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The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire Long article from the WP, but is comprehensive albeit slanted towards the Clintons. Since it was written in June 2015, it was meant to help Hillary in her run for the WH by painting a favorable picture of the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots as a great achievement. Some excerpts.

There was a Clinton Foundation back then, started in 1997. There were vague plans for future international charity work. But the nonprofit focused mainly on Little Rock, where Clinton was planning a library and a graduate school of public service, and envisioning an urban renaissance for the city that nurtured his political career. So the famously obsessive Clinton obsessed some more about buildings in Little Rock.

But the truly big brainstorm of the Clinton Foundation’s early years came on that plane to Davos in 2004. Friends saw Clinton — the lost, lonely, TiVo-bingeing ex-president — transformed into a champion of Harlem and an international philanthropist. A celebrity, even among celebrities.

That night in Switzerland, Band began to work on a memo proposing a new kind of conference.

It was September 2005. A year and a half after Band’s brainstorm, the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative was a smashing success. Some Clinton aides had been skeptical that it would work, but Clinton had shrewdly timed it to coincide with a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly — when New York was already chockablock with world leaders looking for something more interesting than a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

From 2004 to 2006 — the years before and after Clinton’s new conclave began — his foundation’s revenue more than doubled, from $58 million to $134 million.

At times, the Clinton Foundation has employed several key members of Hillary Clinton’s political team.

During her tenure as secretary, the foundation paid a second salary to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s official personal aide, who acted as a contractor to the foundation. The foundation hired Maura Pally, now acting chief executive, who worked previously for Hillary Clinton at the State Department and served as deputy counsel for her 2008 presidential campaign. Dennis Cheng, another Hillary Clinton aide, went from Clinton’s 2008 campaign to the State Department to the foundation and then to the 2016 campaign.

The Clinton Foundation also hired as a consultant Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to both Clintons from their White House days, paying him $10,000 a month starting in 2009 to advise a project to promote Bill Clinton’s presidential legacy, several people familiar with the arrangement said. (Blumenthal’s salary was first reported by Politico; foundation officials would not confirm it.)

After the former president had quadruple-bypass surgery, the foundation partnered with the American Heart Association to fight childhood obesity. After Clinton borrowed a plane from Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, the foundation began a new development effort — funded in part by $100 million from Giustra — that included anti-poverty programs in a number of countries where Giustra has had business interests.

By 2009, the foundation had grown to a $242-million-a-year organization. It had nine branches, plus independent fundraising arms in Canada and Britain.

At the center of it all was Clinton, inhabiting a role he had created for himself: a “convener.” He wasn’t a philanthropist, at least in the classic sense. He was more like the world’s middleman.

In many cases, Clinton persuaded the rich and powerful to give, and he lent their gifts a tint of global prestige as they passed through. As Clinton blessed their money, their money blessed him, too. When he traveled to Africa, aides said, massive crowds strained to get a look at him.

There was other obvious proof of his exalted new status. The world’s most powerful men went out of their way to see him.

For Clinton, the foundation had re-created many of the things he loved about the presidency — cheering crowds, an army of aides and a resonant sense that he was doing good on a global scale.

But the former White House employee who made the most in the foundation’s heyday was probably Clinton himself. The ex-president didn’t take an official salary from the foundation. But he has received at least $26 million in speaking fees from companies and organizations that were major donors to his foundation. And in many cases, what Clinton got paid to speak about was, in part, the foundation.