Chelsea Clinton to Leave Well-Paid NBC News Job

 

Chelsea Clinton on “The Tonight Show.” Ms. Clinton worked at NBC for less than three years. Credit Lloyd Bishop/NBC

Less than three years after she embarked on a new and lucrative career as an NBC News special correspondent, Chelsea Clinton said on Friday that she would leave that position.

In a letter posted on her Facebook page, Ms. Clinton said she had decided to depart NBC News to focus on philanthropic work at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. She and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are also expecting their first child this fall. At the same time, her mother, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is mulling a presidential bid in 2016.

“I am profoundly grateful to NBC viewers who responded to the stories I shared,” wrote Ms. Clinton, whose reports were part of NBC News’s “Making a Difference” series. Those reports were often in line with the charitable work Ms. Clinton does at the Clinton Foundation.

Ms. Clinton’s tenure at the news outlet was not a smooth one, less because of her feel-good reports than because a media-shy first daughter was hired as a television journalist earning a six-figure salary. (In 2009, NBC News hired Jenna Bush Hager, a daughter of former President George W. Bush, as a special correspondent for the “Today” show, drawing similar criticism.)

Ms. Clinton, who is vice chairwoman of the philanthropic organization her father founded, made an annual salary of $600,000 at NBC, according to Politico. She remains on the board of IAC/InterActiveCorp, the digital media company overseen by Barry Diller, a longtime Clinton supporter. In 2011, that position paid an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.

More recently, Ms. Clinton’s affiliation with NBC News had been seen as a potential conflict as her mother embarked on a nationwide book tour that looked like the precursor to a presidential campaign. It was during Hillary Clinton’s hard-fought 2008 Democratic primary against then Senator Barack Obama that her daughter emerged as a more public figure, stumping for her mother.

While Chelsea Clinton’s NBC segments did not attract particularly large audiences, news executives and her subjects said her celebrity brought outsize attention to the communities and nonprofits she profiled. “It’s hard to get stories like this told on a platform as big as ‘NBC Nightly News,’ “ said Josh Wachs, chief strategy officer at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that fights childhood hunger.

A number of media outlets talked to Ms. Clinton before she decided to sign with NBC News in December 2011. Since then the network has experienced a management shift; Deborah Turness, a British news executive, recently stepped in as president. Not long ago, Ms. Clinton switched to a contract that allowed her to exit.

In a statement, Alex Wallace, senior vice president of NBC News, said, “While she will be missed, we look forward to working with her in the future.”

Correction: August 29, 2014

A previous version of this article misstated the name of the digital media company overseen by Barry Diller. It is IAC/InterActiveCorp, not IAC/InterActive Corporation.

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Economic sanctions

Economic sanctions spare Western-tied Russian fund

WASHINGTON (AP) — Western business connections are complicating efforts to bring economic sanctions against executives and companies closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle. A prime example: the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund that's escaped sanctions in spite of international efforts to punish Russia for its incursions in Ukraine.

A sanctioned Russian bank funds the RDIF, and a top Putin aide serves on one of its board. The fund's international advisory board, meanwhile, is stocked with blue-chip American and European private equity executives, among them Stephen Schwarzman of The Blackstone Group LP, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management LLC and David Bonderman of TPG Capital LP.

The chief executive of a French state-controlled investment company, Caisses de Depots, is listed as one of its supervisors — as is former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The fund has done deals with BlackRock Inc. and General Electric Co., which partnered with the fund to build small power plants for industrial users across Russia. JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s One Equity Partners joined an Illinois tire company to buy a manufacturer of agricultural and industrial tires. European investors took stakes in telecommunications firms, information technology consultants and health care companies. In total, more than $6 billion from blue-chip foreign companies have flowed in.

President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are considering new economic sanctions against Russia over its apparent invasion of Ukraine. There is no evidence that the Russian Direct Investment Fund would be a target, but the situation with the sanctions-free RDIF illustrates the Obama administration's struggle to achieve conflicting goals — punishing Putin's circle without damaging U.S. companies doing business in Russia.

"We can't have a situation where a business entity is immune from (sanctions) designation because it does some good things and some bad things," said Jimmy Gurule, a senior Treasury Department enforcement official in the Bush administration and law professor at Notre Dame University.

Obama said Thursday he expects U.S. and European allies to take additional steps to respond to the Russian military's apparent invasion of Ukraine. "Capital is fleeing. Investors are increasingly staying out," Obama said.

A Republican-backed bill in the Senate would extend sanctions to executives, companies and investment funds, including the $10 billion Russian fund, and penalize Americans who work with them, according to congressional staffers.

Within the Obama administration, Treasury lawyers and investigators have been consulting intelligence and law enforcement officials in recent weeks to identify targets for new sanctions, according to three federal officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the confidential discussions. The White House and Treasury Department declined to say whether the Russian fund might be a target.

Under presidential action, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has the authority to freeze a foreign target's financial assets in the U.S. and block its transactions with Americans. The targets can be businesses or individuals and have included terrorists, criminals and state entities. The Treasury Department can also limit the effect of its sanctions, and some targeted Russian banks are restricted only from accessing U.S. capital markets, not blocked entirely.

Some Westerners have already cut ties with the Russian fund. Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, a longtime Obama political intimate who was listed on corporate documents as a fund adviser as recently as April, has now severed ties with the fund. Harvard Professor Josh Lerner stepped down from the fund's supervisory board. And last week, references to Kurt Bjorklund, a leader of European investment firm Permira, quietly disappeared from the fund's website.

Others, including all three American private equity executives, have stayed put. Bonderman appeared in photographs and on the attendee list in April at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, an annual event favored by Putin that the Obama administration urged many top American business leaders to skip.

Current and former board members either declined to comment or did not respond to phone calls and emails from the AP.

"Businesses are caught in the middle, because while they want to be loyal to the government, they have major investments here," said Laura Brank, the head of the Russia practice at Dechert LLP, a major international law firm.

The Russian fund in May partnered with two unidentified international investors and Gazprombank, the sanctioned finance arm of Gazprom, the Russian-controlled energy conglomerate, to buy a liquefied gas terminal. The seller was OAO Sibur Holding, which is partially owned by Gennady Timchenko, a Russian billionaire on the U.S. sanctions list. Under the deal, as described by the Russian fund, Sibur sold the facility to the investors for $700 million — and simultaneously struck a deal to lease it back from them. The Russian Direct Investment Fund's head, Kirill Dmitriev, told the Associated Press that Sibur has not been targeted by sanctions but otherwise declined to discuss fund investments.

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Ebola drug

Experimental Ebola drug heals all monkeys in study

An experimental Ebola drug healed all 18 monkeys infected with the deadly virus in a study, boosting hopes that the treatment might help fight the outbreak raging through West Africa-once more of it can be made.

The monkeys were given the drug, ZMapp, three to five days after they were infected with the virus and when most were showing symptoms. That is several days later than any other experimental Ebola treatment tested so far.

The drug also completely protected six other monkeys given a slightly different version of it three days after infection in a pilot test. These two studies are the first monkey tests ever done on ZMapp.

"The level of improvement was utterly beyond my honest expectation," said one study leader, Gary Kobinger of the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg.

"For animal data, it's extremely impressive," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which had a role in the work.

It's not known how well the drug would work in people, who can take up to 21 days to show symptoms and are not infected the way these monkeys were in a lab.

Several experts said it's not possible to estimate a window of opportunity for treating people, but that it was encouraging that the animals recovered when treated even after advanced disease developed.

The study was published online Friday by the journal Nature.

ZMapp had never been tested in humans before two Americans aid workers who got Ebola while working in Africa were allowed to try it. The rest of the limited supply was given to five others.

There is no more ZMapp now, and once a new batch is ready, it still needs some basic tests before it can be tried again during the African outbreak, Fauci said. "We do need to know what the proper dose is" in people and that it's safe, he said.

Ebola has killed more than 1,500 people this year and the World Health Organization says there could be as many as 20,000 cases before the outbreak is brought under control. On Friday, it spread to a fifth African country — Senegal, where a university student who traveled there from Guinea was being treated.

There is no approved vaccine or specific treatment, just supportive care to keep them hydrated and nourished. Efforts have focused on finding cases and tracking their contacts to limit the disease, which spreads through contact with blood and other fluids.

ZMapp is three antibodies that attach to cells infected with Ebola, helping the immune system kill them.

Of the seven people known to have been treated with ZMapp, two have died — a Liberian doctor and a Spanish priest. The priest received only one of three planned doses. The two Americans recovered, as have two Africans who received ZMapp in Liberia — a Congolese doctor and a Liberian physician's assistant who were expected to be released from a treatment center on Saturday. A British nurse also got the drug, reportedly the two unused doses left over from treating the Spanish priest.

Doctors have said there is no way to know whether ZMapp made a difference or the survivors recovered on their own, as about 45 percent of people infected in this outbreak have.

ZMapp's maker, Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., of San Diego, has said the small supply of the drug is now exhausted and that it will take several months to make more. The drug is grown in tobacco plants and was developed with U.S. government support.

Kobinger said it takes about a month to make 20 to 40 doses at a Kentucky plant where the drug is being produced. Officials have said they are looking at other facilities and other ways to ramp up production, and Kobinger said there were plans for a clinical trial to test ZMapp in people early next year.

The monkey study involved scientists from the Canada health agency, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease.

Eighteen monkeys were given lethal amounts of Ebola in a shot, then received three intravenous doses of ZMapp, given three days apart starting three to five days after they were infected. Some were showing severe symptoms such as excessive bleeding, rashes and effects on their liver.

All treated with ZMapp survived; three other infected monkeys who did not get the drug died within eight days.

Primates have been good stand-ins for people for many viral diseases, but how well they predict human responses to Ebola, "we just don't know," said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a Duke University infectious disease specialist. The study also "tells us nothing about side effects" people might have, he added.

Still, it was encouraging that even monkeys with severe symptoms got better, said Wolfe and Erica Ollmann Saphire, a Scripps Research Institute professor who has worked with some of the study leaders on antibodies to Ebola.

"The treatment window in humans needs to be established in a well-controlled trial" that also would explore the correct dose of ZMapp in people, Saphire wrote in an email. "Given its tremendous efficacy in the nonhuman primates, I don't see how it couldn't be helpful in people."

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