When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in January 2009, she set a historic precedent: a former first lady serving in a Cabinet post. The new job presented an ethical conundrum: how to keep separation between her work as the nation’s diplomat-in-chief and the global activities of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
The potential entanglement centered on the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton’s charitable organization, which raised hundreds of millions from foreign governments, individuals and entities. With Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration, every check written to the Clinton Foundation could look like an attempt to curry favor with the secretary of state.
To get through the thicket, a series of agreements were hashed out between Hillary Clinton, the Obama White House and Clinton Foundation to avoid any conflicts of interest or, as all sides noted, even appearances of conflicts. Hillary Clinton said she would recuse herself from foundation activity, while the foundation agreed to publish its donor list annually and submit foreign donations to a State Department review.
Fast forward three months to April of that year. Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation emails Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. Mills and Band had been involved in negotiating the main agreement that would prevent the secretary of state and Clinton Foundation from crossing ethical lines. So they knew what their bosses, Hillary and Bill Clinton, had promised: to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest.
Nevertheless, Band was writing to Hillary Clinton’s aides on behalf of Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent who had donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. Band wanted some help — quickly. “We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re Lebanon,” Band wrote on April 25, 2009. “As you know he’s a key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp.”
Abedin replied a few hours later that the right person at State was Jeff Feltman, the recent ambassador to Lebanon serving as an assistant secretary of state. “I’ll talk to Jeff,” Abedin wrote. Band’s response: “Better if you call him. Now preferable. This is very important.”
If you’re keeping score at home: Aide to Bill Clinton writes to State Department aides of Hillary Clinton on a Saturday afternoon with an urgent request to provide access to a Nigerian billionaire. Appearance of a conflict of interest? Yes.
This email exchange doesn’t appear out of the blue. As part of the controversy concerning Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, she turned over thousands of “work-related” emails to the State Department. For reasons we don’t know, this exchange wasn’t part of the record. It was obtained by Judicial Watch, a conservative group, through a Freedom of Information lawsuit, one obviously intended to damage the reputation of Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign.
After the emails were released Tuesday, a spokesperson for Chagoury said he was “simply passing along his observations” on the chaotic politics of Lebanon but nothing came of the request. The Clinton campaign described the emails with similarly innocuous phrasing to the Chagoury statement: Chagoury “was simply seeking to share his insights on the upcoming Lebanese election with the right person at the Department of State for whom this information might be helpful.” Feltman told The New York Times he never met with Chagoury or spoke to him.
When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the issue of conflicts of interest focused, laserlike, on the question of fat donations to the foundation, not on relationships that might continue going forward. So, there appears to have been no laws violated here, and no ethical agreement violated either, because the secretary of state was not directly involved.
But the spirit of the separation protocols was breached.
By definition, matters of perception and conflicts of interest aren’t clear-cut. Perceptions don’t drop from above with the force of a rainstorm, they float by like gray clouds on an otherwise sunny day. Avoiding them requires recognizing, and steering clear of, the gray area of potential outcomes, even perceptions only an adversary might see.
Hillary Clinton might well be the next president of the United States. Much has been said about her poor reputation for trustworthiness. The belated revelation that her top aides were violating the spirit of the separation protocols to which she agreed only provokes more doubt.
— Chicago Tribune
