So who's really lying here? They overpaid $86,000.00? I don't see that anywhere. Oh well we can also debate what "is" is when it refers to clintons.
"The president must report gifts over a certain value; during most of the Clinton years, the amount was $250, though today it is $350. When Bill Clinton completed his term, he submitted a final disclosure form that listed roughly $190,000 in gifts.
Clinton’s itemized list caught the eye of the
Washington Post and provided plenty of fodder for the curious. People gave the president a notable quantityof golf clubs. Movie star Sylvester Stallone gave him a pair of boxing gloves. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg sent him china. And one Steve Mittman from New York gave him two sofas, an easy chair and ottoman worth $19,900.
The problem was, Mittman and a few others included on the list said they never intended their gifts to go to the Clintons. They thought they were donating to the White House itself as part a major remodeling project in 1993.
This is where the questions of provenance get muddy. Some gifts are intended for the government, and must stay in the government’s hands, while some are intended for the person living in the White House. But it’s not always as simple as "this is mine" and "that is Uncle Sam’s."
Within about two weeks of the publication of the
Post article, public criticism escalated, and the Clintons announced that they would
pay the government nearly $86,000 for items that were actuallygovernment property. A few days after that, they also returned about $48,000 worth of furniture (including the sofas, chair and ottoman from Mittman).
Add that up and the government got back $134,000 out of the $190,000 the Clinton’s had declared as gifts. But as an indication of how hard it is to determine ownership, the National Park Service, which oversees the White House property, later returned a chair and an ottoman to the Clintons.
The House investigates
The
House Committee on Government Reform looked into the fracas over the Clintons’ gifts. While its report never accused the former first family of criminal wrongdoing, it noted shortcomings in how gifts were processed, saying there was no independent assessment of gifts and that some had likely been undervalued.
For example, lawmakers were skeptical of the estimated value of $240 for a John Quincy Adams-signed original land grant from 1826. There was also a large Coach leather travel bag, which the White House estimated at $200 but which investigators found priced at $498 to $698, and a Tiffany necklace valued at $150 but that Tiffany's valued at $450 to $1,000.
There were instances of a twisted paper trail in which the National Park Service thanked donors for certain items but never formally added them to the permanent White House collection, which meant the Clintons could take them for themselves or for the Clinton Library.
The committee found that giving things to the White House and its occupants was governed by several laws and six federal offices and agencies. Its overall conclusion was that the systemwas too complicated and left the government vulnerable. "Since the current system is subject to abuse and political interference, there is a need for centralized accountability in one agency staffed by career employees," it said.
Among the aspects of the case that lawmakers found troubling was the apparent violation of the ban on soliciting gifts. It’s fine under the law to accept someone’s generosity, but you can’t tell them what you want. This came up in regards to a portion of the goods the Clintons kept -- about $38,000 worth of goods given to Hillary Clinton in December 2000. That was after she won her Senate race in New York, but before she took office, at which point accepting such gifts would have violated Senate rules. Clinton had created a gift registry at Borsheim’s Fine Jewelry and Gifts. This yielded 16 rimmed soup bowls worth $2,352 and a soup tureen worth $1,365, among other items.
Even before the registry episode, the White House had retainedan interior decorator who, according to the report, coordinated 43 of the 45 furniture gifts received over the Clintons’ eight years.
Kathleen Clark focuses on government ethics law at Washington University in St. Louis. For her, that interior decorator raised a flag. "I don’t know how you coordinate gifts without soliciting them," Clark said.
Ultimately, the first family retained 227 of 14,770 gifts given over the eight years."
