Clinton releases her tax returns: Bill & Hillary made $109M since leaving WH Nick Juliano

Published: Friday April 4, 2008



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Print This Email This Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign released her and husband Bill Clinton's tax returns Friday, showing the couple made more than $109 million since leaving the White House in 2001. They donated $10 million to charity and paid nearly $34 million in taxes. The couple's tax returns are available here. According to the campaign, Bill Clinton was responsible for the bulk of the couple's post-White House income, both from his books -- $23 million from autobiography My Life and $6.3 million from Giving -- and a lucrative speaking tour, which netted him nearly $52 million. Hillary Clinton had been facing mounting pressure to release the family's tax returns since last week, when Obama released his. Questions also arose earlier this year when Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million from her and her husband's joint assets. "The Clintons have now made public thirty years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service," Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said in a prepared statement. "None of Hillary Clinton's presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information. "What the Clintons' tax returns show is that they paid more than $33,000,000 in federal taxes and donated more than $10,000,000 to charities over the past eight years," Carson continued. "They paid taxes and made charitable contributions at a higher rate than taxpayers at their income level." Clinton earned close to $10.5 million from her own memoir Living History and about $190,000 from her 1996 book, It Takes a Village. Earnings from the earlier book were donated to charity. The Clinton campaign summarized the couple's earnings as follows: CUMULATIVE TOTAL(GROSS) INCOME: $109,175,175



Including, among other items:



Senator Clinton's Senate Salary: $1,051,606

President Clinton's Presidential Pension: $1,217,250

Senator Clinton's Book Income: $10,457,083

President Clinton's Book Income: $29,580,525

President Clinton's Speech Income: $51,855,599

That summary leaves about $18 million unaccounted for, as Politico's Ben Smith notes. The returns went out at 4 p.m. Friday, and the Drudge Report apparently got early word they were coming. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder observes some reasons the release's timing was helpful for Clinton: Good day to get these out.



(a) Clinton's traveling press corps is exhausted by their travel schedule



(b) Mark Penn's gaffe goes away temporarily



(c) It's a Friday



(d) lots of MLK-related political news



(e) it's well before Pennsylvania, as opposed to just days before Pennsylvania. DEVELOPING...