Bill Clinton Defends Accepting Foreign Funds for Foundation

The Clinton Foundation's transparency has recently been questioned due to the acceptance of tens of millions of dollars as foreign donations. The foundation has not published a complete list of foreign donations since 2010.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Bill Clinton said in an interview with the channel NBC on Monday that he had not done anything wrong by accepting foreign donations for the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Foundation has recently been at the center of controversy concerning the acceptance of donation from abroad. It received between $10 million and $25 million from Saudi Arabia while the foundation was open to donations from many foreign states.

"I don't think that I did anything that was against the interests of the United States," Clinton said.

Now the foundation will only accept donations from six Western countries, namely Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. However, this move does not mean, according to the former president, that it was a mistake not to stop the other foreign donations before Hillary Clinton ran for president.

He said there had been a very deliberate attempt to take the foundation down, and pointed out that almost no new facts have emerged that were not known when Hillary Clinton ran for president for the first time.

The foundation and its founding member Hillary Clinton have recently been criticized for a lack of transparency and for not declaring the receipt of tens of millions of dollars in foreign funds, in light of the launch of her 2016 presidential campaign.

On April 12, Clinton announced her bid to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, simultaneously announcing that she was stepping down from the board of the Clinton Foundation. The charity continues to come in for criticism over accepting foreign donations, a complete list of which has not been published since 2010.