The bribery standard
Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals. In his first debate, he famously dismissed the email issue, it being beneath the dignity of a great revolutionary to deal in things so tawdry and straightforward.
Sanders failed to understand that Clinton scandals are sprawling, multilayered, complex things. They defy time and space. They grow and burrow.
The central problem with Hillary Clinton’s emails was not the classified material. It wasn’t the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it.
That’s a serious offense, to be sure, and could very well have been grounds for indictment. And it did damage her politically, exposing her sense of above-the-law entitlement and — in her dodges and prevarications, her parsing and evasions — demonstrating her arm’s-length relationship with the truth.
But it was always something of a sideshow. The real question wasn’t classification but: Why did she have a private server in the first place? She obviously lied about the purpose. It wasn’t convenience. It was concealment. What exactly was she hiding?
Was this merely the prudent paranoia of someone who habitually walks the line of legality? After all, if she controls the server, she controls the evidence, and can destroy it — as she did 30,000 emails — at will.
But destroy what? Remember: She set up the system before even taking office. It’s clear what she wanted to protect from scrutiny: Clinton Foundation business.
The foundation is a massive family enterprise disguised as a charity, an opaque and elaborate mechanism for sucking money from the rich and the tyrannous to be channeled to Clinton Inc. Its purpose is to maintain the Clintons’ lifestyle (offices, travel, accommodations, etc.), secure profitable connections, produce favorable publicity and reliably employ a vast entourage of retainers, ready to serve today and at the coming Clinton Restoration.
Now we learn how the whole machine operated. Two weeks ago, emails began dribbling out showing foundation officials contacting State Department counterparts to ask favors for foundation “friends.” Say, a meeting with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon for one particularly generous LebaneseNigerian billionaire.
Big deal, said the Clinton defenders. Low-level stuff. No involvement of the secretary herself. Until — drip, drip — the next batch revealed foundation requests for face time with the secretary herself. Such as one from the crown prince of Bahrain. To be sure, Bahrain, home of the Fifth Fleet, is an important Persian Gulf ally. Its crown prince shouldn’t have to go through a foundation — to which his government donated at least $50,000 — to get to the secretary. The fact that he did is telling.
Now, a further drip: The Associated Press found that over half the private interests who were granted phone or personal contact with Secretary Clinton — 85 of 154 — were donors to the foundation. Total contributions? As much as $156 million.
Current Clinton response? There was no quid pro quo.
What a long way we’ve come. This is the very last line of defense. Yes, it’s obvious that access and influence were sold. But no one has demonstrated definitively that the donors received something tangible of value — a pipeline, a permit, a waiver, a favorable regulatory ruling — in exchange.
It’s hard to believe the Clinton folks would be stupid enough to commit something so blatant to writing. Nonetheless, there might be an email allusion to some such conversation. With thousands more emails to come, who knows what lies beneath.
On the face of it, it’s rather odd that a visible quid pro quo is the bright line for malfeasance. Anything short of that — the country is awash with political money that buys access — is deemed acceptable. As Donald Trump says of his own donation-giving days, “when I need something from them ... I call them, they are there for me.” This is considered routine and unremarkable. It’s not until a Rolex shows up on your wrist that you get indicted. Or you are found to have dangled a Senate appointment for cash. Then, like Rod Blagojevich, you go to jail. (He got 14 years.)
Yet we are hardly bothered by the routine practice of presidents rewarding big donors with cushy ambassadorships, appointments to portentous boards or invitations to state dinners.
The bright line seems to be outright bribery. Anything short of that is considered — not just for the Clintons, for everyone — acceptable corruption. It’s a sorry standard. And right now it is Hillary Clinton’s saving grace.
Charles Krauthammer is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.
Donald Trump’s supporters can pretend otherwise, but deep down they must know the truth: Trump has been playing them for fools all along.
All that bluster about creating a “deportation force” to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and kick them out of the country? Forget about it. Trump is now “softening” that ridiculous pledge, which he could never have carried out, into a new policy in which “we work with them.”
Hmmm. Work with them how?
All we know of the details, so far, is what Trump said Wednesday at a town hall hosted by Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Now, everybody agrees we get the bad ones out. But when I go through and I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject, and I’ve had very strong people come up to me, really great, great people come up to me, and they’ve said, ‘Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person who’s been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and their family out, it’s so tough, Mr. Trump.’ I mean, I have it all the time. It’s a very, very hard thing.”
Trump talked about how such families will “pay backtaxes, they have to pay taxes,” and claimed that “there’s no amnesty, as such.” If this is indeed Trump’s revised policy, he now advocates the same basic approach as the one laid out in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” reform bill passed three years ago by the Senate — which immigration hardliners derided as amnesty.
Attempts by allies to explain the complete reversal have been comic. My favorite came from Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, who said this on CNN: “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration, he’s changed the words that he is saying.”
That absurdist formulation sounds like something from the experimental writings of author Gertrude Stein — who, come to think of it, gave us the perfect blanket description of the entire Trump campaign: “There is no there there.”
There never was any “there” in Trump’s wild promises, many of which were not just impractical but impossible. No, he was never going to be able to roust millions of people from their homes. No, he was never going to be able to ban all foreign Muslims from entering the country.
Trump continues to claim that, if elected president, he will build a wall along the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. This, too, would be logistically and politically impossible, but I believe he’ll keep saying it until the bitter end. He seems to think he can get away with betraying supporters on the deportation issue by hiding behind his “artistically beautiful” imaginary wall.
I realize that most of Trump’s ardent fans do not take kindly to being lectured by the likes of me. But it is with a certain degree of genuine sympathy that I say what has to be said: Your candidate is a flake. A fraud. A bag of air. A con man. A joke.
I understand the frustration that made the Republican base such fertile ground for the Trump phenomenon to flourish. The GOP leadership spent the entire Obama administration making promises it knew it could not keep — on immigration, the economy, fighting terrorism, repealing Obamacare and so on. This was good short-term politics, especially in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, but many voters became disillusioned with politics and politicians. Enter Trump, a non-politician with zero scruples, who quickly identified which buttons to push — and pushed them like crazy.
I also understand that for some voters, Hillary Clinton is basically, as Trump called her, “the devil.” There are those who will vote for Trump just to keep his opponent from becoming president.
But no one, at this point, should cling to the illusion that a vote for Trump is a vote for any specific policy on any given issue. Having said all kinds of outrageous things to win the nomination, he is now trying — clumsily — to say more moderate things in an attempt not to get crushed in November. I wouldn’t take his new, “humane” immigration stance any more seriously than his earlier draconian pronouncements.
In a sense, spokeswoman Pierson was right: Trump doesn’t actually have positions. He only has words.
There is anger, bigotry and ignorance behind many of those words. But mostly, where substance ought to be found, there is just arrogance and ego. Trump thinks his supporters are suckers who will line up to buy deportation one day and amnesty the next. Some champion.
Eugene Robinson is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost. com.