Yo, politicians: It's time to get out of the charity business

This is a story about Bill and Hillary Clinton and corruption. Got your attention? Good. Because it's also a story about corruption and the Philadelphia D.A. Seth Williams. And also Donald Trump and Rep. Corrine Brown and Colin Powell and Kenyatta Johnson and Rick Santorum, among others.

And here's the tricky part: It's a story about corruption ... and charity, that magical word that carries its own halo and a pair of wings, guaranteed to make any suggestion of impropriety look utterly silly.

Maybe that's exactly why any ambitious elected official or diplomat with half a brain is in the charity business these days. This all started a couple of decades ago when politicians were looking for new ways to build their brand by associating themselves with good deeds, and to do so by offering the only two things a politician typically brings to the table: Influence and access to power.

Consider Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania GOP senator and presidential candidate. Around the time that the 2000 Republican National Convention came to Philadelphia, Santorum came up with the idea for an affiliated charity called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation that would show he was -- like that year's GOP nominee -- a "compassionate conservative." The influential senator from the then-majority party in Congress reeled in hundreds of thousands from large corporations and from some of the same Pennsylvania power brokers who also supported his Senate campaigns. The Operation Good Neighbor Foundation then awarded grants to community groups across the state.

Good stuff, right? Sometimes. But there were also serious problems, as I learned when I looked into the foundation in 2006 -- and not just that the Santorum-linked charity had failed to register with the state, as required by law. Less than 36 percent of the money raised by the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation went to programs -- the bulk went for expenses like renting office space from Santorum's Senate campaign finance director, who was also on the charity's payroll, as was the chief fundraiser for the campaign. It was hard to tell where the charity started and where the politics ended.

But the Santorum-tied charity wasn't the only politically tinged philanthropy to have problems, nor were its problems the worst. Just this summer, longtime U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, a Florida Democrat, and her chief of staff were indicted on federal charges of creating what prosecutors have called a fraudulent charity that was really a slush fund that used Brown's influence to raise $800,000, almost none of it going to worthy causes.

Trump's charitable arm, it recently came out, illegally made a $25,000 campaign contribution to Florida attorney general Pam Biondi at roughly the same time that Biondi's office declined to investigate claims from Florida citizens they'd been ripped off by Trump University, arguably the scammiest enterprise ever run become someone with a serious shot at becoming the president of the United States.

Even politicians with almost saintly reputations can be tripped up by the charity business. Ask Colin Powell, who launched a foundation called America's Promise in the late 1990s, after his stint as head of the military's joint chiefs. It was first accused of inflating its results and later -- when Powell returned to public life as George W. Bush's secretary of state -- Powell even went to bat for one of the foundation's biggest donors, the soon-to-be-disgraced Enron Corp.

What about politicians here in Philadelphia -- most of whom don't have saintly reputations? A charity founded by D.A. Seth Williams called the Second Chance Foundation is considering disbanding after the FBI asked for its records. (Maybe if he's cleared he can launch the Third Chance Foundation.) A couple of years ago, City Council member Kenyatta Johnson was forced to admit that his group called Peace Not Guns wasn't a  a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization despite advertising itself as such -- after it had raised at least $10,000, donors unknown.

These may be some of the worst cases, but I think the big picture is clear. Most of these politically-flavored charities do at least some good works, handing out some scholarships or grants to community groups. But they also often serve as a financial support network for a politician's aides and associates. And the money they raise -- whether spent for good or not-so-good -- all stems from the same thing: The politician is getting donations because he or she has influence. And large donors get special access to these politicians that an average citizen probably doesn't have. You could call this...influence peddling. And influence peddling doesn't sound so good -- even when you wrap a white cloak of philanthropy around it.

That brings us to the Clinton Foundation controversy -- which epitomizes some of the good things and definitely many of the bad things that happen when the worlds of philanthropy and political influence collide. On the good side, the foundation that Bill Clinton and his family -- including his wife, our possible next president -- started ramping up as his 42nd presidency was winding down gets high ratings from the well-regarded groups like Charity Watch that evaluate philanthropies. The Clinton Foundation raises millions -- and most of the money goes towards its charitable endeavors. (Are those endeavors actually effective? That's a matter of some controversy, which we won't get bogged down in, for now.)

But much like Rick Santorum's charity, the lines between the Clinton Foundation entities and the Clintons' political machine are more blurred than a pre-kindergarten coloring book. Bill Clinton's chief post-political aid, Douglas Band, was running the foundation at the same time he was launching a for-profit consulting firm called Teneo that was doing business with some of the charity's bigger donors. The one-time chief fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation, Dennis Cheng, is now the chief fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's closest aide, was at one time was working part-time for the charitable foundation, for Teneo, for Clinton's personal staff -- and for the State Department, when Clinton was the nation's chief diplomat. That's a highly unusual arrangement.

To describe it, um, charitably.

Many of the Clinton Foundation high-rolling donors wanted access to an ex-president and a possible future president -- and possibly more than access. Some wanted favors as mundane as an invitation to a state dinner or luncheon, while others wanted the Obama administration to OK their uranium deal or boost their arms shipments. Even in an era of a dumbed-down definition of corruption, this appearance of a conflict is an ugly look.

Here's the thing. All of this would actually make sense....in a world in which the world's prosperous people had absolutely no other means to funnel some of their riches to the planet's most worthy causes, other than laundering the cash through some politician's 501 (C)3 and burnishing that elected official's image as a selfless do-gooder. Imagine such a world, which would have no American Cancer Society, or Oxfam International, or Red Cross Disaster Fund, or ... I think you get the picture.

Maybe the best story I've read about the Clinton Foundation didn't get very much attention. Greg Gordon of McClatchy News Service looked closely at four oil-rich kingdoms and found while they'd donated as much as $40 million to the Clinton Foundation, they'd donated no money at all to six better-known, well-established charities doing the same work (and less than $7 million to a seventh, the International Committee of the Red Cross. It's almost as if these oil oligarchies cared more about currying favor with U.S. bigwigs than about the needy of the planet.

When a politician-linked charity creates the appearance of such conflicts at best, and at worst becomes an outright repository for patronage and fraud, then why do they even exist? Very few, if any of them, do work that isn't already being done by other non-profits. We need to start telling our politicians that the charity world is happy for their support -- but not in this fashion. That's a nice way of saying, get out!

We have strict laws about what elected officials and top governmental officials can and can't do while they hold office, and some activities such as lobbying are proscribed even for a period of time after they leave. I don't think it would be unreasonable to pass a law banning such officials from founding, serving as a director or lending his or her name to a fundraising charity at least while he or she is in government service. There are many other things that politicians can do to encourage giving -- using their high profile to ask people to donate to groups like the Red Cross after a natural disaster, for example. Or here's a wacky notion: Promote policies that would attack income inequality or lack of health care, which is technically their day job, I believe, and which might even reduce the need for so much charity.

Banning public officials from having a charity might have been a crazy idea 20 years ago. But now we know the track record of politicians and charities -- and the track record is not great. I realize some people (especially certain fanatical Hillary Clinton defenders) will read this and freak out and say "can you believe a guy actually wrote a column against charity?" But this is not a column against charity. Philanthropy is wonderful. This is a column against influence peddling. It's time to yank off the white cloak.