If you were to map the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy—the networks of conservative donors, operatives, and journalists who Hillary Clinton insisted were behind the efforts to bring down her husband’s Administration—you’d have to assign Chris Ruddy a position somewhere within it. Ruddy, who in the nineties was an investigative journalist for the New York Post, wrote two books asking whether the death of the White House aide Vince Foster was an inside job. Ruddy has since become wealthy running Newsmax, a low-brow conservative news Web site and magazine. “Hillary Has Second Coughing Spell of Day During In-Flight Presser,” a recent headline on the site declared. Despite his politics, Ruddy seems to have become personally close with Bill Clinton during the George W. Bush Administration. He has given more than a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation, defended the Foundation on Newsmax last year, and blogged on the Foundation’s Web site in support of anti-malaria efforts in Africa. When Ruddy put Bill Clinton on the cover of his magazine, Clinton gave him an autographed copy, with the note, “I hope this doesn’t destroy your circulation.” All of this has put Ruddy in a strange position in American political life: he is, to use the language of the nineties, at once a certified Friend of Bill’s and a credentialled member of the Conspiracy.

The complexity of this position began to matter more this week, when Ruddy surfaced in the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails that were made public. In the summer of 2009, Ruddy was interested in the conservative donor Wilson Lucom’s estate, which was involved in litigation in Panama; Lucom had left his entire fifty-million-dollar fortune to a charity for the Panamanian poor. Ruddy, who had evidently been an executor of the estate, had tried and failed to reach the American ambassador to Panama through Otto Reich, the cold warrior who ran the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean during the Reagan Administration. So Ruddy asked for help from the Bill Clinton confidant Doug Band, who helped launch the Clinton Global Initiative, and who in turn asked for help from the Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin. Band forwarded Abedin an e-mail from Ruddy. “Would be good to do quickly,” Band wrote. “Even a call.” A few weeks later, Ruddy heard from a senior State Department official named Roberta Jacobson. “I apologize for not getting you a response on our position last evening, but we will get back to you as soon as possible today,” Jacobson wrote. Abedin followed up with Band: “She’s the dep assistant secretary for the whole bureau. The Panama desk guy is on leave so I asked that she at least reach out.”

In some respects, the Clinton Foundation story has been one of the most absurd parts of this campaign season. There has been so much attention, but so little evidence of questionable behavior, that liberals have started to complain about the coverage. In a Times column on Monday, Paul Krugman called it “increasingly bizarre.” In the same batch of e-mails, there are multiple exchanges between Band and Abedin but few of serious note. Band helped the C.E.O. of Dow Chemical get a few moments alone with the Secretary of State just before she delivered a speech. He tried to get Abedin to arrange a meeting between a State Department expert on Lebanon and a Nigerian businessman named Gilbert Chagoury, but that never took place. Band wanted to place a young Clinton Foundation staffer at the State Department, but the request seemed to disappear into human-resources limbo. Band seems to have been running some sort of access operation around the Clinton Foundation, but the e-mails show it to have been largely ineffective. For Ruddy, a State Department official offered to explain the agency’s position on an obscure lawsuit, after weeks of delay.

And yet in many of these episodes you can see expectations operating like an electrical circuit. The donors expect that their support of the Clinton Foundation will help them get access to the State Department, Band expects that he can count on Abedin to help, and Abedin seems to understand that she needs to be responsive to Band. This would be a lot of effort for powerful people to expend, if it led to nothing at all. There are two obvious possibilities. One is that the State Department actually was granting important favors to Clinton Foundation donors that the many sustained investigations have somehow failed to detect. The other, which is more likely, is that someone, somewhere along the line, was getting played.

Band generally does not emphasize the favor his partner wants—often he does not mention it—or even that the request be directed to a person powerful enough to grant it. What he wants is a quick response. Others might be focussed on what can or cannot be promised, but he, in many ways the critical figure, is mostly focussed on speed. “Would be good to do quickly,” he urged Abedin on the Ruddy matter. “Even a call.” When he was intervening on behalf of Chagoury, Abedin said she would track down the relevant State Department official. “Better if you call him,” Band wrote back. “Now preferable. This is very important.” What Band seems to be offering to his partners is not actual influence over policy. It is the sensation of access. Maybe the donors are the ones getting played.

The atmosphere of a scam has surrounded the Clinton Foundation since early in its history, most notably in the case of Raffaello Follieri. Follieri, a young Italian man with the hair of a game-show host, arrived in New York in 2005, advertising himself as a real-estate investor working to sell off Catholic Church properties. Quickly, he managed to arrange an introduction with Band, who was soliciting Italian donors to the Clinton Foundation and connected Follieri with some of the former President’s supplicants. A meeting was arranged with the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, though Slim wisely passed on any joint venture, and then with the billionaire real-estate investor Michael Cooper, who put six million dollars into a Follieri project (which soon went bust). Band invoiced Cooper for two hundred thousand dollars, a finder’s fee. Another Clinton confidant, Ron Burkle, put a hundred and five million dollars into a real-estate fund with Follieri, though Burkle took steps to limit his own exposure.

Follieri turned out to be a con man, in the most specific sense of the term. According to Michael Shnayerson’s reporting in Vanity Fair, he kept ecclesiastical garments in his personal office, so that confederates could pose as senior Vatican officials to impress investors. This probably should have been obvious earlier. Follieri seemed to have had a very young person’s idea of how a wealthy person behaved: he was obnoxious to waiters and berated his secretary, an Italian-born woman who “lived with her mother in Queens.” This scandal took place in New York at the height of the financial boom—and involved the actress Anne Hathaway, who for several years was Follieri’s girlfriend—so it wasn’t only a story about Band and the Clinton Foundation. But, in retrospect, some patterns are apparent.