The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation has a new, shorter list of the foreign governments whose money it will take, the Wall Street Journal reported. This is unsatisfying for anyone who thinks that the number of names on that list should be zero, now that Hillary Clinton is running for President. If she wants to be a champion for ordinary Americans, as she said in a video released last weekend, why let one of the first stories after her announcement be that the foundation with her name on it takes checks from officials in other countries?
The answer seems to lie in a certain conception of what corruption is, and isn't. The choice of countries whose money is good is telling: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway can all continue to give money, as they have been doing. The countries that, though they've given money in the past two years, will have to wrap up their business include Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Other non-approved past donor countries are Algeria, Brunei, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Kuwait, and Taiwan. The foundation’s statement on the change, on its Web site, does not specify the reasons that some made the cut and others didn’t. Perhaps the rationale is, as many press reports assumed, a guess about each country’s potential for controversy. Voters might not mind a picture of Bill hanging out with Crown Prince Haakon of Norway as much as one with the Sultan of Brunei. And there are particular reasons to avoid taking money from authoritarians, or states that ignore, say, women’s rights, which Clinton is making one of her signature issues. "British funds" in a headline does have a different ring from "Saudi cash.” But either could still be rendered as “foreign cash,” and that remains, at the very least, indecorous when one is running for President. Beyond appearances, the theory seems to be that nice countries, like nice, respectable, well-situated people, are not corrupt. For a transaction to be corrupt, from this perspective, one of the parties has to be in some way marginal, whether financially, politically, socially, or ideologically. The Dutch are doing fine—they don't need anything, and it's inappropriate to question their generosity. The Clintons are doing well, too; Bill has earned more than a hundred million dollars in speaker fees, and the Clinton Foundation has taken in more than two billion dollars from various sources. They don't need the Dutch. The very surfeit of money is taken as a guarantee of honesty. One could call it a Clintonian view, except that it is, increasingly, an American one.
And yet even northern Europeans have policy priorities. So do billionaires who might otherwise be said to have everything; what donors want can be different from what, objectively, they might need. It is wrong to ignore the way a world view, or simple access, can be bought and sold. This is true of campaign finance across the board, but there is something particularly disorienting about the size and geographic scope of the Clinton operation. And it is strange, going into the 2016 Presidential campaign, that Hillary Clinton isn’t more wary of that.
Instead, the Clintons act as though the injustice of the second-guessing about the foundation's finances—and the family's own—is manifest. Every time there is a story about the foundation's money, its spokesmen emphasize that it exceeds legal requirements for transparency. One change, with Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, is that it will now release the names of its donors quarterly, rather than annually; she is also stepping down from the board. A spokesman told the Journal, "By implementing this new, even stronger and more transparent policy, the Clinton Foundation is reinforcing its commitment to accountability while protecting programs that are improving the lives of millions of people around the world.” Attack the fund-raising, in other words, and you are attacking efforts to help the poor. Presented with a conflict, the Clintons just don't seem to see why they should have to make a choice.
A couple of weeks ago, the Times had a story about how Eaglevale Partners, the hedge fund co-founded by Chelsea Clinton's husband, Marc Mezvinsky, had investors who were also supporters of the Clintons. The people the paper spoke to emphasized that the amounts in question were not large, in terms of the fund, which managed four hundred million dollars—one person had put in a million, for example, suggesting, again, that people in the Clintons’ circles have lost track of what is a large or a small amount. And, the Times noted, "Clinton supporters also say there are more direct ways to cultivate favor with the family, such as giving to the foundation, where Chelsea Clinton is vice chairwoman, than by investing with a hedge fund that her husband co-founded." There has long been a belief in American politics that a wealthy person who runs for office is more likely to be honest because bribes won't tempt him—this is the Bloomberg model. What is distinct about the Clintons is that their wealth comes from such sources as speaking fees, book advances, and board memberships—that is, from trading in on their political aura and experience, if not simply selling access. That may be what Presidential retirement looks like. But it creates certain conceptual and ethical difficulties, and Hillary Clinton can't ignore that.
When Clinton served as Secretary of State, the foundation had a policy limiting foreign-government money to avoid conflicts, but there were plenty of gaps, and at least one case in which the rules were broken. (It involved Algeria, and the foundation said that it was an oversight.) Those limits were dropped when she left State, which was also when she added her name to the foundation. Because loopholes seem to matter, here are a few: under the new policy, foreign governments can still pay for their ministers to attend the Clinton Global Initiative; that costs twenty thousand dollars a person, and, again, the Clinton defense might be that, though this seems like significant money, it's not, really, in the context of the C.G.I. And the rules have to do with government entities, not foreigners per se. Of course, the distinction between public officials and people with influence can be vague in some countries, including this one.
