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State Department walks back claim on Clinton Foundation review

The State Department is stepping back from a spokeswoman’s comment last week suggesting that the agency’s ethics lawyers signed off on donations to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

Asked at a daily briefing Thursday about the foundation’s failure to submit a $500,000 donation from the country of Algeria for a conflict of interest review in 2010, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the department did such reviews whenever the non-profit founded by former President Bill Clinton sent in information about a potential gift.

“We like to review — and we have reviewed every donation that was submitted,” Psaki said.

However, there are no indications any Clinton Foundation donations were ever sent to the State Department for approval.

Asked about Psaki’s comment, another State Department spokesperson said Monday that the reviews the agency did were of paid speeches Bill Clinton was proposing to make and business deals he wanted to enter into. From 2009 to 2012, hundreds of speech requests and a handful of consulting deals were sent to State Department lawyers for sign off. The vast majority were approved.

“We received requests regarding speeches and consultancies of former President Clinton,” State spokesman Alec Gerlach said.

Clarifying Psaki's earlier comment, Gerlach said that State Department reviewed every request that came in, not every donation.

In her remarks last week, Psaki also said the State Department was not troubled that the Algeria gift was never flagged to State. “In this case, the fact that the process has – was not followed in this particular incident does not raise concerns with us,” the spokeswoman said.

The ethics agreement struck before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009 only required State Department review of donations to the Clinton Foundation under very limited circumstances: when a foreign government wanted to “materially” increase its giving to four specific Clinton Foundation programs.

Gifts from foreign governments to one program, the Clinton Global Initiative, were barred altogether, as were new gifts to the other four programs from governments that had not previously supported them.

The agreement did not require vetting of donations from individuals, whether foreign or U.S. citizens, or from private companies, but did require public disclosure of the names of donors on an annual basis. Part of the pact also required Bill Clinton to submit proposals for paid speeches as well as plans for consulting deals.

Both the Clinton camp and the State Department have noted that the agreement went beyond the requirements of the law.

In response to a Washington Post report about the Algeria gift, a foundation spokesman said the State Department “should…have been formally informed” about the donation. However, it’s unclear whether the text of the agreement actually required such vetting.

A foundation spokesman pushed back against criticism of the nonprofit on Monday, sending talking points to Clinton allies urging them to rebut "attacks on the Clinton Foundation" by stressing that the entity is "a world-class philanthropy" and that "every penny" of the Algeria gift went to helping Haiti recover from the devastating earthquake it experienced in 2010.

UPDATE (Monday, 8:06 P.M.): This post has been updated to add an additional line of comment from the State Department.