Ultimately, Clinton’s aides prevailed upon her, and she sent Bill and Chelsea Clinton in her place. But this exchange about Morocco, first reported by The New York Post, is the clearest example yet in the emails posted by WikiLeaks of the type of arrangement that people find most, well, icky about the Clintons. Bill and Hillary wanted a deep-pocketed donor to make a large contribution and foot the bill for a ritzy conference, and the king of Morocco wanted access to the woman who, then as now, was the leading candidate to be the next president of the United States. The Clintons didn’t apparently care that, as the Post noted, Morocco had a spotty record on human rights. The State Department has cited the Moroccan government for widespread corruption, and the government-owned mining company that paid for the CGI meeting has been cited for its own human-rights abuses.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment specifically on the episode, instead delivering the blanket statement it issues on all WikiLeaks emails—blaming Russia for hacking Podesta’s emails and asking whether Donald Trump’s campaign was involved in the breach. Yet based on Hillary Clinton’s staunch defense of the foundation as “a world-renowned charity” at Wednesday night’s debate, she would likely argue that the money from Morocco went to a good cause; that stronger ties promote U.S. leverage; and that her record speaking out in support of human rights is well established.

All of that may be true, and nothing in the exchange appears to be illegal. Hillary Clinton wasn’t secretary of state at the time, and there is no evidence in the emails that Morocco gained any official concessions in terms of U.S. policy other than potentially the good will of the next president. But the image of the Clintons seeking out a foreign head of state for cash is not a good look. And as Abedin pointed out, Hillary Clinton “knows it.”

That is why the Moroccan episode is such a quintessentially Clinton controversy. It’s not as if they are tone-deaf politicians. Like so many other “scandals”—from the alleged renting out of the Lincoln bedroom in 1990s, to the pardon of Marc Rich, to Hillary’s use of a private email server—the Clintons seem to know that what they are doing will look bad and raise questions of ethics and corruption, and yet convinced of their own righteousness, they do it anyway. And the fact that these lapses continue to repeat themselves so long into their time in the public arena offers little hope that the next four years of a possible Clinton White House would be any different.

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