Smoke and Clinton Ethics

Hillary Clinton has finally admitted that there is scandal smoke surrounding her.

From Real Clear Politics: “In a telephone interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday night, Clinton went on defense to protect her edge in key battleground states as Trump and his new advisers retool the GOP nominee’s general election strategy. . . To maintain her current advantages in the polls, Clinton needs to keep the public’s attention trained on Trump’s negatives, rather than on a growing collection of unwelcome headlines about herself and her husband, which she telephoned the cable news channel to challenge. “I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire,” she told Cooper.”

One of those unwelcome headlines comes from CBS News: AP: Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with Hillary Clinton at State Department

That news report states, “Some of Clinton’s most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband’s political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton’s calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.”

An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial states, “Strange, or maybe not so strange, how the Clinton Foundation and American foreign policy kept intersecting when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.” The editorial also says about Clinton, “Those of us who watched her rise here in Arkansas will know she’s been getting away with ethical shortcuts for a long, long time and the lower she sinks, the higher she rises in the esteem of her fans — or just of those who have benefited from her largesse.”

Roll Call columnist Walter Shapiro states, “The furor over the Clinton Foundation has all the hallmarks of a classic Clinton scandal — lots of smoke, lots of questions about conflict of interest, but also a murkiness about whether anything illegal actually occurred.”

Shapiro goes on to give an explanation for all of the Clinton smoke:

“The idea is to straddle the ethics lines but pride oneself on not actually doing anything untoward. In this spirit, it appears that key donors to the Clinton Foundation got meetings at the State Department. But the favor appears to have been the meeting rather than a subsequent decision to benefit the donor. In a sense, the ethical failures of Bill and Hillary are rooted in hubris. They believe they are smarter than almost anyone, so they are entitled to bend the rules in a way that mere mortals cannot. And since their hearts are pure, they can justify almost any action as a momentary detour on the road to utopia.”

In other words, the expression Clinton ethics is an oxymoron.