Ethicists: Clinton team violated ‘spirit’ of pledge
Emails suggest aides were catering to Clinton foundation donors.
An April 2009 exchange between Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band and two of Clinton’s top State Department aides concerning a major foundation donor is the latest in a succession of emails suggesting Clinton staffers violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the ethics agreement Clinton had signed just months earlier.
.. Either way, the foundation was seeking special access for a donor — itself a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the pledge Clinton and top foundation officials had signed, according to several ethicists.
.. Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said that the actual language of the pledge is “not surprisingly, very lawyerly … [and] there is an argument to be made that Clinton herself has not violated what was in the pledge.”
.. “The Clinton Foundation was taking money from anybody who would give it, and the biggest contributions were from people who had business before the State Department,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen.
.. Clinton herself argued during her confirmation hearings that there was no real conflict, since neither she nor her husband had a financial interest in the foundation. And the campaign’s response to the latest email batch — emphasizing that Band was working in his role as an aide to Bill Clinton, not an employee of the foundation — similarly hinges on obscure legal reasoning.
.. “and of course many of the ambassadors are themselves contributors to the president’s political party.”