Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Last week’s revelations about connections between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation should have been bigger news. The latest unearthed emails from the Clinton State Department reveal that the ethical wall she was supposed to have built between herself and her family organization was not impermeable enough.
Two email conversations revealed by Judicial Watch show that staff on both sides of that wall were in contact. Both conversations involved Douglas J. Band, head of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009, when the emails were written, and top Clinton aides.
In the most concerning, Band pressed Clinton confidantes Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to connect Gilbert Chagoury, a major Clinton Foundation donor, with a senior State Department official.
Abedin responded encouragingly to Band’s request. Offering access is providing a favor.
The Clinton Foundation, though a nonprofit organization, is essential to their high-flying lifestyle. It does not matter that Band may have been acting as a “personal aide” to former president Bill Clinton rather than as a Clinton Foundation official, as the campaign now claims.
That the Clintons allowed such distinctions to become blurred is part of the problem. Abedin, in fact, worked for the Clinton Foundation while she was also working at the State Department.
But it suggests that some donors to the Clinton Foundation may have seen their gifts as means to buy access — and it points to much bigger potential problems. Should Clinton win in November, she will bring to the Oval Office a web of connections and potential conflicts of interest, developed over decades in private, public and, in the case of her family’s philanthropic work, quasi-public activities.
As secretary, she pledged to keep her official world and her foundation separate, and she failed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-porous-ethical-wall-between-the-clinton-foundation-and-the-state-department/2016/08/14/f068899e-60b8-11e6-af8e-54aa2e849447_story.html?utm_term=.397383118315&wpisrc=nl_draw2&wpmm=1