WASHINGTON – If Barack Obama asks Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to be secretary of state, she likely will face questions about the global network her husband Bill has created with his foundation, speaking engagements and business ventures, experts said Friday.

Those questions could include whether Bill Clinton has conflicts of interest or follows the State Department line in his dealings with business and government leaders overseas.

Since leaving the White House eight years ago, Bill Clinton has entered into business partnerships and established the William J. Clinton Foundation, which sponsors international development, AIDS care and other initiatives in projects around the world.

The Clintons dissolved their blind trust and sold their stocks last year, and Bill Clinton disengaged from some investments, to avoid conflict of interest questions while Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., campaigned for president.

But Bill Clinton still runs his foundation, which has raised at least $375 million from donors, including some from foreigners whose gifts have been questioned in newspaper articles.

In one case reported by The New York Times in January, for example, Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra gave $131 million to Bill Clinton’s charitable enterprises after the two went to Kazakhstan together.

There, Clinton announced a program of selling discounted AIDS drugs and praised the country’s leader, and Giustra won the right to invest in state-run uranium projects. Clinton and Giustra denied the two deals were connected.

But questions about that deal, the foundation and other business dealings are expected at the Senate confirmation hearing if Hillary Clinton is tapped, said Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

“Any oversight committee worth its salt would raise those questions,” said Pletka, a senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 10 years.

The Clintons also would face financial disclosure requirements, she said. But it is unlikely Bill Clinton would have to name his foundation’s donors, which is not required by law.

Yet as on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton as secretary of state could face concerns she might have to tiptoe through a maze of trip wires inadvertently set by her husband in his far-flung connections and interests.

“There is no question it’s a tricky thing,” said Edwin M. Smith, a professor of law and international relations at the University of Southern California.


Smith said appearances of impropriety or awkward political moments could arise, as happened while Hillary Clinton was running for president.

Take the controversy that arose in June last year.

After Victor Pinchuk, a billionaire steel magnate in Ukraine, donated millions to Clinton’s foundation, according to Newsweek, Clinton went to speak at a Yalta conference. But the former U.S. president created an inadvertent stir when he was embraced by Pinchuk’s father-in-law, a former Ukraine president whose authoritarian rule has been condemned by the State Department.

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AP-NY-11-14-08 2320EST