From Mike Allen's Wednesday morning newsletter.
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IF YOU READ ONLY ONE THING - N.Y. Times A1, top of cols. 1-2, "Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions: With Mrs. Clinton's Arrival, an Urge to Focus," by Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick, with Lydia Polgreen and Kitty Bennett: "Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name [2011], Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. ... The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton's early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in. And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm - which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser - while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative ...
"The review set off more than a year of internal debate , and spurred an evolution ... that included ... Chelsea ... taking on a dominant new role ... This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation's new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. ... Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Worried that the foundation's operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton's nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London. ...
"[T]he changing of the guard has aggravated long-simmering tensions within the former first family's inner circle as the foundation tries to juggle the political and philanthropic ambitions of a former president, a potential future president, and their increasingly visible daughter. And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons' charity work from Mr. Clinton's moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton's political future ... The foundation ... has 350 employees in 180 countries ... Dennis Cheng, Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment drive, which some of the Clintons' donors already describe as a dry run for 2016." nyti.ms
CLINTONS IN HAMPTONS NEXT WEEK - N.Y. Post "Page Six ": "Hillary and Bill Clinton are renting a ... [$200,000-a-month,] six-bedroom, 7 1/2 -bathroom mansion at 709 Daniels Lane in Sagaponack ... expected to arrive this weekend ... usually rent 211 Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton, ... but ... they had a dispute at the end of last summer over the deposit ... [S]o ... instead staying at the home of Republican donor Michael Saperstein [a former senior managing director at Bear, Stearns & Co., and a listed Republican donor who gave $15,000 to Mitt Romney]. A source told us, 'There was an issue with the security deposit last summer. The Clintons were dissatisfied with how much money they got back.' The source speculated that the couple may have balked over "astronomical" landscaping and utility costs. ...
"The Clintons' new place is set on 3.5 acres and includes a heated pool, direct beach access, a gym ... [T]he Clintons ... could be spied on from a house next door, which is up for sale. The nearby seven-bedroom home has been put on the market for $21 million ... 'There is a concern that people will view the house, which has a turret, in order to snoop on the Clintons.'" |
