WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton defended controversial foreign donations to his foundation and his big-money speeches, declaring, “I gotta pay our bills.”

In his first interview since wife Hillary Clinton announced her 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton told NBC his Clinton Foundation charity has never done anything “knowingly inappropriate.”

The charitable foundation, under pressure, admitted bookkeeping mistakes and will likely have to refile federal tax forms. Under increased scrutiny, the foundation also decided to limit donations to six foreign governments.

Asked whether accepting millions from countries like Saudi Arabia was a mistake, Clinton said, “Absolutely not.”

The new foreign donation policy is “an acknowledgment that we’re going to come as close as we can during her presidential campaign to following the rules we followed when she became secretary of state,” Clinton said while touring Africa with daughter Chelsea for the Clinton Foundation.

“There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.”

In her second bid for the White House, Hillary Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner for the nomination, but polling shows that Americans doubt her trustworthiness in the wake of the email server controversy and questions regarding whether foreign contributions to the foundation swayed public policy decisions.
The Clinton Foundation defended its policy of not disclosing individual donor names from its Canadian affiliate because of that country’s public disclosure rules.

Bill Clinton’s speaking fees shot up when his wife became President Obama’s first secretary of state. And he intends to continue on the speaking circuit.

“I gotta pay our bills,” he said. “And I also give a lot of it to the foundation every year.”

“I spend a couple of hours a day just doing the research. People like to hear me speak,” Clinton said in defense of the high price tag.

“We do our best to vet them,” he said of the groups that pay him. “And I have turned down a lot of them. If I think there’s something wrong with it, I don’t take it.”

Clinton didn’t explain why he needed money when he and his wife are worth tens of millions.

The former commander-in-chief also claimed his family is held to a higher standard than everyone else.

“All I’m saying is the idea that there’s one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else is true,” he said.

Hillary Clinton’s opponents are hitting her on the foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation. After Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy Monday, she said Bill and Hillary Clinton can’t be trusted.

“I think that Bill Clinton is saying is what Hillary Clinton has said on multiple occasions — ‘Just trust us.’ Unfortunately, trust is earned through transparency and I think they have not been particularly transparent on a whole host of things,” Fiorina said on a press call with reporters.

She added: “I have served as the chairman of two major charities. … When a charitable institution has to restate 990s (tax forms) not once, but multiple times, that says it all.”

Additional reporting by Yaron Steinbuch