Benghazi, Conflicts of Interest in Foggy Bottom, The
Clintons’ Private Email Server, Sidney
Blumenthal, The Speeches,
Whitewater, Troopergate,Paula Corbin
Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Impeachment,
Vince Foster’s suicide, Juanita Broaddrick
and The Clinton Foundation
Current Clinton E-Mail Scandal
What? Setting aside
the question of the Clintons’ private email server, what’s
actually in the emails that Clinton did turn over to State?
While some of the emails related to Benghazi have been released, there are
plenty of others covered by public-records laws that haven’t.
When? 2009-2013
A May report from the
State Department inspector general is harshly critical of Clinton’s email
approach.
What? On September
11, 2012, attackers overran a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador
Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, Republicans have charged
that Hillary Clinton failed to adequately protect U.S. installations or that
she attempted to spin the attacks as spontaneous when she knew they were
planned terrorist operations. She testifies for the first time on October 22.
When? September 11,
2012-present
How
serious is it? Benghazi
has gradually turned into a classic “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup”
scenario. However, it was through the Benghazi investigations that Hillary
Clinton’s use of a private email server became
public—a controversy that remains potent.
What? Before becoming
Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills worked for Clinton on an unpaid basis
for four month while also working for New York University, in which capacity
she negotiated on the school’s behalf with the government of Abu Dhabi, where
it was building a campus. In June 2012, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma
Abedin’s status at State changed to “special government employee,”
When? January
2009-February 2013
What? During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter
Michael Schmidt learned Clinton had used a personal email account while
secretary of state. It turned out she had also been using a private server,
located at a house in New York. The result was that Clinton and her staff
decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and
which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as
personal.
When? 2009-2013,
during Clinton’s term as secretary.
Who? Hillary
Clinton; Bill Clinton; top aides including Huma Abedin
How
serious is it? The
biggest question right now appears to be whether the server was hacked, which
could have exposed classified or otherwise sensitive information. Even if not,
there’s the question of whether using the serve was appropriate. The rules
governing use of personal emails are murky, and Clinton aides insist she
followed the rules. There’s no dispositive evidence otherwise so far.
Politically, there are questions about how she selected the emails she turned
over and what was in the ones she deleted. The FBI has reportedly managed to recover some of the
deleted correspondence.
Blumenthal takes a
lunch break while being deposed in private session of the House Select
Committee on Benghazi. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)
What? A former
journalist, Blumenthal was a top aide in the second term of the Bill Clinton
administration and helped on messaging during the bad old days. He served as an adviser to
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and when she took over the State
Department, she sought to hire Blumenthal. Obama aides, apparently still
smarting over his role in attacks on candidate Obama, refused the request, so
Clinton just sought out his counsel informally. At the same time, Blumenthal
was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation.
When? 2009-2013
How
serious is it? Some
of the damage is already done. Blumenthal was apparently the source of the idea
that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous, a
notion that proved incorrect and provided a political bludgeon against Clinton
and Obama. He also advised the secretary on a wide range of other issues, from
Northern Ireland to China, and passed along analysis from his son Max, a staunch
critic of the Israeli government (and conservative bête noire). But
emails released so far show even Clinton’s top foreign-policy guru, Jake
Sullivan, rejecting Blumenthal’s analysis, raising questions about her judgment
in trusting him.
What? Since Bill Clinton
left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions of dollars for
giving speeches.
When? 2001-present
Who? Hillary
Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton
How
serious is it? Intermittently
dangerous. It has a tendency to flare up, then die down. Senator Bernie Sanders
made it a useful attack against her in early 2016, suggesting that by speaking
to banks like Goldman Sachs, she was compromised. There have been calls for
Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches, which she was declined to
do, saying if every other candidate does, she will too. For the Clintons, who
left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches—mostly
by the former president—proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth.
They have also been an effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill,
Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge?
What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf
of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the
charity, and which would be treated as personal income? Are
there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos—for example, speaking gigs for Bill Clinton on behalf of
clients who had business before the State Department?
What is it? Since the Clintons have a long
history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals:
The Whitewater
controversy (also known as the Whitewater scandal, or
simply Whitewater) began with an investigation into the real estate
investments of Bill and Hillary Clinton and
their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal,
in the Whitewater Development Corporation,
a failed business venture in the 1970s and 1980s.
A March 1992, New York Times article published
during the U.S. presidential campaign reported
that the Clintons, then governor and first lady of Arkansas,
had invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation.[1] The
article stimulated the interest of L. Jean
Lewis, a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator
who was looking into the failure of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim and Susan
McDougal. Lewis looked for connections between the savings and loan company and
the Clintons, and on September 2, 1992, she submitted a criminal referral to
the FBI naming Bill and Hillary Clinton
as witnesses in the Madison Guaranty case. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Charles
A. Banks and the FBI determined that the referral lacked merit, but Lewis
continued to pursue the case. From 1992 to 1994, Lewis issued several
additional referrals against the Clintons, and repeatedly called the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Little Rock and the Justice Department regarding
the case.[2] Her
referrals eventually became public knowledge, and she testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee in 1995.
Troopergate is
the popular name for an alleged scandal in
which two Arkansas State Troopers claimed they had
arranged sexual liaisons for then-Governor Bill Clinton.
The allegations by state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry were first
reported byDavid Brock in the conservative magazine American Spectator in 1993.[1]
The story mentioned a woman named Paula, a reference
to Paula Jones,
who later sued Clinton for sexual
harassment in Jones v. Clinton.[2]
Paula Corbin Jones (born Paula Rosalee Corbin;
September 17, 1966) is a former Arkansas state employee who sued U.S. President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. The Paula Jones case precipitated
Clinton's impeachment and acquittal by the Senate on February
12, 1999. Charges of perjury and obstruction of justice were brought against
Clinton. Eventually, the court dismissed the Paula Jones harassment lawsuit,
before trial, on the grounds that Jones failed to demonstrate any damages.
However, while the dismissal was on appeal, Clinton entered into an
out-of-court settlement by agreeing to pay Jones $850,000.[1]
Monica Lewinsky
How can anyone not remember the infamous blue dress.
The Lewinsky
scandal was an American political sex scandal in
1998, referring to a sexual relationship between 52-year-old President Bill Clinton and
a 25-year-old White House employee, Monica Lewinsky.
During a televised speech, Clinton ended with the statement that he did not
have sexual relations with Lewinsky. Further investigation led to charges
of perjury and
led to the impeachment of President Clinton in
1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives and
his subsequent acquittal on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day Senate trial.[1]
President Clinton was held in civil contempt of
court by Judge Susan Webber Wright.[2]His license to practice law was suspended
in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court.[3] He
was also fined $90,000 for giving false testimony
in the separate Paula Jones case.[4]
In 1995, Lewinsky, a graduate of Lewis & Clark College, was hired to
work as an internat
the White House during Clinton's first term, and was later an employee of the
White House Office of Legislative Affairs. While working at the White House she
began a personal relationship with Clinton, the details of which she later
confided to her friend and Defense Department co-worker Linda Tripp,
who secretly recorded their telephone conversations.[5]
When Tripp discovered in January 1998 that Lewinsky had sworn
an affidavit in
the Paula Jones case
denying a relationship with Clinton, she delivered the tapes to Kenneth Starr,
the Independent Counsel who
was investigating Clinton on other matters, including the Whitewater scandal, the White House FBI files controversy,
and the White House travel office controversy.
During the grand jury testimony Clinton's responses were carefully worded, and
he argued, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is,"[6] in
regards to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual
relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper
relationship."[7]
The wide reporting of the scandal led to criticism of the press
for over-coverage.[8][9][10] The
scandal is sometimes referred to as "Monicagate,"[11]Lewinskygate,"[12] "Tailgate,"[13] "Sexgate,"[14] and
"Zippergate,"[14] following
the "-gate" nickname construction
that has been popular since the Watergate
scandal.
Vince Foster’s suicide. Hillary Clinton relentlessly browbeat
her clinically depressed former law partner Vince Foster shortly before he
committed suicide in 1993, according to notes from a final jailhouse interview
with a former close business partner of the Clintons.
Jim McDougal, a long-time member of the Clintons’ Arkansas inner
circle and a central figure in the Whitewater scandal, passed away from a heart
attack in prison in 1998. But he said in a final interview before his death
that Hillary Clinton had a “hard, difficult personality” and was “riding [Vince
Foster] every minute” about Whitewater before Foster took his own life.
McDougal also described his ex-friend Bill as a “master con
artist” who married Hillary after a “cold-blooded search” to find himself a
politically beneficial wife. Bill, according to McDougal, also privately wanted
to prevent Hillary from succeeding in her own political career. McDougal, who
was convicted of fraud in 1996 in connection to the
controversial real estate partnership with the Clintons, sat for a number of
jailhouse interviews with former Boston Globe reporter Curtis
Wilkie before his death. Many of his statements were reported in his posthumous
1998 book with Wilkie, Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal.
Juanita Broaddrick.
When? 1975-2001
Who? Bill Clinton;
Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters
How
serious is it? The
conventional wisdom is that they’re not terribly dangerous. Some are wholly
spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively
investigated it’s hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary
Clinton’s standing. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal famously boosted her public
approval ratings. But the January 2016 resurfacing of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape
allegations offers a test case to see whether the conventional wisdom is truly
wise—or just conventional. On May 23, Donald Trump released a video prominently highlighting Broaddrick’s
accusation.
Juanita Broaddrick is a former nursing home administrator from Arkansas. She alleged in 1999 that United
States President Bill Clinton had raped her two decades earlier in April, 1978.
President Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, denied the allegations on his client's
behalf. Clinton refused to comment further on the issue. Rumors circulated
about Broaddrick's allegations for many years, but she refused to speak to the
media and, as "Jane Doe #5,"[1] filed
an affidavit with Paula Jones' lawyers stating that the rumors were
unfounded.[2] (See Road to public disclosure.) In an interview with Dateline NBC, that
aired on February 24, 1999, Broaddrick claimed she had indeed been raped by
Clinton.[3]
