Bill and Hillary Clinton used a legal loophole to avoid reporting some of their income on financial statements. The latest financial report does not include mention of a shell company “with no apparent employees or assets that the former president has legally used to provide consulting and other services.”
The company, WJC, LLC (WJC is the initials of William Jefferson Clinton), has no financial assets and no employees. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was not obligated to report its existence, officials with Bill Clinton’s private office and the Clinton campaign told the Associated Press.
Those officials told the AP that the WJC was a “pass-through” company designed to channel payments to the former president.
While Bill Clinton’s lucrative speeches have provided the bulk of the couple’s income, earning as much as $50 million during his wife’s four-year term as secretary of state in the Obama administration, the former president has also sought to branch out into other business activities in recent years. Little is known about the exact nature and financial worth of Bill Clinton’s non-speech business interests.
The identities of several U.S and foreign-based companies and foundations that Bill Clinton worked for have been disclosed in Hillary Clinton’s recent financial report as well as in earlier reports during her stint as secretary of state.
Under federal disclosure rules for spouses’ earned income, Hillary Clinton was only obligated to identify the source of her spouse’s income and confirm that he received more than $1,000. As a result, the precise amounts of Bill Clinton’s earned income from consulting have not been disclosed, and it’s not known how much was routed through WJC, LLC.
WJC, LLC was set up in Delaware in 2008 and again in 2013 and in New York in 2009, according to documents obtained by The AP. The company did not appear among holdings in the Clintons’ financial disclosure released last week or in previous Hillary Clinton disclosure reports between 2008 and 2013, when she resigned as secretary of state. Bill Clinton signed a document as its “authorizing person” in a corporate filing in Delaware in 2013.
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The purpose of Bill Clinton’s U.S.-based company was not disclosed in any of the corporate filings in Delaware and New York, but State Department files recently reviewed by the AP show that WJC, LLC surfaced in emails from Bill Clinton’s aides to the department’s ethics officials.
In February 2009, Clinton’s counselor, Douglas Band, asked State Department ethics officials to clear Bill Clinton’s consulting work for three companies owned by influential Democratic party donors. Memos sent by Band proposed that Bill Clinton would provide “consulting services regarding geopolitical, economic and social trends affecting the entity and philanthropic opportunities” through the WJC, LLC entity.
It’s unclear how much money was routed through the company and into the former president’s pockets or what speeches or consulting work was directed that way, though the Associated Press found mentions of the company in emails between his aides and State Department officials in which they sought approval for him to consult for companies of a trio of major Democratic donors.
None of the proposals detailed how much Bill Clinton would be paid.
While Hillary Clinton’s 2011 federal disclosure report did not mention WJC, LLC, it reported that Bill Clinton received “non-employee compensation over $1,000 from Teneo,” but did not disclose a more precise amount. Federal disclosure rules require the spouses of filers to disclose the identity of any income sources over $1,000, but they do not have to provide exact figures.
Don’t be surprised if the media don’t pay the same attention to the Clinton shell company as they did to improprieties committed by Romney, which became an issue in 2012:
Republican candidate Mitt Romney disclosed a private equity entity worth $1.9 million despite failing to report the company on his previous federal disclosure. Romney aides said the company previously held no assets but then received the $1.9 million “true up” payment — a catch-up payment to make up for private equity fees from defunct investment advisory businesses that had not been previously paid.
While this process and shell company are technically legal, both should inspire questions about what else the Clintons are hiding? Was it simply not wanting to seem too wealthy and out of touch — phrases the Democrats applied liberally to candidate Mitt Romney? Or are they hiding something even more nefarious? It’s hard to say because like so much else surrounding the Clintons, it’s a secret.
