Obama administration officials ducked questions Wednesday about a report in The Washington Times detailing the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising operation in Sweden at a time when the Swedish government was lobbying Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department to forgo sanctions against companies doing business with Iran.
Both White House press secretary Josh Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Wednesday that they had not seen the front-page report in The Times. That prompted Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to send them copies of the article.
“I heard that you had not seen the excellent article by John Solomon and Kelly Riddell in today’s Washington Times,” Mr. Priebus told the White House spokesman in a letter. “It is certainly a must-read, so enclosed is a copy of today’s paper featuring their front-page story about another massive conflict of interest at the Clinton State Department involving foreign donors.”
The GOP chairman said it was “alarming that the White House would plead ignorance about a report revealing that $26 million flowed into the Clinton Foundation from Swedish donors as the country’s government was lobbying Clinton’s State Department to remove sanctions on Iran.”
“These startling revelations demand answers, not more stonewalling from the self-proclaimed ’most transparent administration in history,’” Mr. Priebus wrote. “It is our hope that the White House will not duck its responsibility to the public to hold members of the administration accountable for their conduct.”
The article said the foundation’s fundraising arm in Sweden was never disclosed to State Department ethics officials, even though one of its largest sources of donations was a Swedish government-sanctioned lottery.
The report also detailed how, as money flowed to the foundation from Sweden, Mrs. Clinton’s team in Washington declined to blacklist any Swedish firms despite warnings from career officials at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm that Sweden was boosting economic ties with Iran and potentially undercutting Western efforts to end Tehran’s rogue nuclear program.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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