No, it's not old baggage from the nineties that didn't even have wheels for God's sake - it's completely new designer luggage, all elegantly monogrammed, some with Hillary's initials, some with official State Department seals on them, and some with Property of the Clinton Foundation on them. All this baggage is all jumbled together and it will take teams of cargo handlers years to sort them out and get them all straight, if that is even possible.
Email doesn't appear to be the only milieu where Hillary thought it was okay to mix interactions involving the public, the personal, the corporate, the charitable, the domestic, and the international - her entire tenure at the State Department appears to be a giant co-mingling of competing interests which both requires and deserves scrutiny.
I seriously question whether any Presidential candidacy can survive such scrutiny but I imagine that we'll all have a chance to find out. The email situation will play in, because Hillary's actions in that arena could make untangling the intersections between corporate lobbyists, the State Department, foreign governments, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton political campaign a Gordian knot of gigantic proportions.
I missed a huge story from the Wall Street Journal when it first appeared. My apologies if it has been diaried about previously, but even if it was, I think it deserves to be looked at again in light of the email revelations and how they play into it.
My attention was drawn to it by reading Maureen Dowd's column yesterday in the NYT. I would say don't bother reading it since it's a waste of time (mostly about shadow of blue dress in Clinton portrait ), but she did drop this one sentence:
Schmidt’s scoop followed The Wall Street Journal revelation that at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department when Hillary was in charge had funneled more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.
I had heard about the donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation during her tenure, which had been expressly forbidden but ignored anyway, but the information about being lobbied by corporations as Secretary of State while simultaneously accepting their donations to her family's foundation was news to me so naturally I went to look for the article Dowd referenced. Here it is:
Hillary Clinton's complex Corporate Ties: Family Charities Collected Donations From Companies She Promoted As Secretary Of State
Indeed, Clinton Foundation money-raising already is drawing attention. “To a lot of progressive Democrats, Clinton’s ties to corporate America are disturbing,” says Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College who once worked for congressional Republicans. Mrs. Clinton’s connections to companies, he says, “are a bonanza for opposition researchers because they enable her critics to suggest the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
The Wall Street Journal identified the companies involved with both Clinton-family charitable endeavors and with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department by examining large corporate donations to the Clinton Foundation, then reviewing lobbying-disclosure reports filed by those companies. At least 44 of those 60 companies also participated in philanthropic projects valued at $3.2 billion that were set up though a wing of the foundation called the Clinton Global Initiative, which coordinates the projects but receives no cash for them.
Mrs. Clinton’s connections to the companies don’t end there. As secretary of state, she created 15 public-private partnerships coordinated by the State Department, and at least 25 companies contributed to those partnerships. She also sought corporate donations for another charity she co-founded, a nonprofit women’s group called Vital Voices.
In the sentence I bolded, it says that her actions "suggest the appearance of a conflict of interest". Really, you think? It's nothing short of incredible. Yes, there is definitely the appearance of multiple conflicts of interests.
The WSJ is careful to add the caveat that "corporate donations to politically connected charities aren't illegal as long as they aren't in exchange for favors" and also notes "there is no evidence of that". It says that donations to the Foundation came sometimes before and sometimes after "Mrs. Clinton took action that helped a company."
In my experience this is some pretty breathtaking stuff. I cannot recall another public official who so obviously conflated public (Sec of State) and personal (Clinton Foundation) roles. Before going off the deep end and screaming "It's charity, dang nabbit!" I get that. That's why it will behoove Hillary to be able to explain very clearly and understandably how her activities as Secretary of State benefitting companies that lobbied her had NOTHING to do with contributions to her family Foundation made prior to or subsequent to those activities and how neither she nor her family personally gained (Take a quick moment and ask yourself based on what you have seen so far in the email brouhaha how well Hillary and her surrogates will be able to perform in this regard.)
I expect that the opposition research mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article will have both right wing and progressive elements examining her ties to these companies very closely and that there will be more than a few stories based on these entwined relationships.
On yet another baggage front concerning HRC and the Clinton Foundation and her Presidential campaign, we have this tangential issue concerning the Clinton Foundation and (ahem!) "troubled" banks that CNN discusses here:
Base Wary of Clinton Foundation's Ties To Troubled Banks
The banks are just an assortment of well known names and some well known charges involving violating sanctions, money laundering, interest rate rigging, tax evasion, yada, yada, yada (yes, that is snark) but still, it does provide some challenges for the Clinton Presidential campaign outlined here by Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee:
"It's fair for voters to be skeptical of Hillary Clinton's speeches about holding Wall Street accountable when Wall Street institutions fund her foundation at the same time she gives those speeches," he said.
"That's a burden that Clinton will have to address by backing up her words with bold action -- like appointing an economic team not beholden to Wall Street and showing a willingness to break up too-big-to-fail banks and jail bankers who broke the law."
If nothing else, it underscores the challenge she'll face during a presidential campaign in making a populist economic pitch to average voters and framing herself as a reformer while at the center of a tangled web of ties to troubled banks.
Expect the Clinton Foundation to come up again and again and again during Hillary's campaign. Be prepared for turbulence and possibly even a diversion to another airport. So, as Bette Davis would say - "fasten your seat belt because we're in for a bumpy flight."
Democrats might want to consider disembarking and flying on a different airline.