In December, the board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation approved a salary of more than $395,000, plus bonus, for its Yale-educated CEO, Eric Braverman, while voting to extend his board term through 2017, according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Braverman, who had worked with Chelsea Clinton at the prestigious McKinsey & Company consultancy, had been brought in with the former first daughter’s support to help impose McKinsey-like management rigor to a foundation that had grown into a $2 billion charitable powerhouse.
But in January, only weeks after the board's show of support and just a year and a half after Braverman arrived, he abruptly resigned, and sources tell Politico his exit stemmed partly from a power struggle inside the foundation between and among the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades and who helped start and run the foundation. Some, including the president’s old Arkansas lawyer Bruce Lindsey, who preceded Braverman as CEO, raised concerns directly to Bill Clinton about the reforms implemented by Braverman, according to sources, and felt themselves marginalized by the growing influence of Chelsea Clinton and the new CEO she had helped recruit.
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The previously untold saga of Braverman’s brief, and occasionally fraught tenure trying to navigate the Clintons’ insular world highlights the challenges the family has faced trying to impose rigorous oversight onto a vast global foundation that relies on some of the same loyal megadonors Hillary Clinton will need for the presidential run sources have said she is all but certain to launch later this year.
Already, a spate of recent news stories in Politico and elsewhere have highlighted questions about the foundation’s aggressive fundraising both before and during Braverman’s tenure, including the news that the foundation had been accepting contributions from foreign governments with lax oversight from the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. The foundation has been Clinton’s main public platform since she left State in February 2013.
The hiring a few months later of Braverman, who had been a partner in McKinsey’s Washington office, was seen as validation of Chelsea Clinton’s view that the foundation needed to address recommendations from a 2011 audit for tighter governance and budgeting, as well as more comprehensive policies to vet donors and avoid conflicts of interest.
When Braverman arrived to replace Lindsey as CEO, he moved quickly to adopt the auditor’s recommendations, and then some. He diversified the foundation’s board beyond the Clintons and their longtime political allies and restructured its finance department. He oversaw the creation of a $250 million endowment and implemented data-driven analytics to measure the effectiveness of foundation programs.
No public explanation was offered for Braverman’s resignation.
But sources say Braverman’s modernization efforts were hampered by the occasionally conflicting visions of the three Clintons, and their rival staff factions. Some told Braverman, “You don’t know how this place works,” while others—including Lindsey—second-guessed Braverman to Bill Clinton, according to sources familiar with the situation. They said a repeated refrain from the old guard was that Braverman was in it for his own glory.
Braverman referred requests for comment to the foundation.
Asked if Braverman was pushed out, foundation officials pointed to an official resignation statement, in which Braverman thanked the foundation and the Clintons praised his leadership in helping “improve our governance structure, increase coordination across the Foundation and build better internal processes.”
The foundation announced that, while it was looking for a permanent successor, longtime Clinton loyalist Maura Pally would serve as acting CEO. Other than a stint at Bloomberg Philanthropies (which has donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation’s efforts), Pally had spent most of her professional life working for the Clintons, from Bill Clinton’s White House to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and subsequent State Department term.
This account of Braverman’s foundation tenure is based on interviews with about a dozen current and former Clinton Foundation staffers, Braverman associates, donors and Clinton allies, most of whom cited the coming presidential race in declining to be identified.
At left, Eric Braverman. At right, Bill Clinton with Bruce Lindsey, the former president's old Arkansas lawyer, who sources say complicated reforms pushed by Eric Braverman and Chelsea Clinton. | Left: Moshe Zusman Photography Studio; right: Getty Images
Most praised Braverman and said he accomplished much of what he set out to do, leaving the foundation in a strong position headed into 2016. And some dismissed recent scrutiny of the foundation’s fundraising and management as a function of the news media’s “total obsession” with the Clintons, in the words of Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative media outlet Newsmax, which last year pledged $1 million to the foundation. A longtime participant in the foundation-backed Clinton Global Initiative, Ruddy said, “I don’t see that the ongoing work of the foundation will be undermined in any way by any leadership changes that have taken place.”
But some family allies think Braverman’s experience offers lessons that could help Hillary Clinton as she chooses from the scores of operatives jockeying to work for a 2016 campaign. “This is the story of their lives. They’ve always been torn between the super, super loyalists who are protecting them and the extremely competent people who don’t owe their whole careers to them,” said one former Clinton aide. “They need to try to strike that balance. And her campaign, at least so far, seems to be bringing in competent people who haven’t all come from that world.”
In many ways, what played out over the past two years at the foundation was the story of Chelsea Clinton’s rise. Her power now at the foundation cannot be overstated, according to sources with knowledge of its workings, who say no major decisions occur without her input. Now 35 and with the official title of vice chair at the foundation, Chelsea Clinton is expected to be a key adviser to her mother in the presidential campaign.
“I’ve often joked that she would be the ultimate campaign manager,” said a longtime Clinton operative, who said that the foundation was an ideal place for Chelsea Clinton “to come sit at the adult table. And Chelsea is unique in that she was always at the adult table, but now she can participate.”
Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said, "Chelsea has a tremendous positive influence on the foundation, and we’re thrilled to have it. Publicly, she’s been an incredibly strong and effective advocate for the foundation and its programs. Internally, she’s done everything she can to improve the way the foundation operates and make sure it’s in the best possible position to continue helping people around the world.”
But Chelsea Clinton’s rise at times has seemed to threaten some veteran Clinton aides who had carved out influential—and lucrative—positions after long service with her parents. She is blamed in some quarters for marginalizing both Lindsey and Doug Band, who rose from the president’s body man to build and help run the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative. A third Clinton veteran, Ira Magaziner, saw his portfolio at the foundation diminished during Braverman’s tenure, and sources say Magaziner’s role remains under scrutiny.
Magaziner, who was a Rhodes scholar with Bill Clinton in the late 1960s and spearheaded Hillary Clinton’s botched health care reform push in the 1990s, was paid $415,000 in foundation salary and consulting fees in 2013 to help run two programs, the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Magaziner left the climate project late last year after Braverman brought in new leadership, but he remains CEO of the health initiative. The health group’s board—which includes Magaziner—at the end of last year voted unanimously to initiate an internal governance review by the New York law firm Simpson Thacher, according to foundation officials.