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Clintons Earned $30 Million From Paid Speeches And Book Sales

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries conference on April 10, 2014 in Las Vegas. According to the Clintons' financial disclosure, she received an honorarium of $225,000 for that event.
Isaac Brekken / Getty Images
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries conference on April 10, 2014 in Las Vegas. According to the Clintons' financial disclosure, she received an honorarium of $225,000 for that event.

It’s widely known the Clintons have done well for themselves in recent years, but until now, it wasn’t clear just how well. Today, the campaign filed a financial disclosure report revealing they earned $30 million in just the last seventeen months.

The report is not yet posted on the Federal Elections Commission website, but the campaign voluntarily released it to reporters. It covers the period from January 2014 to present.

In that time the former president and former secretary of state earned just over $25 million from about 100 paid speeches. That works out to about $250,000 per speech. Not bad work, if you can get it, which they can.

The report also reveals just who paid for all those speeches.

Another $5 million came from Simon and Schuster, the publisher of Hillary Clinton’s book Hard Choices.

This income puts them in the upper echelons of the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States. An income of $430,000 puts you in the top 1 percent.

The Republican National Committee has already responded to the disclosure. Chairman Reince Priebus said “The Clintons’ claim that staggering amounts of income from paid speaking fees that raise ethical questions and potential conflicts of interest is simply to ‘pay our bills’ shows how out-of-touch they’ve truly become.”

While promoting the book, Clinton told ABC’s Diane Sawyer when she and her husband moved out of the White House, they were “not only dead broke, but in debt.” She later said she regretted those comments.

And in a recent Today show interview, Bill Clinton responded to a question about his highly-paid speeches saying, “I gotta pay our bills. And I also give a lot of it to the foundation every year.”

According to a campaign official, because most of the Clintons income is held in cash, they didn’t pay capital gains taxes. The campaign estimates their effective tax rate in 2014 was 30 percent, which is above the average for those in their income group.

Income and taxes became a campaign issue in 2012, when Mitt Romney released tax returns showing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010, lower than the tax burden of many middle class Americans.

Some Of Hillary Clinton’s Honoraria

GE $225,500

National Automobile Dealers Association $225,500

Novo Nordisk $125,000

California Medical Association (via satellite) $100,000

tinePublic Inc $225,000

Xerox Corporation $225,000

Institute of Scrap Metal Recycling Industries $225,000

United Fresh Produce Association $225,000

tinePublic Inc $150,000

tinePublic Inc $100,000

Biotechnology Industry Organization $335,000

GTCR $780,000

Knewton Inc $225,000

Ameriprise $225,500

Corning Incorporated $225,500

Cisco $325,000

Cardiovascular Research Foundation $275,000

Canada 2020 $275,000

Qualcomm Incorporated $335,000

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce $150,000

Watermark’s Silicon Valley Conference for Women $225,500

eBay Inc $315,000

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. utm

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. In that time, she has chronicled the final years of the Obama administration, covered Hillary Clinton's failed bid for president from start to finish and thrown herself into documenting the Trump administration, from policy made by tweet to the president's COVID diagnosis and the insurrection. In the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration, she focused her reporting on the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association and is the association's president through July 15, 2023. In that role she leads the press corps in its interactions with the White House, advocating for press conferences and coordinating travel. Her mission for the year of her presidency is to demystify the White House beat for the public, in an effort to help restore trust in the press, an essential pillar of American democracy.

Previously Keith covered congress for NPR with an emphasis on House Republicans, the budget, taxes and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time.

Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world, from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake, and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived of and reported "The Road Back To Work," a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.

Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member station KQED's California Report, where she covered agriculture, the environment, economic issues and state politics. She covered the 2004 presidential election for NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and opened the state capital bureau for NPR Member station KPCC to cover then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited and distributed for nine years, back before podcasts were cool.

Keith earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game. She serves on advisory boards for the University of California Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and the UC Berkeley J-School.

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