The Hillary Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation, CNN, and Media Matters have been falsely claiming that the Clinton Foundation received a “platinum rating” from Guidestar, a nonprofit “information service” which reports on other US nonprofits.

Here is the problem, Guidestar does not give ratings, they are not a watchdog nor a ratings agency. They merely post the data they are provided by nonprofits without verifying any of it.

Some background information on Guidestar. Their about us page claims that:

Many people think that we are a charity evaluator or a watchdog. We aren’t. Instead, we are a 501(c)(3) public charity that collects, organizes, and presents the information you want in an easy-to-understand format while remaining neutral.

In an email with Jacob Harold, the CEO of Guidestar, he stated , “We do not endorse candidates or political parties. GuideStar is a neutral data platform. We do not consider ourselves a watchdog or a ratings agency. “

Guidestar has, however, created the “Platinum Seal” program, which allows a nonprofit to submit any metric they like, whether they choose one of the 700 metrics already listed or can simply make up their own custom metric.

Guidestar’s description of the Platinum program states that:

Some of these metrics are as simple as “number of donors” or “number of first time donors”.

However, an organization is also free to make up their own metric, such as “number of Jedi Knights saved from death at the hands of Darth Vader” or “number of Sasquatches fed, clothed and returned to the wild unharmed”. None of this is checked for accuracy or monitored by Guidestar according to their website, and the organization refused to return numerous emails questioning this program or their policies concerning nonprofits falsely claiming that Guidestar had awarded them a platinum rating.

In other words Guidestar’s “platinum seal” has set the bar so low it’s buried in the ground and any organization that bothers to set up an account on their website and enter in a few “metrics” can be sure not to trip over it.

The Clinton Foundation, in their neverending quest to promote the Clintons as humanitarians by any means necessary, seems to have made a concerted effort to misrepresent this platinum seal as a platinum rating. Hillary Clinton’s official campaign website repeated the same false claim that Guidestar has given this organization a “platinum rating” as well.