Clinton attends a meeting with New York Stock Exchange president Duncan Niederauer and various business leaders on September 21, 2009. (Credit: public domain)
In June 2016, the Associated Press will finally gain access to some planning schedules from when Clinton was secretary of state. A comparison of these planning schedules with Clinton’s official calendar from that time will show that at least 60 meetings with Clinton’s donors and other outside interests were omitted. The Associated Press will give one specific example of a meeting on this day that is omitted from the calendar, even though the names of attendees to other meetings on the same day are not. Clinton meets with 13 major business leaders for a private breakfast discussion at the New York Stock Exchange:
- David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc.;
- Fabrizio Freda, CEO of the Estee Companies Inc.;
- Lewis Frankfort, chair of Coach Inc.;
- Robert Kelly, CEO of the New York Bank of Mellon;
- Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont;
- Harold McGraw III, chair of McGraw Hill Companies;
- Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange;
- Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo;
- Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Corp;
- Steven Schwarzman, chair of the Blackstone Group;
- James Taiclet, chair of the American Tower Corp.;
- James Tisch, president of Loews Corp.; and
- John D. Wren, CEO of Omnicom Group.
All the companies represented except Coach Inc. lobby the US government in 2009. Four companies—Blackstone, Honeywell, Omnicom, and DuPont—lobby the State Department that year. All the companies except for American Tower and New York Bank of Mellon donate to the Clinton Foundation, and two attendees—Schwarzman and Frankfort—personally donate to the foundation. Four of the companies—PepsiCo, the Blackstone Group, DuPont, and Honeywell International Inc.—also donate to what the Associated Press calls “Clinton’s pet diplomatic project of that period,” the US pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. (The Associated Press, 6/24/2016)