Bill Clinton accepted $500,000 award that could have built 10 schools

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

published 29 May 2015

In the summer of 2014, former President Bill Clinton accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Happy Hearts Fund, a charity that builds schools in regions affected by natural disasters. But as the The New York Times reports, the former executive director of Happy Hearts alleges Clinton only agreed to attend the Happy Hearts event after Happy Hearts offered to make a $500,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation:

"The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal... "Petra [the founder of Happy Hearts] called me and said we have to include an honorarium for [Clinton] — that they don't look at these things unless money is offered, and it has to be $500,000."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.