The Associated Press story
this week revealing
that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton frequently met with donors to the
Clinton Foundation, set off a firestorm in the media. Many Democrats and
sympathetic pundits are criticizing the article — and have made the
sweeping claim that, contrary to many deeply reported investigations,
there is no evidence that well-heeled backers of the foundation received
favorable treatment from the State Department.
While there are
some legitimate criticisms of the AP story — its focus, for
instance, on a Nobel Peace Prize winner meeting with Clinton distracts from the
thesis of the piece — it is nonetheless a substantive investigation based
on calendars that the State Department has fought to withhold from the public.
The AP took the agency to court to obtain a partial release of the meeting
logs. Other commentators took issue with a tweet
promoting the AP piece, which they said might confuse readers because the AP
story reflected private sector meetings, not overall meetings.
But in challenging the
overall credibility of the AP story, Clinton surrogates and allies are going
well beyond a reasoned critique in an effort to downplay the serious
ethical issues raised by Clinton Foundation activities.
One frequent line of attack
heard this week is that stories concerning the Clinton Foundation, at best,
only reveal that some foundation donors received help at the State Department
with visa problems:
Vox writer Matthew Yglesias argued
that “however many times they take a run” at the Clinton Foundation,
journalists “don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation
that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State
Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.” The
Vox piece was circulated widely
by the Clinton campaign.
ThinkProgress editor Adam
Peck wrote
that “aside from an occasional assist with acquiring a visa, or meeting with
executives from a cosmetics company to talk about ways to curb gender-based
violence in South Africa,” there were no “shady dealings” conducted by the
Clinton Foundation. He added, “If Hillary Clinton was abusing the power of her
office by running an international multi-million dollar pay-for-play scheme,
she did a lousy job of it.”
DailyKos writer
Mark Sumner, in a piece shared
by Blue Nation Review, a website owned by Clinton campaign operative David
Brock, claimed that “extensive reviews haven’t found any evidence — any
evidence — that [the Clinton Foundation] affected a single action at the State
Department.”
The assertions above obscure
the problems unearthed through years of investigative reporting on the
foundation. Journalist David Sirota, who has reported extensively on the
Clinton Foundation, rounded
up a sample of the stories that provide a window into Clinton Foundation issues:
The Washington Post found
that two months after Secretary Clinton encouraged the Russian government to
approve a $3.7 billion deal with Boeing, the aerospace company announced a
$900,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation.
The Wall Street Journal found that
Clinton made an “unusual intervention” to announce a legal settlement with UBS,
after which the Swiss bank increased its donations to, and involvement with,
the Clinton Foundation.
The New York Times reported
that a Russian company assumed control of major uranium reserves in a deal
that required State Department approval, as the chairman of the company
involved in the transaction donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation.
The Intercept has also reported
on the Clinton Foundation and the conduct of the State Department under
Clinton. Leaked government documents obtained by The Intercept revealed
that the Moroccan government lobbied Clinton aggressively to influence her and
other officials on the Moroccan military occupation of Western Sahara, which holds
some of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate, a lucrative export for the
kingdom.
As part of its strategy for
influence, the Moroccan government and companies controlled by the kingdom
donated to the Bill Clinton presidential library, the Clinton Foundation, and
hired individuals associated with the Clinton political network. Despite a
statement by the Obama administration that suggested it would reverse the
previous Bush administration support for the Moroccan government and would back
a U.N.-negotiated settlement for the conflict in Western Sahara, Clinton
announced there would be “no change” in policy — and has gone on to praise the
Moroccan government’s human rights record.
As recently as Monday, we learned
that after being denied an official meeting with the State Department, Peabody
Energy, the worlds largest coal company, used a consultant who donated heavily
to the Clinton Foundation to back channel and attempt to set up a meeting with
Clinton via her aide Huma Abedin. The consultant, Joyce Aboussie, wrote that
“It should go without saying that the Peabody folks” reached out to her because
of her “relationship with the Clinton’s [sic].”
Peabody and Aboussie have
declined to comment, and it is unclear if the meeting took place.
There may be many other
potential influence-peddling stories, but the State Department has
not released all of the emails from Clinton’s private server and other
meeting log documents, while redacting identifying information that could shed
light on other stories. For example, Mother Jones and The Intercept have reported
that Clinton used the State Department to promote fracking development across
the globe, and in particular her agency acted to benefit particular companies
such as a Chevron project in Bulgaria and ExxonMobil’s efforts in Poland. Both
ExxonMobil and Chevron are major donors
to the Clinton Foundation.
The release of more meeting
log documents and emails would certainly reveal a better picture of potential
influence.
In further criticizing the AP,
Yglesias wrote on Thursday that the Clinton Foundation faces a double standard
and that similar charitable groups set up by Republicans were not criticized
closely by the press. In fact, Democrats and media figures roundly criticized
the public interest foundations set up by Republicans and funded by lobbyists
and special interest groups, including nonprofit organizations affiliated
with Newt
Gingrich and George
W. Bush.
Earlier this year, in similar
fashion to the questions raised about the Clinton Foundation, Democrats in
Arizona raised influence peddling concerns regarding
the reported $1
million donation from the Saudi Arabian government to the McCain Institute
for International Leadership, a nonprofit group closely affiliated with Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain
oversees a range of issues concerning Saudi Arabia, including arms sales. But
none of the pundits rushing to the defense of the Clinton Foundation defended
McCain.
In fact, the more Clinton’s
allies have worked to defend big money donations to the Clinton Foundation, the
more closely they resemble the right-wing principles they once denounced.
In one telling argument in
defense of the Clinton Foundation, Media Matters, another group run by David
Brock, argued
this week that there was “no evidence of ethics breaches” because there was no
explicit quid pro quo cited by the AP. The Media Matters piece mocked press
figures for focusing on the “optics” of corruption surrounding the foundation.
Such a standard is quite a
reversal for the group. In a piece published by Media Matters only two
years ago, the organization criticized conservatives for focusing only on
quid pro quo corruption — the legal standard used to decide the Citizens United
and McCutcheon Supreme Court decisions — calling such a narrow focus a “new
perspective of campaign finance” that dismisses “concerns about institutional
corruption in politics.” The piece notes that ethics laws concerning the role
of money in politics follow a standard, set forth since the Watergate scandal,
in which even the appearance, or in other words, the “optics” of corruption, is
cause for concern.
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