OPINION:
Hillary and Bill Clinton have pulled in so much money through speeches since January 2014 that their income is more than 99.9 percent of all Americans.
In fact, the couple that says they left the White House “dead broke” made nearly as much as the NFL’s top quarterback, Tom Brady ($31M) and a good bit more than Mitt and Ann Romney ($21.7M).
But the Clintons’ income — as most things Clinton — is incomplete, since it omits speeches delivered in which the payment went to the Clinton Foundation, a “charity.”
What’s more, as Byron York, chief political correspondent at the Washington Examiner noted, Hillary earned so much in one single day of speeches that she jumped into the top 1 percent of American incomes for the entire year!
The cash poured in after Hillary left the State Department. She delivered 51 speeches and banked nearly $12 million (a whopping $230,000 average per speech). Husband Bill gave 53 speeches and pulled in the other $13 million.
Bill’s speeches are beginning to draw more attention as it is revealed that he started making a lot more money once Hillary became Secretary of State — and then dropped off swiftly after she left the influential government post.
For each of the four years Hillary served, Bill made more than $5 million in foreign speeches. But in 2014, after she left office, Bill netted just $2.2 million from international speeches. All told, Bill gave more than 215 speeches during his wife’s time in office, earning nearly $50 million.
He delivered speeches in Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Panama, and India, among others.
Not surprisingly, the tech industry and so-called “green” companies put up most of the cash for domestic speeches.
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