Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon: An Update

Let me return to my post of last week on Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon.  That post was somewhat over-the-top – and it did not state my thoughts about Secretary Clinton’s candidacy as well as it should have.  Let me try again:

First, while Hillary Clinton is probably the most paranoid candidate in the race this year, it was unfair, at this point, to say that she would act like Richard Nixon did.  (Of course, as we saw in the IRS/Lois Lerner slow-rolling of applications of Tea Party groups, the president apparently doesn’t need to tell the IRS to go after his/her opponents these days; they do it on their own.)

On the other hand, there is one area where Hillary Clinton’s conduct has been more egregious than Richard Nixon’s.  Richard Nixon was ridiculed for saying “I am not a crook.”  But you have to understand what he was talking about.  He wasn’t talking about abuses of power.  (And anyway, his view was that prior presidents had done the same things he did.)  He was talking about taking money and favors – and fur coats.  (There is a reason, in the Checkers speech, he talked about Pat having “a respectable Republican cloth coat.”  Check out the history of fur coats and freezers in the Truman administration.)

Which gets to the point of this post.  For all of the abuses Richard Nixon has been accused of, taking money and gifts wasn’t one of them (except, of course, for the true Nixon haters).  A number of presidents have given speeches for money or gotten gifts after they left office.  Where the Clintons have taken things to the next level is that they are getting serious money between Hillary Clinton’s time in office and her current run for president – and in the case of the Clinton Foundation, even while Hillary Clinton was serving as Secretary of State.  Plus, not unlike her private email server, it is unclear if we will ever know the full story of what happened. 

Let me quote briefly from an article by Reuters last May on contributions by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation, contributions which the Foundation promised to report to the U.S. government and did not:

“The U.S. State Department will not review the breaches of the 2008 ethics agreement Hillary Clinton signed in order to become secretary of state after her family's charities admitted in March that they had not complied, a spokesman said on Thursday. …

The State Department ‘regrets’ that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, but does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. …

Rathke, the State Department spokesman, said the department was not aware of donations having an undue influence on U.S. foreign policy.  When reporters asked how the department could know this without reviewing the belated disclosures, he declined to comment further.”

At least nobody will be able to say they are surprised if (when?) these things happen again if Secretary Clinton is elected president in November.