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Hillary's 'Clinton Cash' dismissal is dead in the water

Right about the time Drudge Report splashed a link to Jonathan Chait's latest column across its homepage, I got a g-chat from a Democratic strategist: "This is a big deal," he wrote. "My gut tells me it elevates this story to something bigger and more needing of her response. I think this might take away the chance of this ordeal being seen as a partisan witch hunt."

The story in question is, of course, the revelation that Clinton Foundation donations and Clinton family speaking fees may have influenced Hillary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State -- which, if true, would be an extraordinary conflict of interest. In the last 24 hours, The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have all published reports on such possible connections, based off the forthcoming book by conservative author Peter Schweizer, “Clinton Cash."

Just yesterday, The New Yorker's John Cassidy argued that the "Clinton Cash attacks could end up aiding Hillary," because it would enable her campaign to dismiss the book as partisan. Indeed, Clinton and her team have been doing just that. "We are back into the political season and there are all kinds of distractions and attacks," the candidate said on Wednesday. Meanwhile, her press secretary Brian Fallon has been writing internal memos and public posts dismissing the whole thing as an agenda-driven smear campaign."

The fact that Schweizer's revelations have now been vetted and reported out by the likes of the Times, POLITICO, etc., means the Clinton campaign can no longer be so dismissive. And while Chait's column is probably not the definitive nail in that coffin -- "I think the stories themselves achieved that," he told me Thursday -- it is certainly an added blow, if only because it is so damning in its assessment of what he dubs the "disastrous Clinton post-presidency."

"[T]he best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy," Chait writes. "The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles."

Chait also places the "Clinton Cash" revelations in the context of larger Clintonian secrecy: "The Obama administration wanted Hillary Clinton to use official government email. She didn’t. The Obama administration also demanded that the Clinton Foundation disclose all its donors while she served as Secretary of State. It didn’t comply with that request, either."

"The Clintons’ charitable initiatives were a kind of quasi-government run by themselves, which was staffed by their own loyalists and made up the rules as it went along," Chait concludes. "Their experience running the actual government, with its formal accountability and disclosure, went reasonably well. Their experience running their own privatized mini-state has been a fiasco."

In the eyes of my Democratic strategist, this damning critique "gives a VERY strong retort to the argument that the New Yorker said they were going to push... which is that this is a Fox News/Koch brothers-pushed story."

"Now one of the biggest liberal voices at a big liberal mag is calling them out in the harshest terms possible makes that argument nul and void," he wrote.

Chait is more modest: "It's really overestimating my influence to suggest something I wrote changes things," he said Thursday. "Look, reporters are going to ask about this, I doubt the campaign's response will be shaped by my piece in any way."

However, he later added: "I'm sure they don't like having a liberal criticize them. It might, in some very marginal way, help open up more space for a Democratic challenger."