The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley
things in the annals of government than donors who influence elected officials. But that isn’t an endorsement of America’s pay-for-play networks, in which officials exchange public favors for campaign contributions, book contracts, media hires, charitable gifts and the like. Then we get the shady dealings of Bill and Hillary Clinton that were detailed by Peter Schweizer in Clinton Cash.4
What “ingratiation and access” might look like became clear from Clinton Foundation emails to the State Department, made public only after protracted Freedom of Information Act litigation forced their disclosure. In 2009, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain, sought a private meeting with Hillary Clinton, the newly appointed secretary of state. The request went through normal diplomatic channels, but that didn’t work. Bahrain wasn’t on the State Department’s best-friends list, and little wonder, since Human Rights Watch says that the little sheikdom regularly practices torture and that its human rights record is “dismal.” Nothing daunted, the crown prince turned to the Clinton Foundation, which had received $32 million from him. The foundation’s chief executive, Doug Band, then reached out to Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s chief aide. The two were so close that Clinton saw Huma as her surrogate daughter (but would demote her to “one of my staffers” after the Anthony Weiner scandal broke).5 Abedin’s job at the State Department included taking care of “Clinton family matters,” and while working at State she was also on retainer with both the Clinton Foundation and Band’s advisory firm.6 And when Band wrote her, “Cp of Bahrein in tomorrow to Friday Asking to see Good friend of ours,” that did the trick.7 Secretary Clinton met with the prince, and then, between 2010 and 2012, Clinton’s State Department approved major arms sales to Bahrain, including chemical weapons that would be used to crush pro-democracy protests.8
In another case, Secretary Clinton brokered a deal that helped the Swiss banking giant UBS, which the IRS had sued to force disclosure of the names of the 52,000 Americans with secret bank accounts. UBS had stalled on releasing the names, pleading that this would violate Swiss secrecy laws. Within months of assuming office, Clinton took the unusual step of personally announcing that UBS would have to turn over the names of only 4,500 depositors. Thereafter, UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation swelled: from $60,000 by the end of 2008, to a total of $600,000 at the end of 2014. The bank also made a $32 million donation to the foundation’s inner-city loan program, and paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with a UBS executive. Secretaries of state are sometimes called on to tout major U.S. businesses, but this was a foreign corporation, and a bank at that.9
In surveying the pattern of fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation, Schweizer suggested that the Clintons had put America’s foreign policy up for sale. The foreign countries that supported the foundation, many of them human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, were presumably more interested in seeking Secretary Clinton’s favor than in foundation issues such as empowering women and improving LGBT rights. And if it was favors they wanted, favors they got. Foreign dignitaries, such as Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, were more likely to score a meeting with Secretary Clinton if they supported the foundation, and this was true of private individuals as well. More than half the private people who met with her were foundation donors, either personally or through their businesses. Eighty-five private donors in all gave a total of $156 million.10
That’s a lot of money, but some donors seemed to get their money’s worth. In one example, Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity to the Russian government at the same time that businessmen involved in the transfer donated $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. Simply a coincidence, claimed Clinton, who said she wasn’t aware of what was happening.11 Another foundation donor, Rajiv Fernando, a securities trader, was appointed to the International Security Advisory Board, which provides the State Department with advice on arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation and international security. Its members typically include past cabinet secretaries, nuclear scientists and distinguished diplomats. They have access to the most secret government information, and none of the others had a clue what Fernando was doing there. When ABC News started asking questions about him, Fernando promptly resigned and the State Department stonewalled requests for information about how he was appointed.12
All of this looked very much like a quid pro quo, a contribution to the Clinton Foundation (the quid) in return for a government favor (the quo). There isn’t direct evidence of a bribe, however, but only a suspicious pattern of favors granted against contributions given. So Clinton loyalists say it’s not proved, it’s all innuendo. But in such cases it’s never really proved, unless somebody is wired or the phones are tapped, and even those measures don’t catch the pattern of reciprocal gifts that make up the pay-for-play networks of corruption. As it is, we are permitted to wonder if we’d have learned more about corrupt dealings had Hillary Clinton not taken the extraordinary step of wiping her private emails from her hard drive with a software program from a company that afterward boasted it had “stifled” the FBI’s investigation of Clinton.13
In a very short time, the Clinton Foundation had become fabulously wealthy. It took in $2 billion, with a significant bump after Hillary became secretary of state. Part of this came from speaking fees, $150 million between 2001, when Bill Clinton left the White House, and 2015.14 Often the speeches were made in Third World dictatorships. Speaking fees for former presidents generally decline over time, but Bill Clinton’s fees doubled or tripled after his wife became secretary of state. In one case, he declined to speak at a charity devoted to building schools in countries devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami unless he was paid $500,000. That was a quarter of what the event brought in, and it would have been enough to build ten preschools in Indonesia.15 When Hillary Clinton left office as secretary of state, she got into the act. After she quoted a fee of $300,000 for a speech, UCLA officials asked whether they might get a reduced rate as a public university. That was the special university rate, they were told.16
Then there’s the way the foundation was run. It wasn’t a normal grantmaking foundation that acted as a conduit for passing money to worthy causes. Instead, it was more of an operating foundation, which organized events where others were encouraged to donate money. Its work involved the high-level schmoozing at which the Clintons have been so adept: international conferences, speeches, prizes and the like. In 2013 the foundation took in $140 million but spent only $9 million on direct aid. The rest went toward administrative expenses—salaries, bonuses, conferences, travel and development. Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, looked at the financials in 2015 and concluded that the foundation appeared to be run as a slush fund for the Clintons.17
As if to demonstrate how the Clinton Foundation had become a pay-for-play network, contributions began to dry up as soon as Donald Trump defeated Mrs. Clinton. The Australian government, which had given the foundation $66 million over a ten-year period, announced plans to zero out the payments a few weeks after the election. As for the speaking fees, a wag announced that Mrs. Clinton had agreed to give a speech to Goldman Sachs executives in return for a brand-new toaster.
The more reputable media outlets found the whole affair disturbing. The New York Times, for example, agreed with Donald Trump that “it was hard to tell where the foundation ended and the State Department began.”18 To veteran Clinton-watchers, it was all just the latest in a long list of scandals, from the commodity futures trading, Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Chinagate, Filegate, Pardongate, the impeachment, on up to the private email server. In the past, a record like this would have disqualified a person from candidacy for higher office. That it didn’t do so today, that Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, that there were furious apologists for every new scandal—all this seemed to tell us that we now live in a country where corruption is of little concern. With the Trump victory, we may be permitted to wonder if we were wrong, if Mrs. Clinton’s defeat was a popular repudiation of public corruption. But then it was a near-run thing, as she racked up nearly three million more votes than Trump.
In