
The grants, including $200,000 awarded as recently as January, have gone to CHAI’s Global AIDS program, filed under “Global Health and Child Survival.” The CDC is listed as a $1-10 million contributor to CHAI, according to its donor list. CHAI, the Boston-based health arm of the Clinton Foundation has come under scrutiny for failing to disclose donations from foreign governments—in violation of a pledge Clinton made to the Obama administration before she assumed office as secretary of state.
A Reuters report found that the health initiative stopped making its annual disclosure in 2010 and that “no complete list of donors to the Clintons’ charities has been published” since. The group only recently published a partial donor list, which its spokesperson Maura Daley told Reuters “made up for” CHAI’s “oversight” of failing to meet the disclosure agreement.
When asked whether the CDC has any concern regarding its funding of CHAI or plans to provide grants to the organization in the future, an agency spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon that it “can’t predict who will apply for and be awarded grants.”
“CDC and potential grantees must follow federal guidelines when applying for or awarding and monitoring grants,” said Shelly Diaz. “CHAI, like any other organization meeting federal requirements, may apply for CDC grants. They would also be expected to meet the same ongoing requirements for grantees (e.g. reports, audits, performance standards).”
CHAI received hundreds of millions from foreign nations between 2009 and 2014, including: the UK ($79.7 million), Australia ($58.6 million), Norway ($38.1 million), Canada ($12.1 million), Ireland ($11.7 million), Sweden ($7.2 million), and New Zealand ($1.2 million). A Boston Globe investigative report found that foreign donations “sharply accelerated” to CHAI when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state.
“Government grants, nearly all from foreign countries, doubled to $55.9 million in 2013 from $26.7 million in 2010, according to the records,” the report said.
The health initiative broke off into a nonprofit separate from the Clinton Foundation in 2010, though it is still chaired by Bill and Chelsea Clinton. The charities have remained intertwined. CHAI received a $2 million cash grant from the Clinton Foundation for “Haiti relief,” according to the group’s 2013 tax filing. It received a $4 million cash grant from the foundation for “program service” in 2012.
CHAI’s chief executive officer and vice chairman, Ira Magaziner, a 1960s student activist who tried to “convert a small American city into a model of municipal socialism,” is a long time associate of the Clintons. Magaziner was a Rhodes scholar with Bill Clinton in the late 1960s, a senior advisor in the Clinton White House, and the architect of Hillary Clinton’s failed health-care plan in the 1990s.
Magaziner formerly ran the foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative while also running CHAI, though he ceded control over the environmental group late last year. He was paid $415,000 in salary and consulting fees from the Clinton Foundation in 2013, according to Politico. Bruce Lindsey, Bill Clinton’s longtime lawyer and chairman of the board of the Clinton Foundation, was the highest paid official at CHAI, paid $398,159 in salary and benefits in 2013 as a board member.
CHAI’s website says they are a “frugal” charity that focuses on saving lives, rather than “compensating ourselves excessively.”
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