Bill Clinton Defends Family’s Charity

Former President Bill Clinton defended his family’s charity and its finances on Friday amid reports that the group â€" recently renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation â€" had run up deficits in some years and been mismanaged.

“The Clinton Foundation was founded on the belief that we could help people in the United States and around the world solve problems and seize opportunities faster, better and at lower cost,” Mr. Clinton wrote in a message on the foundation’s Web site in an attempt to calm anxious donors.

Clinton aides often express exasperation that news media coverage tends to focus on Mr. and Mrs. Clinton as political figures rather than highlighting their charitable work. In his message, Mr. Clinton listed some of the foundation’s accomplishments in the 12 years it has been operating, like providing five million people with access to low-cost AIDS medications and helping more than 21,000 farmers in Malawi obtain seeds and fertilizer.

He also defended how donations had been handled, responding to a New York Times article on Wednesday that raised questions about the foundation’s finances. He said that the tax forms mentioned in the article “can be misleading,” partly because multiyear charitable commitments are reported in the year that they are made. That can make financial reports in subsequent years appear skewed, he said.

Because of multiyear commitments, tax forms “will often indicate that we have more or less money than is actually in our accounts,” Mr. Clinton wrote. This is a message that the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising operation has reiterated to donors in the last several days.

The scrutiny of the foundation comes as speculation continues about whether Mrs. Clinton will run for president in 2016. She will soon relocate her personal office from Washington to the foundation’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, where she is assembling a foundation staff.

Mr. Clinton also tried to ease concerns about mismanagement. He released the executive summary of a 2011 review by the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett that suggested the charity’s management had improved as it had grown.

“Over the last two years, we have strengthened our foundation’s leadership and structure,” Mr. Clinton said, pointing specifically to the appointment of Eric Braverman as chief executive.

Mr. Braverman, 38, a former McKinsey & Company consultant and a friend of Chelsea Clinton’s, recently took over the foundation’s leadership from a longtime Clinton adviser, Bruce R. Lindsey, who had split his time between Little Rock, Ark., and New York.

Mr. Clinton’s letter also praised Ira C. Magaziner, the chief executive of a foundation offshoot, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, who has been criticized for his management style and his handling of budgets. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Magaziner met as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and the former president strongly expressed his confidence in Mr. Magaziner, who ran Mrs. Clinton’s failed efforts at overhauling the health care system in the 1990s.

“CHAI’s growth and development have been amazing,” Mr. Clinton said, mentioning the group’s work training nurses in Rwanda, among other efforts. “It could not have happened without Ira Magaziner’s hard work, dedication and innovative vision.”

On Thursday, Mr. Magaziner defended the financial solvency of the Health Access Initiative, where the Clintons serve as chairman and chairwoman.

“CHAI has been a successful organization that has operated within its budget for most years of its existence,” he wrote in an e-mail.