Clinton releases tax, health records on busy Friday

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband paid close to $44 million in federal taxes since 2007 and she is in "excellent physical condition" - two facts that emerged Friday in a flood of disclosures about the Democratic presidential candidate pushed out by her campaign on a busy summer day.

Within a three-hour period, the State Department made public more than 2,200 pages of e-mails sent from Clinton's personal account, her campaign released a letter from her personal doctor about her health and she unveiled eight years of tax returns. Meanwhile, Clinton herself was campaigning at the annual meeting of the National Urban League and calling for an end of the nation's trade embargo of Cuba during a speech in Miami.

Friday was also the deadline for super PACs to file their first financial reports of the 2016 campaign with federal regulators, revealing the names of a slew of billionaires and millionaires paying for the early days of the 2016 election.

Campaign aides cast the records dump as part of an effort to compete with Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on the issue of transparency. Clinton is the first 2016 presidential candidate to release her health records, and aides said she released more detail about her finances than Bush, the former Florida governor who has already made public 33 years of his tax returns.

Republicans didn't buy it.

"This massive Friday news dump was not a good-faith effort at transparency, it was a deliberate attempt to sweep things like three dozen more classified e-mails under the rug," said Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short.

The Clintons earned more than $139 million between 2007 and 2014, according to the returns, and made almost $15 million in charitable contributions - including a $3 million donation to their family foundation in 2014. Last year, they paid an overall federal tax rate of 35.7 percent.

The couple made nearly $23 million from speaking fees alone in 2013 - the year Clinton left the State Department - and collected an additional $20 million from paid events last year. The remainder of their income came largely from book royalties and consulting fees paid to former President Bill Clinton.

In a statement, Clinton emphasized that she came into her wealth later in her life - an effort to draw a distinction with Bush, the scion of a rich political family.

"We've come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children's Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas - and we owe it to the opportunities America provides," she said.

Bush has earned nearly $28 million since leaving the Florida governor's mansion in 2007 and paid an effective federal income tax rate of roughly 36 percent in the last three decades, according to tax returns released by his campaign last month. He has said he paid a higher rate than the Clintons, though he earned less income.

Both candidates are in the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who paid an average of 30.2 percent between 1981 and 2011, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The average for middle-income households in that time was 16.6 percent.

The financial release came just hours after Lisa Bardack, an internist and chairwoman of the Department of Medicine at the Mount Kisco Medical Group near the candidate's suburban New York home, publicly detailed Clinton's health in a two-page letter.

The report said that Clinton, who is 67, has fully recovered from a concussion she suffered in December 2012 after fainting, an episode that Bardack attributed to a stomach virus and dehydration.

Bardack said testing the following year showed "complete resolution" of the concussion's effects, including double vision, which Clinton wore glasses with special lenses to address.

Clinton's doctor said she exercises regularly - practicing yoga, swimming, walking, and weight training - and eats a diet rich in lean proteins, vegetables, and fruits. She does not smoke and drinks alcohol "occasionally," Bardack wrote.