Another Republican scandal has been blown to tiny bits as Hillary Clinton has confirmed that all of her speaking fees from universities are donated to charity.
Former Sec. Clinton told ABC News that her speaking fees from universities get donated to the Clinton Foundation, “All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation.”
The last point the Mrs. Clinton made was an important one. She is not accepting money from a university’s general fund, which comes from student tuitions. University foundations are funded by donations from alumni and others. The whole idea that Republicans have been pushing is that Hillary Clinton was accepting six-figure speaking fees while students are being crushed under rising tuition costs and student loan debt.
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Republicans are trying to stop Hillary Clinton by taking a page out President Obama’s book. Just as the president did to Mitt Romney in 2012, Republicans are trying to label Clinton wealthy and out of touch. The hypocrisy of this position is mind boggling as it has been the Republican Party that has refused to raise taxes on the wealthy, create jobs, extend unemployment benefits, and offered a platform that can best be described as protecting the rich while screwing the rest.
In other words, it is impossible to take their claims that Hillary Clinton doesn’t care about regular folks seriously.
It is a valid question to debate whether or not any university should be dishing out six-figure speaking fees to anyone. There are probably better ways to spend their money, but that question has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. If students don’t want the university to spend the money on big dollar speakers, it is something that they need to take up with university itself.
What Hillary Clinton is doing is much more transparent than how Republicans collect their speaking fees. Top Republicans have for years insisted that they be paid for their appearances in book purchases. Before he ran for president in 2012, Mitt Romney declined speaking fees, but insisted that institutions buy thousands of copies of his book. Romney was just one example of how Republicans push books that nobody seems to read to the top of the bestseller list.
If a university decides that it just has to spend big bucks to lure a national speaker to campus, it is better that the fee goes to charity instead of getting wasted on thousands of copies of a book that nobody wants. This is another attempted Republican scandal that is going to nowhere, but it says a lot about the Republican Party that they are trying so hard to damage Hillary Clinton before the 2016 process has begun.
America remains ready for Hillary, and this fact is terrifying Republicans to death.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
