Documents obtained by Politico reveal that requests made by Bill Clinton to deliver paid speeches in questionable circumstances, “a proposed China speech and one consulting deal with a major player in Middle East policy,” were easily and quickly approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. In fact, despite hundreds of requests, not a single case appears where the State Department explicitly rejected a Bill Clinton speech. Rather, “the records show State Department lawyers acted on sparse information about business proposals and speech requests and were under the gun to approve the proposals promptly.” Additionally, “the ethics agreement did not require that Clinton provide the estimated income from his private arrangements, making it difficult for ethics officials to tell whether his services were properly valued.” Politico,
The records also highlight a blind spot in the ethics deal the Clintons and the Obama transition team hammered out in 2008 with the involvement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: While the pact subjected Bill Clinton’s moneymaking activities to official review, it imposed no vetting on donations to the Clinton Foundation by individuals or private companies in the U.S. or abroad…
Doubts also remain about the transparency of the ethics deal. Obtaining details on how the approval process played out in practice has been difficult and slow. For nearly three years after POLITICO filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records in late 2009, the State Department released no information.
Leave a Reply