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Donations to Clinton Foundation plunged after Hillary’s defeat

In the year after Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat, donors seemed to abandon the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, with contributions plummeting nearly 58 percent.

The $36 million nosedive in donations has come to light as Republican legislators plan to hold hearings on the results of a federal corruption investigation into the non-profit next month.

Federal authorities have long been probing the non-profit over allegations of “pay to play.” Specifically, the FBI investigation focused on whether any donations made to the foundation were linked to policy decisions made while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, according to published reports.

The foundation has vigorously and repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Contributions plunged from $62,912,331 in 2016 to $26,566,825 in 2017, recently released federal tax filings show.





Revenue from speeches given by the Clintons also fell from a high of $3.6 million in 2015 to just under $300,000 in 2017. In 2016, during the presidential campaign, the non-profit took in no earnings from speeches, tax filings show.

Executives at the non-profit said the drop in foundation revenue is due to restructuring, after the announcement in August 2016 that the Clinton Global Initiative, a foundation program that tackled some of the world’s most urgent social problems, such as health care and disaster preparedness, had shut down.

“We anticipated a decline in both revenue and expenses for 2017, largely attributable to the absence of sponsorship and membership contributions for CGI,” a spokesman for the Clinton Foundation told The Post. “Moving forward to 2018, our work has expanded into new fields — for example, establishing a new CGI Action Network on Post-Disaster Recovery; beginning new work with faith leaders to help address the opioid epidemic, particularly focusing on issues of stigma; and forging new partnerships to promote early childhood literacy and development.”





In 2016, the group spent $757,300 in “audit and tax services” compared to $401,212 in 2017, tax filings show.

Travel expenses also dipped, but were still tallied in the millions — with $3,917,419 spent in 2016, and $2,300,601 spent in 2017. The Clinton fly first-class or by private plane, tax filings show.

In 2015, the foundation voluntarily amended four years of tax filings for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 after a Reuters report found that the group recorded zero income on a line in the federal 990 tax forms to report government grants. The non-profit had said that those grants were mistakenly lumped in with other donations.

But if the fortunes of the foundation are slipping at least Bill Clinton is raking in the profits from the thriller he wrote with mega-bestseller James Patterson. The book sold more than 1.2 million copies, and the television rights have already been granted to Showtime for an undisclosed amount.





Clinton’s first novel, “The President is Missing,” tells the story of a sitting president who disappears from the White House in the midst of a looming cyber-terrorist attack.

It’s not clear how much Clinton and Patterson made from the advance for the book, which was released this summer in a unique deal involving two publishing houses — Alfred A. Knopf and Little, Brown & Co.

A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation refused to say whether any of the proceeds from the sale of the book would go to aid the work of the non-profit.





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