As an owner of a small business I have been on both sides of
requests for access similar to those at the center of the controversy over
Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State.
Anytime my company needs to make contact with a company or highly placed
individual, the first thing we do is ask ourselves who might know someone we
could reference. It’s called “six degrees of separation” marketing, based on
the John Guare play. People who want to work for my agency or sell it goods or
services often invoke the name of a business friend to get in the door.
The success of using contacts to gain access doesn’t always
work. When I needed to reach out to the Justice Department on a sensitive
matter for a client about 10 years ago, I called the former campaign manager
for a former Pennsylvania governor and a former prosecutor because I thought
they would know whom at DOJ I really needed to contact. Didn’t help me one bit.
I’ve been on the other side of the conversation, too. To get
a job interview at my firm, one of my very best employees of all time used the
name of someone whom she had gotten through another contact—that’s three
degrees of separation.
Virtually every month, someone on my staff gets requests
from business friends to interview someone or consider contributing our time or
money to a charity. I don’t have much to do with these matters any more, but
occasionally I get an email asking me about a request or letting me know we
said “no.”
So if I wanted to contact someone at the State Department
and I knew someone at the Clinton Foundation, damn right I would call the
Clinton Foundation. And if I’m at the State Department, damn right I’m going to
turn down all these requests. Except maybe sometimes, I might propose a short
meeting if it seemed appropriate, just as I would if it were the chair of
General Motors or the executive director of the NAACP.
And if I were the person responsible for fielding requests,
damn right, I would occasionally write a memo to my boss. It sure would be
embarrassing if HRC met Bono at a party and didn’t know the State Department
had turned down his request for high-level help to arrange a live link to the
International Space Station for his concerts.
Thus, the key fact in the controversy over whether Clinton
Foundation donors got access to and favors from the Clinton State Department is
buried in the fifteenth paragraph of the Washington
Post’s expose:
“State
Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters Monday that there is ‘no clear
sign’ donors received access for their contributions.”
The Washington Post
article gives three examples of requests for access. In two cases, the answer
was “no.” The third case was the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country with which the
United States has friendly relations. The Crown Prince also applied directly to
the State Department. He participated in one Clinton Foundation event in 2005.
In what way is setting up a meeting with the head of a foreign country that’s
an ally corruption? Should a State Department turn down all requests for
meetings from any organization in which a key executive has gone to college
with the Secretary and Undersecretary? Worked for the same law firm? Served on
the same board? Lived in the same town?
Corruption comes not in fielding these requests, but in approving a request for any reason other than its merits.
If there were any evidence—any slip of paper or veiled
reference—of someone calling the Clinton Foundation and then winning a
competitive contract with the State Department or getting their nephew a cushy
job, the Washington Post would have
published it. If a majority or even close to a majority of requests were
granted, the Washington Post would
have noted it and not had a “no” as the result of two out of the three case histories
it detailed. That The New York Times
article used the same Bahrain case history strongly suggests that there was
nothing really problematic in the emails.
In other words, what the emails show incontrovertibly is
that the system worked. Influential people tried to gain access to the Clinton
State Department through the Clinton Foundation and none did, except in those instances
that the Clinton State Department was going to say “yes” in any case to a
meeting request.
As usual, the Clintons are under a much more careful scrutiny
that has not been applied to others. No one has scrutinized the emails of the
Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell State Departments. We swept the illegalities
of the torture gulag the Bush-Cheney Administration created under the rug. No one wonders about the millions of emails
the Bush-Cheney Administration destroyed.
Let’s compare. A few people may have been able to meet with
State Department personnel because they had a contact with a nonprofit
organization that does wonderful work around the world. High-level officers in
an Administration concocted a series of lies to convince the United States to
begin a war that turned into a quagmire and then engaged in barbaric acts that
were illegal under U.S. and international law. Who do we go after?
Or how about this double standard: Do we investigate
Benghazi or do we investigate the 13 separate attacks of U.S. embassies during
the Bush-Cheney years in which 60 diplomatic officers died?
The most recent of these comparisons comes this week. The
right-wing media is putting out false and scurrilous rumors that one candidate
has serious health problems and the mainstream news media is correctly telling
us that the rumors are baseless—using the experts and facts that right-wing
enthusiasts always doubt because it goes against what they know in their hearts
must be true. This candidate released a letter from her physician that gives
her a clean bill of health, while discussing past medical problems; the letter
takes the form and uses the language that virtually every other letter about a
candidate’s health has ever employed. The one exception to this standard format
for medical letters is the other candidate in this year’s race, who released a
letter that sounded as if it were written by an ignoramus, not a physician. The
letter said all tests were positive, which is generally a bad thing and asserted
that the candidate would be the healthiest president ever, which a physician
would never say unless he had personally examined all the others. And yet
except for Rachel Maddow and a few other journalists, no one is questioning the
authenticity or veracity of this letter. And no one has wondered about the true
state of health of this overweight 70-year-old who professes to love unhealthy
food and whose primary exercise is riding a golf
cart.
A double standard for Hillary? I would say so.
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