You probably saw the big scoop last week from the Associated Press (Stephen Hayes writes about it elsewhere in this issue). As the AP reported, “At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with [Hillary] Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs. . . . Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.”
As with all stories about Clinton World—whether it’s the foundation, the speaking fees (Bill’s and Hillary’s both), or any other variety of buck-raking, the amounts involved are somewhat breathtaking, even by Washington standards.
As it happens, we were also reminded by an old friend last week of a scandal that made big headlines 30 years ago and had Washington and the media all hot and bothered for a season: Attorney General Ed Meese’s failure either to divest himself of telephone-company stock or to recuse himself from Justice Department deliberations over the future of the so-called Baby Bells. The precise details are as eye-glazing now as they were then. But the amount of money that caused all the heavy-breathing by Meese’s critics is what caught our eye. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1988, “Meese’s financial-disclosure filings show that at the time he was meeting with the representatives of the phone firms in 1985 and 1986, he and his wife, Ursula, held legal title to as many as 119 shares of stock in the seven ‘Baby Bell’ companies created by the 1984 breakup of AT&T. The stock was worth about $14,000 when the Meeses sold it late last year.”
In case you’re wondering, we didn’t leave off any zeroes. The figure was fourteen-thousand dollars. Truly, it was a different era, not to mention a different party in power
