Showing posts with label favors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label favors. Show all posts

Monday, August 15, 2016

A porous ethical wall between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department; Washington Post, 8/14/16

Editorial Board, Washington Post; A porous ethical wall between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department:
"Though it is an exaggeration to claim that Ms. Clinton ran her agency as a pay-to-play operation, the latest unearthed emails from the Clinton State Department nevertheless reveal that the ethical wall she was supposed to have built between herself and her family’s organization was not impermeable enough...
Offering access, even just for sharing information, is providing a favor...
As political scandals go, this is middling, at best.
But it suggests that some donors to the Clinton Foundation may have seen their gifts as means to buy access — and it points to much bigger potential problems. Should Ms. Clinton win in November, she will bring to the Oval Office a web of connections and potential conflicts of interest, developed over decades in private, public and, in the case of her family’s philanthropic work, quasi-public activities. As secretary, she pledged to keep her official world and her family’s foundation separate, and she failed to keep them separate enough. Such sloppiness would not be acceptable in the White House."