Is the Clinton Foundation Corrupt? There’s a Way to Find Out For Anyone Who’s Seriously Interested.

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Did corporations and foreign governments make donations to the Clinton Foundation as a way of cozying up to Hillary Clinton? Cherry picking the few occasions when they did so within a few months of some action by Hillary won’t tell us anything. There’s too little signal and too much noise. But there’s a way to attack this question. Since 2000, Hillary Clinton has had five phases in her career:

2001-06: Senator from New York
2007-08: Candidate for president with good chance of winning.
2009-12: Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
2013-14: Retired, giving speeches, no one knew what she would do next.
2015-16: Candidate for president with excellent chance of winning.

So here’s what someone needs to do: Take a look at donations to the Clinton Foundation and see if they seem to align with these career phases. For example, you’d expect foreign governments to be uninterested in gaining favors from Hillary while she was a New York senator, but very interested while she was Secretary of State. Conversely, you might expect, say, the financial industry to be generous while she was a New York senator but not so much while she was Secretary of State. During the periods when she was running for president, you’d expect activity to pick up from everybody, and during 2013-14 you’d expect interest to decline across the board.

You can probably think of other trends you’d expect to see if donations to the Clinton Foundation were widely viewed as a way of getting better access to Hillary. So what you need to do is write down these expectations first, and then crunch the data to see if the evidence supports your hypothesis.

This would be a lot of work. But if you really, truly think the Foundation was basically just a way of buying access to Hillary Clinton, this is a way of getting past anecdotes and looking for real trends. Is anyone willing to do this?

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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