The Associated Press suggested it was unethical for then-first lady Hillary Clinton to push for tax breaks for those who donated to nonprofit organizations while the William J. Clinton Foundation was soliciting donations for the Clinton administration's presidential library -- but its own article later undermined those claims, outlining how the proposed measure had been building momentum since 1997, three years prior to the alleged conflict of interest. In fact, as the AP admitted, the proposal in question would provide no “direct” benefit to the foundation. 

Hillary Clinton endorsed a plan proposed by the Clinton administration to provide tax breaks to “private foundations and wealthy charity donors” while she was first lady, according to a May 22 report from the AP:

As first lady in the final year of the Clinton administration, Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed a White House plan to give tax breaks to private foundations and wealthy charity donors at the same time the William J. Clinton Foundation was soliciting donations for her husband's presidential library, recently released Clinton-era documents show.

The AP suggested that the “blurred lines between the tax reductions proposed by the Clinton administration in 2000 and the Clinton Library's fundraising were an early foreshadowing of the potential ethics concerns that have flared around the Clintons' courting of corporate and foreign donors for their family charity before she launched her campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.”

But the AP's own article went on to undermine its allegations of a conflict of interest that “blurred the lines” between the proposed tax reductions and donations to the Clintons' nonprofit. As a spokesperson for Bill Clinton's office explained, the “administration was not trying to incentivize giving to the foundation, but instead was spurred by a 1997 presidential humanities committee that urged tax breaks for charities to aid American cultural institutions,” meaning that the proposal was born from a committee three years prior to the timeline the article used to suggest a conflict of interest.

As The New York Times wrote at the time, the nonpartisan committee had made the recommendations because “cuts in public, private and corporate spending on the arts and humanities [were] undermining cultural and educational institutions in the United States.” Funding from donations to nonprofits accounted for “90 percent of the nation's cultural financing,” and the proposed tax measures would have helped fund cultural institutions that the federal budget would no longer be able to support.

And as the AP's report later explained, quoting former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, Gene Sperling, not only were the nonprofit tax reductions "'developed at the Treasury Department, endorsed by experts and designed to encourage all forms of charitable giving'" but the foundation also “would not have benefited directly by the tax proposals” at all, and any indirect benefits would also have helped “many other U.S. charities.”