Hillary and Bill Clinton have earned $109m since they left the White House in 2000, according to tax returns released by the Clinton presidential campaign on Friday.
The records, which Barack Obama had been pressing Mrs Clinton to release since the start of the campaign, reveal that the former First Lady is by far the wealthiest of the remaining candidates and the second-richest after Mitt Romney, who dropped out in February.
Between 2000 and 2006, the couple paid $33.7m in taxes and gave away $10.25m to charity. “The Clintons have now made public 30 years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service,” said a Clinton spokesman, on Friday. “None of her presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information.”
Mrs Clinton, who loaned her stuttering campaign $5m of her own money in January, accounted for only a small portion of the couple’s joint income mostly from her Senate salary, which amounted to $1.051m between 2001 and 2006, and $10.45m in earnings from her autobiography, Living History.
The bulk of the money came from the $51.85m Bill Clinton earned in speaking fees and another $29.58m from his two books, My Life and Giving. Mr Obama, who earned $983,000 in 2006 and $1.6m in 2005 mostly from advances and royalties from his two books, Dreams From My Father and Audacity of Hope, has yet to release his 2007 tax returns.
Much of the remaining income came from Mr Clinton’s work for businessmen such as Ron Burkle, the supermarket tycoon, and Vinod Gupta, the Indian-American information technology entrepreneur.
The Clinton tax returns, which were released on the Drudge Report, an online news site that is usually hostile to the Clintons, follows news that Mr Obama has again heavily outraised Mrs Clinton in campaign donations with $40m in new funds last month.
The Clinton campaign, which has maintained its opinion poll lead in Pennsylvania, a must-win primary for Mrs Clinton on 22 April, says that Mr Obama has been outspending her there by a ratio of four to one. Mrs Clinton is thought to have raised about half Mr Obama’s total in March having been sharply outraised and outspent by her rival since the nominating contest began in early January.
John McCain, whose wife Cindy is worth more than $100m from her father’s beer distribution fortune, most of which is sealed off from her husband in a pre-nuptial agreement, trails both his Democratic rivals both in his own personal income, which was less than $250,000 last year, and in his presidential fund-raising. Mr McCain is the only candidate not to derive most of his earnings from books or speeches.
By Edward Luce in Washington
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