The Clintons at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, October 2015 (Reuters photo: Mark Kauzlarich)

The most recent trove of Democrats’ e-mails released via WikiLeaks finally puts to rest a longstanding dispute in Washington: It turns out that Bill and Hillary Clinton are in fact marginally more awful and embarrassing than are their henchmen and hangers-on. Given that the latter group includes John Podesta, Sid Blumenthal, and Huma Abedin, the moral limbo contest was a lively one, but the Clintons managed to shimmy under that very low bar.


One entertaining exchange concerns a planned Bill Clinton speech at Morgan Stanley, to be given shortly after Mrs. Clinton formally announced her presidential campaign. The former president had been enjoying paydays in the high six figures and low seven figures for such appearances, and the Clintons were poised to take their usual approach to such opportunities: Cash the check first, consider the consequences afterward. Clinton campaign chief John Podesta wanted the speech canceled, and Mrs. Clinton’s right hand, Huma Abedin, agreed. The problem was that nobody wanted to bell that particular cat. Abedin finally settles upon the expedient solution — lying to Mrs. Clinton and telling her that canceling the speech was Bill’s idea: “HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech. I will have to tell her that WJC chose to cancel it, not that we asked,” Abedin wrote. We will set aside the obvious question of what this exchange says about the current state of communication between Bill and Hillary Clinton, who are, technically, married.

That Morgan Stanley gig was part and parcel of what Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band called “Clinton Inc.” in another leaked document. He meant that boastfully — boasting specifically of his own business acumen, exercised on behalf of the former president. Band is the co-founder of a money-chasing firm called Teneo, upon whose board both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have sat. (“Teneo” is an excellent name, a Latin verb whose meaning, depending on the context, is either “I know” or “I am grasping.” Grasping is the Washington game, and it is all about who you know.) Clinton Inc. is big business — very big: Bill Clinton’s advisory-board sinecures alone were worth millions of dollars, and his $3.5 million position as “honorary chancellor” of Laureate International Universities, a chain of for-profit colleges, does not seem to have entailed much of anything that might be described as work. Band also was, by his own telling, instrumental in securing millions of dollars in speaking fees for the ex-president while he was wheeling and dealing on behalf of the Clinton Foundation.


Nothing too exciting there: That’s what former politicians do in the 21st century. But this is the Clintons we’re talking about, so things get worse.


Band, who wrote the memo to justify his own value-added after Chelsea Clinton began challenging Teneo’s central role in Clinton Inc. and Clinton Foundation affairs, went into some detail about the ways in which the Clinton Foundation was leveraged to provide private income for the Clinton family. In short, he shook down Teneo clients such as Coca-Cola and UBS for Clinton Foundation donations, rewarding them with private meetings between the Clintons and top corporate executives. “Memberships” to the Clinton Global Initiative, generally requiring a $20,000 investment, were given away for free to prized Teneo clients, in the hopes of securing larger payouts from them in the future. Bill Clinton himself was made “honorary chairman” of Teneo, and the firm used access to the president and his name wantonly, for instance by having Teneo operatives lobby British lawmakers — “on behalf of President Clinton” — on matters of interest to Dow Chemical. It was this use of the Clinton “philanthropic” operations for “hustling” — Chelsea Clinton’s description — that apparently set off her exquisitely well-calibrated propriety detector.


Band, in turn, denounced Chelsea as a “spoiled brat kid.” He also chafed at being obliged to sign a conflict-of-interest contract with Clinton Global Initiative. “Oddly,” he wrote, “WJC does not have to sign such a document, even though he is personally paid by three CGI sponsors [and] gets many expensive gifts from them.”


Dow’s $2.8 million relationship with Teneo in 2011 jumped to nearly $20 million in 2012, which the company’s own internal fraud auditor drew attention to, warning that “it appears Dow is paying Teneo for connections with Clinton.”

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both experienced severe financial problems in the latter parts of their lives, and even the no-nonsense Harry Truman discovered the hard way that ex-presidents have to eat, too. We do not begrudge former presidents who join law firms as rainmakers or serve as highly paid ornaments on corporate boards. Some of them may be unseemly about it, but, in the case of Bill Clinton, private unseemliness is an improvement over his conduct while in public office.

The real problem here is one of dynastic politics.

The real problem here is one of dynastic politics. If Wall Street bankers want to shine Bill Clinton’s shoes, that’s mainly of interest to them, their boards, and their confessors. But if they are enriching the family of the secretary of state — and, alas, likely future president of these United States — then that is another story entirely. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, and so must Hillary Clinton’s.


There is no obvious remedy here. The Clintons have an unusual talent for weathering investigations and escaping the consequences of their wrongdoing even when that wrongdoing is well-documented. Barack Obama’s compliant Justice Department and the Clintons’ self-abasing minions in Congress and throughout the federal government help to see to that, as do the usually byzantine nature of the non-sexual Clinton scandals, which date back to Mrs. Clinton’s extraordinarily successful futures-trading career. Donald Trump, a lifelong buyer and exploiter of political access, is not especially well positioned to explain why what he calls good business is something else when the Clintons are involved.

But the minion correspondence is wildly entertaining reading. We’d say that at least it gives us an idea of what we’re likely in for, but we already knew that, and have known for a quarter century.