I'll give Peter Schweizer this: Not since the Swift Boat veterans has someone gotten as much press coverage for their critical book about a presidential candidate. And though his book, Clinton Cash, hasn't come out yet, and it may well contain stories that really do point to malfeasance on Hillary Clinton's part related to contributions to the Clinton Foundation, the story this book rollout has led with-about the approval of a sale of a uranium mining concern to a Russian company-has some real problems. I did a rundown at the Plum Line today, but there's one key point I want to focus on.
This sale had to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is an inter-agency group made up of the heads of nine different federal departments. The whole question here is whether the fact that the Clinton Foundation got contributions from people with an interest in seeing that sale approved led to Hillary Clinton exercising influence over the sale. Schweizer argues that you don't need an explicit quid pro quo for something like that to be problematic or even illegal, which is true. The problem with this case is that there doesn't seem to be any quo at all. The guy who was the State Department's representative on CFIUS says Clinton didn't intervene in the matter, and for the moment we don't have any information to suggest she was involved in the decision in any way. Here's some of what I wrote today:
Even if Clinton had wanted to make sure the sale was approved, it wouldn't have been possible for her to do it on her own. CFIUS is made up of not only the Secretary of State, but also the secretaries of Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense, and Energy, as well as the heads of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Labor are non-voting members, and CFIUS's work is also observed by representatives of other agencies like the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget. The idea that Clinton could have convinced all those officials and all those departments to change their position on the sale, even if she had wanted to, borders on the absurd.
Furthermore, the official who was the State Department's representative on CFIUS at the time, Jose Hernandez, told Time magazine that Clinton did not participate in the evaluation of this deal: "Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter," he said.
So in this case, we have no evidence of a quid pro quo, and we don't have evidence that Hillary Clinton took any action at all with regard to this sale, in favor of the interests of the donors or otherwise. In interviews, Schweizer has referred repeated to "dozens of examples" and "a pattern" in which donations are made to the foundation and official action by Hillary Clinton occurs thereafter. His book hasn't come out, so we don't yet know what he's referring to, but in the uranium case, there doesn't appear to be any official action Hillary Clinton took one way or another.
Schweizer was pressed on that point yesterday by both Chris Wallace and George Stephanopoulos, and he gave essentially the same answer both times. Here's what he said on Fox News Sunday:
Well, here's what's important to keep in mind: it was one of nine agencies, but any one of those agencies had veto power. So, she could have stopped the deal. So, what's interesting about this, of all those nine agencies, who was the most hawkish on these types of issues? Hillary Clinton.
So the alleged wrongdoing isn't that Clinton helped the people who gave donations to the foundation, it's that she failed to oppose them, something that the secretaries of defense, treasury, and all the other agencies also failed to do, with or without donations to foundations controlled by members of their families. Schweizer repeatedly compared Clinton to former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, who was convicted of corruption, and Sen. Bob Menendez, who is currently under indictment, arguing that in those cases there also wasn't direct evidence of a quid pro quo. But in those cases there were specific acts that the officials took in support of the person who had lavished gifts on them. In this case, Schweizer's criticism of Clinton rests on the fact that she failed to intervene in the sale, and came to the same conclusion about it as the heads of eight other agencies did.
Anyone who's been reading my work here knows that I'm hardly a reflexive cheerleader for Hillary Clinton. I've criticized her plenty in the past, and I'm sure I'll have grounds to criticize her in the future. But on this particular case, it doesn't seem like she did anything wrong. Schweizer's argument is essentially that we have to keep looking to figure out the connection. But if he can't even come up with the official action that was supposedly influenced by contributions to the Clinton Foundation, then he has no leg to stand on.
Does the fact that the Clinton Foundation took contributions from foreign sources who had interests before the U.S. government warrant some examination? Absolutely. Investigative reporters should check all those contributors out. And frankly, I would be surprised if those donors didn't hope that their contributions would buy them some good will (even if the money was going to good purposes). The real question, though, is what Hillary Clinton did.
It certainly would have been preferable if the Clinton Foundation had stopped accepting foreign contributions completely when Hillary became secretary of state. Given everything that's happened in the past, she had a particular obligation to stay 100 miles from anything carrying even the faintest whiff of ethically questionable behavior. She obviously didn't stay far enough away. But that doesn't mean she actually did anything wrong, at least not in this case.
