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Ethics watchdog: Clinton’s State Department door always open to big donors

By M.D. Kittle / January 12, 2016 / News / No Comments

A watchdog group is asking the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “apparent breach of ethics rules” for granting top donors special access to the State Department.

“There’s a growing and disturbing narrative surrounding Clinton in the way in which she conducted business at the State Department,” said Matthew G. Whitaker, director of the nonpartisan Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) said in a statement. “Essentially, if someone wanted access to her, they needed to be a significant donor to her political campaigns or to her philanthropic endeavors, the kind of treatment that ordinary Americans would not have.”

OPEN DOOR POLICY: An ethics watchdog is asking for an investigation into presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s open-door policy to campaign and foundation donors.
The complaint comes a little more than a month after an Associated Press investigation found Clinton opened her office to dozens of influential Democratic Party fundraisers, including liberal billionaire kingmaker George Soros.

Clinton, the leading presidential candidate for the Democrats, also warmly welcomed loyalists from her husband President Bill Clinton’s administration and campaigns, as well as corporate donors to the family’s global charity, according to State Department calendars obtained by the AP.

She met or spoke by phone with nearly 100 influential donors and corporate executives during her four years at the State Department, records show.

Clinton’s emails show that in one case Soros was “impressed” with the level of access he was given, bragging that he could always get a meeting with or a call into the secretary to discuss policy issues.

Many of the meetings, according the the AP, involved heads of companies and organizations that “pursued business or private interests with the Obama administration, including with the State Department while Clinton was in charge.”

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“The AP found no evidence of legal or ethical conflicts in Clinton’s meetings in its examination of 1,294 pages from the calendars,” according to a Nov. 30 report. “Her sit-downs with business leaders were not unique among recent secretaries of State, who sometimes summoned corporate executives to aid in international affairs.”

But her recent predecessors did not seek the presidential nomination of their party. Clinton ran in 2008, and while serving at State was widely expected to run in 2016.

Clinton’s campaign did not return Watchdog.org’s request for comment.

The former secretary of State’s special meetings included a sit-down with Bill and Melinda Gates, whose family foundation has donated more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the New York Times.

Some of the donors dropping millions of dollars into the Clinton Foundation also wrote hefty checks to the 2016 Clinton’s campaign.

Last month, Washington, D.C.-based FACT called for a federal probe into communications during Clinton’s time at the State Department. The communications suggest Clinton gave special treatment to a private mining company as a result of the company’s relationships with Clinton’s son-in-law and donors to the Clinton Foundation.

In its statement, FACT notes that ethics laws require all citizens to be treated equally by government officials, “and that the ethics rules prohibit government officials from giving preferential treatment to anyone for any reason.” The rules also require government officials not have conflicts of interest that do or are perceived to affect their actions.
 

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