An upstate New York developer donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton’s foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman’s mall project.
Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel Center in Syracuse.
Mrs. Clinton also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction.
The bill with the tax-free bonds provision became law in October 2004, weeks before the donation, and the highway bill with the set-aside became law in August 2005, about nine months after the donation.
Mr. Congel and Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, both said there was no connection between his donation and her legislative work on his project’s behalf.
Mrs. Clinton supported the expansion of Carousel mall “purely as part of her unwavering commitment to improving upstate New York’s struggling economy, and nothing more,” Mr. Reines said.
Ethics flashpoint
Mr. Clinton set up his foundation as he was leaving the White House and as his wife was transforming herself from first lady to United States senator from New York. The William J. Clinton Foundation finances Mr. Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., as well as programs that work on AIDS, poverty, climate change and other causes worldwide.
Donations to charities favored by lawmakers have been a recent ethics flashpoint in Congress, including the controversy over Representative Charles B. Rangel’s fund-raising from businesses with interests before the House Ways and Means Committee, which he leads, for a center named after him at the City College of New York. In 2007, Congress enacted a law requiring companies and their lobbyists to disclose donations to charities associated with lawmakers.
But there is no law requiring former presidents to disclose money they collect for their foundations.
Mr. Clinton’s foundation last month revealed the identity of its donors as part of an agreement with President-elect Barack Obama, who selected Mrs. Clinton as his nominee for secretary of state.
Force for 'green bonds'
Most of the attention on the disclosure list has focused on millions of dollars donated by foreign tycoons and Middle Eastern governments, like Saudi Arabia, which have an interest in the United States foreign policy that Mrs. Clinton would direct as the nation’s chief diplomat.
But lower on the list was Mr. Congel’s name, one of about 180 people who had donated $50,000 to $100,000. A Destiny USA spokesman said Mr. Congel made a $100,000 donation in November 2004.
“There was no connection with Bill Clinton and the ‘green bonds’ and the contribution,” Mr. Congel said in an interview. “None at all.”
Mr. Congel had been a prime force behind Congress’s passage of tax-exempt “green bonds,” a program to lower the financing costs of some $2 billion in environmentally friendly projects by exempting lenders from paying federal taxes on their income from the private bonds. By some estimates, the program could cost the Treasury about $200 million.
The way the legislation was written, Mr. Congel’s Syracuse development, which he agreed to build and run in a way that promotes renewable energy and recycling, was one of just four proposed projects that would qualify.
His contribution is the only known situation so far in which an American donor gave a large sum to Mr. Clinton’s foundation while benefiting from his wife’s official actions. Mr. Reines said that Mrs. Clinton did not solicit the donation from Mr. Congel nor discuss it with him or anyone on his behalf, and she was unaware of its timing and size until last month.
Mrs. Clinton, who as a Senate candidate in 2000 supported other tax breaks for a Carousel mall expansion to create jobs, did not work alone in getting the subsidies through Congress. The measures had other supporters in the New York delegation, including Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, and James T. Walsh, Syracuse’s Republican representative at the time.
And the “green bonds” were backed by lawmakers from three other states with projects that would qualify for it.
'Big shot in the arm'
Still, Mrs. Clinton threw her weight behind the legislation. In April 2006, she took partial credit for enacting the program in an interview with The Syracuse Post-Standard.
“I’ve been a big supporter of Destiny,” Mrs. Clinton told the newspaper. “I worked successfully to get the green bonds passed. I think it would be a big shot in the arm. It would be a destination site for the area.”
And in July 2005, when the highway bill cleared the Senate, Mrs. Clinton’s office put out a press release announcing the “$5 million that Senators Schumer and Clinton secured” for Destiny-related “design, research, construction and improvements.”
Although Mr. Congel has sometimes given money to Democrats, he is a major Republican campaign fund-raiser. In 2004, he was a “Bush Ranger,” gathering more than $200,000 in bundled contributions for the Bush-Cheney re-election effort.
In the most recent election cycle, he donated money to the Republican National Committee and to the Republican presidential primary campaigns of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Fred D. Thompson and Mitt Romney.
But Mr. Congel said there was nothing incongruous about his donation to Mr. Clinton’s foundation. “I have a huge interest in our country, and I thought Clinton was a great president,” Mr. Congel said. He added, “I think he’s a dedicated, dedicated American, and I’m a dedicated, dedicated American, and when we have a president I think we have a right, privilege and obligation to support that president. And I did that with Clinton, and I did that with Bush.”
Mr. Congel also said he wanted to get to know Mr. Clinton because he was thinking of setting up his own foundation, devoted to environmental causes, and wanted the former president’s advice. Mr. Congel said he had not yet set up such a foundation, though a Destiny USA spokesman later added that Mr. Congel had attended several Clinton Global Initiative events.
Campaign donations
Mr. Congel has also given campaign donations to Mrs. Clinton and other New York Democrats, including Mr. Schumer.
According to the Federal Election Commission Web site, Mr. Congel gave $2,000 to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in October 1999 and gave her political action committee a total of $12,500 from March 2002 to January 2005. He has continued to donate to Mrs. Clinton’s campaigns in the years since the two bills helping Destiny USA passed.
Mr. Congel’s campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer were the subject of media reports around the time that the “green bonds” measure passed. But his $100,000 donation to Mr. Clinton’s foundation in November 2004 was not known at the time.
Keith Ashdown, the chief investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group, said the money illustrated why donations to presidential foundations should be disclosed.
The Destiny USA project has attracted criticism. Stephanie Miner, a member of the Syracuse City Council, called it a “boondoggle” that won tax breaks with dubious economic and environmental promises.
But a Destiny USA spokesman said the savings from the tax-exempt bonds is paying for extra “green” elements — like recycled construction materials, solar power panels and an efficient climate control system — whose cost a lender normally would not have approved.
This article, , was first published in The New York Times.