New ethics rules would ravage the Clinton Foundation's donor base

(Image credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

published 20 August 2016

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton pledged Thursday that if she is elected president, her family's foundation will stop accepting donations from corporations or foreign governments, citizens, or groups, a practice that has raised concern about unethical conduct during her tenure as secretary of state.

But if she makes good on that pledge, more than half of the foundation's high-dollar donors will no longer be able to contribute, according to a calculation from The Washington Post. Some 53 percent of donors who have given at least $1 million, including one member of the foundation's board of directors, fall into one of the suspect categories.

Still, Clinton's decision to curtail her foundation's ethically dubious activities is a smart election strategy, as nearly half of Americans say they are bothered by the nonprofit's acceptance of foreign money while Clinton was at State. Since the announcement, critics left and right have suggested the change is overdue and should not be delayed until after Election Day.

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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.