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Bill Clinton Made Millions with Hillary at State Dept.

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The U.S. State Department gave near-blanket approval to hundreds of overseas requests from Bill Clinton while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

A new report from The Associated Press shows Bill Clinton's requests for lucrative speaking engagements in other countries were regularly granted with great haste.

And the Clintons became very wealthy, making millions of dollars from those speeches.

One speech to the multinational bank Barclays is drawing special scrutiny. The State Department approved it while the U.S. Justice Department was investigating the bank.

It was widely known at the time that Barclays was under investigation by federal prosecutors for repeated illegal transactions with banks in Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan, and Burma and for violating U.S. financial sanctions against those governments.

Barclays had openly acknowledged in its annual reports, as recently as the same month as Clinton's 2010 request, that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and others for sanctions violations.

And the State Department's decision to allow the Clinton speech remained unchanged even after the Justice Department announced just months later, in August 2010, that Barclays Bank agreed to pay nearly $300 million in penalties for violating financial sanctions against foreign regimes.

Some other cases coming under scrutiny also involved banks. For example, Bill Clinton's $200,000 appearance in Florida for British-based HSBC in 2011 was cleared despite an ongoing federal money-laundering investigation that led to a 2012 settlement with prosecutors.

Five U.S. events in 2011 and 2012 earned the former president $840,000 from the wealth management unit of UBS Bank less than two years after the Swiss bank had acknowledged a massive tax evasion scheme aiding American clients and paid $780 million in penalties.

During Hillary Clinton's tenure as the top U.S. diplomat, lawyers and other ethics officials in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser gave near-blanket approval to at least 330 requests for Bill Clinton's appearance at speeches, dinners, and events both in the United States and around the globe.

More than 220 paid events earned the Clintons nearly $50 million, according to a review of State Department documents and Hillary Clinton's financial disclosure forms by The Associated Press.

Now, as Hillary Clinton moves forward with her presidential campaign, the ease with which her husband was repeatedly cleared to address companies and governments around the world highlights potential ethical complications that are likely to intensify if she becomes the country's next president.

"It's politically going to be very treacherous," said Jan Baran, head of the government ethics group at Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLP, who served as general counsel to the Republican National Committee. "It just becomes controversy all the time."

The State Department also green-lighted requests by foreign governments to hire the former president for events, despite potential complications for his wife's diplomacy at the time and for a future Hillary Clinton presidency.

Similar concerns about foreign influence have been raised about the millions of dollars donated by foreign governments over the past decade to the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton family's global charity.

While the State Department's lawyers concluded that most of Bill Clinton's speeches did not violate foreign policy interests, some of his appearances could pose political risk for his wife's presidential bid by giving Republican opponents an opening to depict the couple as beholden to powerful interests.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton has said he intends to continue accepting speaking fees during the presidential campaign.

"I got to pay our bills," he said in an interview with NBC's "Today Show" last week.

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