WASHINGTON: Donald Trump on Monday demanded that Hillary Clinton shut down the charitable foundation founded by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, branding it a “corrupt enterprise.”
“The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people,” the Republican presidential candidate said in a statement.
“It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history,” Trump said, blasting the charity, which has raised some $2 billion dollars since it was founded in 2001 after Bill Clinton left office.
“It must be shut down immediately,” he said. Speaking a short time later on Fox News, Trump said the foundation had received financial contributions from various countries “that discriminated against women and gays and everybody else.”
That remark apparently referred to various nations seen as having checkered histories on human rights, Saudi Arabia among them, that made generous donations to the foundation when Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, served as President Barack Obama´s secretary of state between 2009 and 2013.
“I mean, that money — it should be given back. They should not take that money,” Trump told Fox.
The Clinton Foundation disburses funds domestically and overseas, handing out some $218 million in 2014.
A firewall was supposed to have been in place to ensure that the foundation´s work remained completely separate from Hillary Clinton´s role as head of US diplomacy, but critics said that that barrier has been permeable at best.
