Bernie Sanders Should ‘Go There’ On Arms Sales For Donations: Influence Peddling Is At The Rotten Heart Of Our Corrupt Body Politic Carrie Miller Follow Mar 13, 2016 · 5 min read

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has thus far been nibbling daintily around the edges of Hillary Clinton’s shameless influence peddling, presumably in an effort not to crack the cookie were she to become the Democrats’ nominee in the fall.

Hillary Clinton and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2012

Senator Sanders has so far micro-targeted his criticism at the lucrative paydays the former Secretary of State racked up by giving closed-door speeches to big banks. (Sometimes Sanders throws in big pharma in for good measure.)

Meanwhile he’s left a baker’s dozen of other ethical questions on the table, most glaringly those swirling around foreign governments donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Family Foundation even as she was signing off on billions of dollars in arms sales to those same countries.

So far, Clinton’s reply to both Sanders’ critique of her taking the speaking-fee money and his related call for her to release the transcripts has been a puerile one-two combo of: “everybody does it,” and “only when everyone else does it.”

Let’s consider “everybody does it,” which, sadly, would probably earn a “mostly true” if PolitiFact were to agree to rate the claim. But two important things keep that statement from being completely true, and both of them are strikes against Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ best candidate for the fall.

The first is that not everybody DOES do it and Clinton has the distinct bad fortune to be running against one of those pesky exceptions to the rule. It’s true, as a member of Congress for more than 26 years, it would be illegal for Sanders to take speaking fees. But virtually nobody imagines the Vermont senator roaming the halls of Congress daydreaming about his cash-out payday.

Well before she started lying about Sanders’ record in debates, 67 percent of voters found Clinton untrustworthy, while 68 percent said Sanders WAS trustworthy, according to Quinnipiac. Undoubtedly, her play-for-pay reputation feeds into that distrust.

Secondly, while many former Cabinet officials DO “do it,” Clinton’s venality is in a class of its own. The influence she peddled between early 2014 and the second quarter of 2015 earned her more than $11 million — a price tag commensurate with a presumptive presidential nominee. Had she been transparent and announced her obvious intention to run, Clinton would have been legally barred by ethics rules from barnstorming corporate conventions and boardrooms around the country, scooping up bucket loads of money and saying behind-closed-doors things she now refuses to cop to.

Yes, the speeches were bad, and yes it’s a winning, easy-to-understand message for Sen. Sanders campaign. But he owes it to his supporters, who have gone all in for him, to go further, and in particular to breach the wall around the arms for donations outrage. Helpfully, it is also a paint-by-number scandal easily translatable to soundbites for the stump.

The elevator version: While she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton accepted donations to her family’s foundation from 20 foreign governments to whom she approved $165 billion in arms sales. Although she had promised Barack Obama as a condition of taking the helm of the State Department that the foundation would disclose all of its foreign donors, she broke that promise starting in 2010 when the foundation closed its books to scrutiny.

As Mother Jones noted in their investigation:

The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses.

To drill down into one particularly troubling sale, Israel objected to the sale of $29B of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which donated $900M to the Clinton Family Foundation just two months before the sale was approved.

(Just what exactly the powerful globetrotting Clinton Foundation is and does is its own rabbit hole, particularly since the most authoritative non-profit watchdog, Charity Navigator, last fall stopped rating it, saying that its “atypical business model,” made it too difficult.)

There will, of course, be those who insist Sanders should refrain from bloodying Clinton’s nose for selling her influence while a sitting Secretary of State. Even some supporters might prefer to cross their fingers and hope he might be able to win without it.

But let’s be clear: to ignore such a potent issue is to leave an unopened can of whoop-ass on the shelf that Trump’s posse is no doubt loading into negative ads while you’re reading this. Yes, it IS a character issue, but it’s also deeply connected to the corruption of our campaign finance system and our quotidian mercantile politics.

Sanders’ “unlikely voter army” has gone all in for him, scraping together precious time and money to help him press for the nomination. They believe Sanders is their best, perhaps only chance, to choke off the influence peddling that undermines our politics and breathes oxygen into an oligarchic business as usual. Doesn’t he owe it to them, in return, to do everything he can to win the nomination regardless of how it affects Clinton’s chances?

Sanders’ revolutionary promise is that if millions of people stand up and do their part, he will help them do nothing less than stop the rotten heart beating in our corrupt body politic, clearing the way for a rebirth. It would be devastating to reach the end of the primaries, look back with regret and wish that we had done more; that we had used every above-board weapon in the arsenal to get the job done.

Carrie Miller is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist whose current day job is Director of Content for a PR agency in Chicago.