Democratic criticism of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, holds a dark lesson for us all: Sometimes it’s just not worth it to tell the truth. In a letter released Thursday, six members of Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee called into question DeVos’s involvement in a “complicated web of political and not-for-profit organizations”—and they prominently quoted her decades-old admission to “buying influence” with donations.

In 1997 DeVos wrote a frankly-worded defense of her family’s soft money political donations. In an opinion column in Roll Call, she stated the obvious: that the rich and powerful DeVos clan donates to Republicans fully expecting a “return on our investment,” and declared she would “stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence.” Because of course they were—and, really, what’s the big deal?