Regarding conflicts of interest in government: The Clintons & their legacy

Conflicts of interest have long been a plague in government, probably forever. In the previous presidency, the plague morphed into an aggressive cancer. Rules of ethics were simply blown off. They were shown to be toothless norms. The ex-president kept his businesses operating and money flowing in, including from foreign governments. That constitutes either an actual conflict of interest or a perception of a conflict. Either way, it is often or usually impossible for the public to know with confidence what government and politician actions associated with money are corrupt and what are honest.

In view of recent history, a question that comes to mind centers on what role, if any, did the Clintons play in normalizing acceptance of real or apparent conflicts in government? In hindsight, they may have been significantly more important than one might have thought before the 2016 elections. Some reporting from the past helps put this in context. In 2015, MotherJones wrote in an article entitled Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors: 

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom’s troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

The Saudi transaction is just one example of nations and companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation seeing an increase in arms deals while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department. IBT found that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries—a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses.

An article in The Hill from 2015 reported:

The State Department under Hillary Clinton authorized arms sales to countries that had donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, according to a new report.

State approved $165 billion worth of weapons sales to 20 foreign governments during Clinton's tenure, the International Business Times reports. Among the countries involved in the sales were Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Clinton Foundation received between $54 million and $141 million in donations from the foreign governments and defense contractors involved in those sales, the report says.

Certain defense contractors also paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for speaking engagements during that time.

While the report does not allege a direct connection between the arms sales and the donations, the activities of the Clinton Foundation have become a growing headache for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

A new book by Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash, questions whether foreign governments sought to curry influence with the Clintons by making donations to the foundation.

The Clinton campaign has dismissed the book as a hit job by a conservative author, arguing it is filled with "sloppy research and attacks pulled out of thin air. 

A 2015 article by Vox, 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling, also focused on this issue:

During and before the four years Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation run by her husband took tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and corporations.

Many of these donors had a lot riding on Clinton’s decisions. Saudi Arabia gave the foundation up to $25 million, and Clinton signed off on a controversial $29 billion sale of fighter jets to the country. Oil companies gave the foundation around $3 million, and Clinton approved a lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands they’d long sought.

We've known the basics of this story for months now. But another media feeding frenzy over the foundation kicked off again on Monday, when the State Department was forced to release emails showing that the foundation’s leadership tried to land its top donors meetings with the secretary of state.  

How do we know foundation donors really did get better access to Clinton’s State Department? Well, it’s impossible to prove — no Clinton staffer was stupid enough to write, "Thanks for giving $10 million to Bill! Now we can get coffee!"

There’s no evidence that donors to the Clinton Foundation did anything like buy off Clinton, and there’s no definitive proof that they got access to the State Department because of their donations. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.   

But the money in politics experts argued that these aren't the only standards of wrongdoing by which we can or should judge Clinton. To them, the fact that the Clintons allowed for an appearance of a conflict of interest — that the suspicion could be reasonably raised — is itself a major shortcoming worth criticizing.

"What's so troubling is that these revelations suggest that if you want to see the secretary of state, it helps to make a large donation — that’s the perception this gives," says Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.  

[Quoting Noble:] "Politicians like to say things like, "I would have given the lobbyist for Exxon a meeting regardless of their donation," and that might be true. But the problem is that it’s impossible to know if the meeting would have happened anyway, if the meeting was given out of a favor, or what. 

So they don’t get the benefit of the doubt. It’s their job to make sure they avoid the appearance of a conflict in interest in the first place — because if a politician has made a decision that affects a major donor [whose money they want], then it becomes basically impossible to sort out why they did it. It calls into question the decision even if it’s totally legitimate and the best one they could make. 

That’s why the very idea that access to government depends on how wealthy you are — and how much you give — is so dangerous. What the Clintons did here helps create the impression that if you’re a small-business person who wants to talk to the secretary of state, then you’re out of luck. But if you donate a few million dollars to her husband’s charity, you can talk to her." 

In other words: Since it’s so difficult for anyone to ever prove a quid pro quo, it’s incumbent on politicians to recuse themselves so it can’t even look like they’re swapping favors for private donations — or to not take those donations in the first place. 

By that standard, Hillary Clinton clearly failed.

In hindsight

Consider the ex-president’s moral compass over his adult life. What was his level of concern about conflicts of interest, real or not? He could not have cared less about conflicts. From the moment he was sworn into office, he was awash in obvious major conflicts. What was the effect, if any, of the Clinton’s conflicts of interest, real or not? One can reasonably argue that in the ex-president’s mind, what the Clintons did constituted precedent and cover for him ignoring the issue. 

Would it have made any difference if what the Clintons did was irrelevant and the ex-president would have acted no differently? That is possible, probably likely, but it ignores the fact that corruption stemming from her real or perceived conflicts of interest was used to attack Clinton in the 2016 election. That probably cost her some votes. It was a legitimate attack on Clinton’s moral character[1] that drove some people away from supporting her.

Question: Is it reasonable to believe that the Clintons moral failings, including Bill’s sleazy antics while in office and money flowing to their charitable Foundation, played some non-trivial role in the rise and/or behavior of the ex-president?

Footnote: 

1. Yes, the ex-president had no moral character in 2015-2016 and thereafter. All he ever had as an adult was an immoral character. But in authoritarian radical right tribal politics that morphed into fascist cult politics on and after the 1/6 coup attempt, moral or immoral character made and still makes no difference to the tribe, then cult. Morals are beside the point when it comes to a sacred tribe or cult leader and their sacred cause.