A donor’s gift soon followed Clinton’s help

By Charlie Savage

updated 9:05 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2009

WASHINGTON - 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.

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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.

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