Fox Correspondent Debunks Colleagues On Clinton Foundation Charitable Spending

Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn debunked his Fox colleagues' earlier criticism that the Clinton Foundation spent just 10 percent of its budget on charitable activities in 2013, calling these claims “incredibly misleading” because the non-profit carries out its humanitarian programs in-house.

On the May 6 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Shawn addressed accusations of misconduct based on flawed analyses of the Clinton Foundation's expenditures.

When asked by host Bill O'Reilly about the “accusation ... that there only 10 percent of the money raised -- and it's $2 billion -- goes to grants out to poor people or institutions,” Shawn responded, “That sounds really bad but it's actually incredibly misleading.” Shawn went on to explain that “the way the charity works, they don't give grants to other charities -- they do most of it themselves.” According to IRS filings, Shawn said, the Clinton Foundation's charitable spending is around 80 percent, and “the experts for charity say that's very good.”

In a response to these accusations, the Clinton Foundation told PunditFact that it and the related Clinton Health Access Initiative combine to spend 88 percent of their expenditures on what the Foundation describes as “life-changing work.”

Shawn's fellow Fox contributors and hosts have cited this misleading figure as evidence of malfeasance on the part of the Clinton Foundation. On the May 4 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Fox contributor Mary Katharine Ham echoed O'Reilly's call for the FBI to investigate the Clinton Foundation's activities, saying that their purportedly low charitable spending rates “raised red flags -- like real red flags -- for the IRS,” calling into question the foundation's designation as a charity. On the May 4 edition of Fox's The Five, host Eric Bolling incorrectly said that, “only 10 cents on the dollar went to charitable uses, causes.” Co-host Juan Williams responded, “I just find that incredible. That strikes me as, I don't unders[tand] -- how is that legal?”