New questions have arisen this week over Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. On Tuesday, the Associated Press published a new investigation revealing that while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, more than half of the private citizens she met with had donated to the Clinton Foundation. The AP investigation comes after a three-year battle to gain access to State Department calendars. The analysis shows that at least 85 of 154 people Hillary Clinton had scheduled phone or in-person meetings with were foundation donors. This does not include meetings Clinton held with U.S. or foreign government workers or representatives, only private citizens.
David Sirota talking:
I think that if you look at some of these individual examples, I think Paul is right that it’s hard to argue that their donations to the foundation got them access. They are—a lot of these people in the AP story are people who knew her.
But I think we should pull back and look at not just what the AP reported, but at the nexus between the donors to the Clinton Foundation—major corporate donors, major foreign government donors—and what business they had with the State Department. Look, the Clinton team, the foundation and the campaign, is saying that this is not going to happen if she is president. The question then becomes: Why was it then allowed to happen when she was secretary of state? The secretary of state has a huge amount of power over a huge number of issues and policies and contracts, for instance, that many of these donors had an interest in. And we did a series on, for instance, arms exports and how many of the governments that gave big to the Clinton Foundation saw huge increases in arms export authorizations from the State Department, and the State Department is the chief regulator of arms exports. There have been stories about foreign governments giving, like Algeria gave $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation at a time when it was lobbying the State Department on human rights issues. You had a situation, that The Wall Street Journal reported, where Hillary Clinton herself intervened in a case dealing with taxes with UBS, a Swiss bank, and then, suddenly, after that, UBS began donating big to the Clinton Foundation. So there are many examples of—I mean, there’s oil companies—that’s another one I should mention right now, which is that oil companies were giving big to the Clinton Foundation while lobbying the State Department—successfully—for the passage of the Alberta Clipper, the tar sands pipeline.
So, again, there are many of these examples where the people and corporations that were lobbying the State Department were giving huge to the Clinton Foundation. Do we know that that money made those deals and those—and access about those deals happen? I don’t think we know. But here’s the key point. The key point is that ethics rules have typically been in place in states and at the federal level that have said we want to prevent the appearance or the potential for conflicts of interest, because we understand that if the appearance or the potential for a conflict of interest is there, we can’t know if those conflicts are operationalized, that there are so many ways for them to be operationalized that we need to prevent the potential and appearance of a conflict of interest or potential appearance of a conflict of interest. And that is really what’s at issue here.
The Bahrain example is a very good example. we saw that the email came in from the Clinton Foundation. The crown prince of Bahrain has given the Clinton Foundation $32 million. And I don’t think anybody is going to sit up and say the crown prince, one of the top leaders in a dictatorial regime, is giving money—we haven’t heard anyone argue that money from dictators typically comes because dictators want to reduce poverty in the world. So, money is coming into the Clinton Foundation from the crown prince of Bahrain. The Clinton Foundation reaches out to the State Department and says, “He is a good friend of ours,” this person from this autocratic regime, head of the military there. The State Department says that the crown prince had already reached out to them and that Hillary Clinton wasn’t sure she wanted to have a meeting with him. And then, subsequently, the meeting happens.
And what happens after, if that—we don’t know if that meeting actually happened, but there was a—the State Department said it was going to happen. Subsequently, after that, what happened is that Bahrain saw a major increase in U.S. arms export authorizations from the Clinton State Department, at a time that Bahrain was facing the Arab Spring uprisings and was accused of human rights violations in crushing those protests. So, did the money and the Clinton Foundation relationship ultimately lead to those arms export deals? We don’t know. Did it potentially get access for that leader at that time? There’s certainly evidence that that could have happened.
And again, the question that this all revolves around is: Why was the potential for a conflict of interest allowed to exist at the State Department, when the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation now says it’s now unacceptable if Hillary Clinton would be president? What is the difference there?
Why were these leaders—let’s say, of these Middle Eastern dictatorships—why were they giving that money? I mean, these are sophisticated, politically sophisticated donors, them and corporations. They are repeatedly giving money to the Clinton Foundation. And I don’t think you’re arguing, and I haven’t heard anyone argue, that, you know, the Saudi regime or another dictatorial regime is giving money to the Clinton Foundation because they really—in the deep well of their heart, they want to solve poverty or help poor children. They are repeatedly giving money to the Clinton Foundation at a time they are seeking highly controversial—in this instance that we’re talking about, highly controversial arms deals. There was a Saudi deal where the State Department said it was Hillary Clinton’s personal top priority to get one of the biggest Saudi arms deals through. The Israelis were raising concerns about it.
It went through. And again, the money flowed into the Clinton—had flowed into the Clinton Foundation. So, why were those donors giving? What did they think they were getting? And again, the critics of this say that what it ended up being was potentially a way that donors saw a way to curry favor with the State Department on controversial issues.
I think you’re right to say that the Clinton Foundation has done projects and is involved in efforts that are laudable and philanthropic. But again, the deeper policy question here goes back to whether a potential conflict of interest, whether the appearance of a conflict of interest, should have been permissible at the State Department and what this money potentially bought.
And I want to go to the—one other point about the appearance of a conflict of interest, because I’ve heard a lot of pundits out there defending the Clintons with sort of the same talking points, saying, “Oh, well, there was a—there’s an appearance of a conflict of interest, and there was only a potential, and that’s all that can be proven.” And, of course, if a lot of these same pundits, these Democratic pundits, were looking at a Republican situation, they would be screaming about how this is a huge scandal. But the key on the appearance of a conflict of interest is, if we want people to believe that their government is doing things in the right way in a democracy, that access isn’t being sold, that contracts aren’t being given out on the basis of preference and money going into a private foundation, appearances actually do matter. It is not something to throw—to pooh-pooh. Appearances really matter. The optics are not just some talking point. The optics matter in a democracy, when people—the public is asked to believe that its government is acting on behalf of the public interest. And in this case, all of these questions swirling around—the Clinton people seem to understand that those questions cannot exist when she was president, but why was it allowed to exist when she was in such a powerful position as America’s top diplomat?
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David Sirota
senior editor for investigations at the International Business Times.
— source democracynow.org