The Clinton Foundation on Thursday night disclosed that it earned $12 million to $26 million for speeches given by Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton. The speeches given by Hillary herself were largely at two types of organizations — universities and financial institutions — and have already created headaches for the candidate in the lead-up to the 2016 race.
The data show that the candidate since 2002 gave 16 paid speeches for the foundation. The foundation did not disclose dates or exact amounts paid for each speech, but it does show that Hillary Clinton's foundation speeches brought in anywhere from nearly $3 million to $6.25 million during that time period.
Colleges and universities paid somewhere between $1.4 million and $3 million for eight Hillary Clinton speeches benefiting the foundation. At some of those universities, students spoke out against the speeches as wasteful spending as colleges dealt with ever-tighter budgets.
The student body president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for example, decried the Clinton speeches as "reckless spending" at a time when the university was also planning a 17 percent tuition hike over four years, as the Washington Post reported last year. The $225,000 the university reportedly paid her is around 40 times what a full-time, resident undergraduate would pay for a year of tuition. The payment didn't come from UNLV directly, but rather from the UNLV Foundation, a nonprofit organization connected to the university. Still, students at UNLV demanded that she give the speaking fees to the university.
Clinton also gave speeches at four financial institutions that netted the foundation somewhere between $1 million and $2 million. The revelation that Clinton's foundation was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by organizations like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup could help to muddy the populist image she has been trying to strike on the campaign trail. Most recently, she has hurled barbs at Wall Street hedge fund managers as she advocates for a fairer tax code.
The foundation's income from Hillary's speeches was dwarfed by her husband's speech paydays, which totaled anywhere from $8.2 million to $18.4 million after 2002.
The latest speaking data come just a week after the Clintons disclosed their personal speaking income and sources for 2014 and 2015. In those years, they brought in more than $25 million from 100 paid speeches.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
