Hillary Clinton’s Financial Disclosure Shows Millions in Book Royalties and for Speeches

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/us/politics/hillary-clinton-money.html

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Hillary Clinton earned more than $5 million in royalties for her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” and roughly $1.5 million delivering speeches last year, according to a personal financial disclosure her campaign released Tuesday evening.

The disclosure came hours after the leading Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, said he had filed his personal financial disclosure with the Federal Election Commission, as required by law for presidential candidates.

“I filed my P.F.D., which I am proud to say is the largest in the history of the F.E.C.,” Mr. Trump said in a statement Tuesday.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign used the release of her financial disclosure to seize on Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, which he has said he cannot disclose because of a routine audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Despite Donald Trump’s boasting, submitting his personal financial disclosure form is no breakthrough for transparency,” Christina Reynolds, a Clinton spokeswoman, said in a statement.

“The true test for Donald Trump,” she continued, “is whether he will adhere to the precedent followed by every presidential candidate in the modern era and make his tax returns available, as Hillary Clinton has done.”

Personal financial disclosures have become a familiar practice for the Clintons after their decades in public office. Mrs. Clinton also had to file the standard forms while serving as secretary of state, revealing Bill Clinton’s investments and paid speeches while his wife served as the nation’s top diplomat.

The 2015 forms show Mrs. Clinton slowed her paid-speaking schedule as she prepared to run for president, with the final speech delivered — weeks before she announced her candidacy — to the American Camp Association for an honorarium of $260,000. A speech to eBay, also delivered the month before her April announcement, earned Mrs. Clinton $315,000, according to the disclosure.

Mr. Clinton made a total of $4.6 million in paid speeches last year, some delivered after Mrs. Clinton made her campaign official.

Those speeches paid Mr. Clinton up to $285,000 each. But unlike in previous years when he gave speeches to overseas groups, in some cases for nearly twice that amount, his speeches in 2015, in preparation for his wife’s second presidential bid, were made to domestic trade groups and companies.

Mr. Clinton received $250,000 for a question-and-answer session at an “upfront” presentation in New York for the Spanish language network Univision. Haim Saban, a major Clinton donor and an owner of Univision, sat in the front row as Mr. Clinton headlined the event, where executives pitched the channel to advertisers.

Mrs. Clinton’s disclosure on Tuesday seemed timed to hit Mr. Trump. Earlier in the day, his campaign said his forms would reveal that Mr. Trump’s income last year was in excess of $557 million, not including dividends, interest, capital gains, rents and royalties, and that his net worth is in excess of $10 billion. (Fortune has calculated his net worth at $3.72 billion, and Forbes has reported that his worth was roughly $4.5 billion as of September.)

The Clinton campaign has used Mr. Trump’s reluctance to reveal his tax returns to imply that he is not as wealthy as he claims, a criticism that has irked Mr. Trump. “What Is Donald Trump Hiding?” read the subject of an email blasted out on Tuesday by the Clinton campaign. Clinton aides, meanwhile, have circulated the Twitter hashtag #PoorDonald.