You're Being Ridiculous

            Let’s start out with three stone-cold facts. First, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton do not receive so much as a penny in compensation or expense reimbursement from the Clinton Foundation.

            Second, the Clinton Foundation is an “operating foundation” that puts boots on the ground to implement its programs instead of a pass-through foundation that simply makes grants to other organizations.  Charity Watch an independent organization that monitors charities, gave the Clinton Foundation its highest rating because the Clinton Foundation devotes 88% of its revenue to its programs.

            Third, as much as Republicans want to insist that the last 8 years should be described as the “Obama-Clinton administration,” the fact is that Hillary Clinton was only the Secretary of State.  Any authority Clinton had to spend money or take other actions depended on appropriations from Congress and the authorization of others, including the President of the United States.  During her time in office, she implemented the President’s foreign policy, not her own.  All of that is how it should be in a democracy.

            But now such august authorities as the Boston Globe and the Associated Press and other media outlets are complaining about interactions between Hillary Clinton, while she was at the State Department, and people associated with the Clinton Foundation.

            The media is feeding a narrative about Hillary Clinton that has enable Donald Trump and his henchmen to rail

It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for, I guess, the making of large amounts of money. The specific crimes committed to carry out that enterprise are too numerous to cover in this speech.

            The narrative is false and naïve.  It doesn’t traffic in reality at all.  It attempts to hold Clinton to a higher standard than other contemporary politicians.  And because of this kind of nonsense, it diverts attention away from the fact that Donald Trump won’t let anyone see how wealthy he is or the extent to which he’s entangled with Russia or China by releasing his tax returns.

            Let’s stipulate that the Clinton Foundation has a lot of wealthy donors, including foreign governments.  Let’s admit that many of these donors gave hefty contributions.  And though we can only speculate about this, let’s also stipulate that among the motives some of these donors had for giving the Clinton Foundation money was to curry favor with a sitting Secretary of State who seemed a good bet for becoming president one day.

            So what?

            There is no evidence at all in the pile of emails Clinton and the State Department has delivered to the FBI or to Judicial Watch, the right wing organization currently prosecuting a Freedom of Information Act law suit designed to keep this controversy festering and hoping to find a silver bullet it can use against Clinton this fall, that Clinton, her husband or daughter received a “quid pro quo” for anything she did as Secretary of State.  And, as former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will happily tell you, “quid pro quo”  is the standard for deciding on a public servant’s corruption.  Setting up a meeting, says a unanimous Supreme Court, isn’t enough.

            The argument these publications are making is that there was something wrong or improper about people associated with the Clinton Foundation calling the State Department, either for help with a problem or a sit down with either the Secretary or somebody else associated with the State Department.  Bono, for example, wanted to “do a linkup with the International Space Station on very show during the tour this year.”  Like most of the other supplicants, he didn’t get what he asked for from State.

            According to the AP:

the meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

            Let’s parse this out.  Was there a violation of any law or agreement to which either Clinton was subject?  No, and that means that all of the stuff about corruption and criminal activity being spouted by Trump and his surrogates is nonsense.

            Then, what’s the problem?  Well, the fact that Clinton or her State Department staff sometimes made time to talk to people who were also donors to the Clinton Foundation “fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.”

            Really?

            Whose perceptions are we talking about here?

            It couldn’t be the perceptions of the donors.  I’ve yet to see any evidence or even any allegation that anyone who wanted to see Clinton or wanted her help believed that giving money to a particular charity with which she was not associated at the time and from which neither she nor any of her family received money, was a prerequisite.

            The record shows that not everyone who wanted something from Clinton got what they wanted.  And it’s far from clear that donors such as Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Muhammed Yunus or philanthropist Melinda Gates wouldn’t have gotten face time with Clinton without having first made donations.

            In any event, do we really want to say that it’s a problem for a public official to pay attention to somebody who has done something that the public official thinks is morally commendable, like giving a large sum of mnoney to a worthy charity?

            Perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of people who are determined to find wrongdoing on the part of every politician.  If that’s the standard, then everyone who wants to do anything flunks.  It’s always possible to spin every story into skullduggery.

            Or, perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of the media who are either bored with Donald Trump’s mendacity, xenophobia, narcissism and inability to articulate policy or need a way to “balance out” the admittedly awful press he has earned, with some negativity directed at Hillary Clinton.  Clinton’s way ahead in the polls, and unless she gets knocked off her game, she’ll win this election in a walk.  Boring presidential races don’t serve the career interests of the reporters dispatched to cover them or their employers who are constantly in a pitched battle for eyeballs.

            Washington D.C. is a town that runs on connections.  Politicians don’t arrive here through an immaculate conception.  Every    one of them brings every mentor, donor, assistant, boss, classmate, campaign worker, and business associate together with every person any of those people has ever been associated with here when they take office.  To expect otherwise is naïve. To demand that upon taking office they sever those connections is absurd.

            Please, just stop it.  You’re feeding an unnecessary cynicism about government that makes it impossible for anyone to claim a mandate for getting something done once elected.

            You’re being ridiculous.