Of the $16 million requested under the former presidents fund, nearly $3 million has been slated for staff salary and benefits, according to GSA budgeting documents.
The documents do not list the names or positions of the former presidents’ federally paid employees. But sources say that several Bill Clinton staffers who have been paid through the GSA have also been paid through the foundation or his personal office. They include Doug Band, the former White House aide who previously helped run the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, and senior foundation official Laura Graham, whose foundation salary increased from $74,000 in 2005 to more than $180,000 in 2013, according to tax filings. Another Clinton insider believed to have been on the GSA payroll is Bill Clinton’s chief of staff Tina Flournoy, a former union official who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and whose arrival on her husband’s staff in 2012 was seen by some insiders “as Hillary’s planting a sentinel,” according to a report in New York magazine.
Band and Flournoy declined to comment, while Graham could not be reached.
A representative for Clinton in 2001 told the Government Accountability Office that, in addition to the GSA money, “some staff compensation will be paid by the former president and his presidential foundation,” according to a 2001 GAO report. It made clear that most employees on the GSA payrolls of former presidents “also receive compensation from other sources.”
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Among the federal payments revealed are $947,000 for communications-related costs and “equipment” — an expense category which, according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report, could include everything from furniture to “information technology hardware or software.”