The Kadzik Affair: Clintonesque Corruption

Is Washington so scandal-fatigued that no one can work up any outrage over good old-fashioned Clintonesque corruption?

Let’s start with the part that the Times condensed into “Mr. Kadzik tried to get his son a job with the Clinton campaign.” In March 2015, assistant attorney general Peter Kadzik’s DoJ colleague Brian Fallon put in his notice and announced he would become the Hillary Clinton campaign’s spokesman. Come April, Kadzik sent an email to Fallon: “Hope all is well with you, [your wife], the kids, and the candidate. Let me know if you or someone else needs a great assistant; my 25 year old son is ready for [Hillary Rodham Clinton].”

Fallon asked for the son’s résumé. “Within the hour,” reported the inspector general, “Kadzik emailed [his son] asking for his current resume and then forwarded [his son’s] resume to Fallon stating ‘Here you go. Again, thanks.’ ” Asked by the Office of the Inspector General about these emails, Kadzik suffered a sudden and severe bout of selective amnesia: “Kadzik told the OIG that he did not recall sending Fallon the emails requesting a job for his son.”

But that wasn’t the only Clinton connection Kadzik tried to exploit on his son’s behalf. On May 5, 2015, the young man emailed his credentials to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He did so explicitly at the direction of his parents and told Podesta so.

Kadzik, by way of defense, emphasized time and again to the IG that nothing became of the efforts—the ones he couldn’t remember—to get his son employed by the Clinton campaign. Kadzik told the IG “his son was neither hired nor offered a job by the Clinton campaign.” But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Kadzik didn’t exactly get the quick action from Podesta he might have hoped for. His old buddy merely sent the son’s résumé down the line to a couple of campaign workers. The friendship was apparently not enough to ensure a gig for his son on the campaign. But no hard feelings: Two weeks later, Kadzik followed up with his own email to Podesta, a friendly “heads up” sharing some as yet unpublicized DoJ information about Hillary’s emails. Could it be that Kadzik was trying to sweeten the pot by showing how valuable a source of information he could be? One might ask Kadzik that question, but the lawyer’s memory is not acute: He told the inspector general he “did not recall” sending that email.

Kadzik is one of those lawyer-politicos who keep turning up in dubious roles. Take, for example, the infamous pardon outgoing president Bill Clinton bestowed in January 2001 on fugitive financier, Iran sanctions-buster, and epic tax cheat Marc Rich. It wouldn’t have happened if not for the (presumably very well-compensated) efforts of Peter Kadzik.

John Podesta testified before the House government reform committee later in 2001 about how the notion of pardoning a man on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list got before President Bill Clinton. His first recollection of the matter was that he “returned a call from Mr. Peter Kadzik, who had been a friend of mine since we attended law school together in the mid-1970s.” Kadzik told Podesta he and his firm were representing Rich and asked “who would be reviewing pardon matters at the White House.” Kadzik sent over materials arguing for a Rich pardon, which Podesta said “I believe I forwarded to the [White House] counsel’s office.”

Working together with Jack Quinn, who had returned to private practice after serving as Bill Clinton’s White House counsel, Kadzik made something of a pest of himself, calling Podesta again and again, stopping by the West Wing to visit Podesta, asking if, in the waning days of the Clinton presidency, there were going to be any more pardons or commutations. As it turned out there were: On his last day in office, Clinton pardoned Rich.

The Marc Rich pardon is hardly the only shabby affair Kadzik has been involved with. Remember when the IRS was caught discriminating against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status? The agency slow-walked the paperwork of organizations with patriot or Tea Party in their names, demanding they jump through bureaucratic hoops not generally required of leftist groups. The Department of Justice mounted an “investigation” to see whether then-director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner or anyone else at the IRS should be prosecuted for using their government powers for political ends. It was Kadzik who announced the results of the DoJ probe:

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoint,” he wrote. “But poor management is not a crime.” The notion that conservatives were being targeted, you see, was just an ill-founded “belief.” What a relief! Especially for Lerner: “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution,” Kadzik wrote to the House government reform committee.

Kadzik brings to his own defense the same prosciutto-thin slicing of ethics rules that were used to benefit Lois Lerner. Caught in an obvious conflict of interest—giving the Clinton team a “heads up” about developments regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails while trying to land his son a spot on the Clinton team—Kadzik did his best to lawyer his way around, through, and under the federal Standards of Ethical Conduct.

Take the “financial interests” provision of the ethics law: As the IG summarizes it, Kadzik would have had to recuse himself from any Clinton-related matters—such as the email server investigation—that were “likely to have a direct and predictable effect on the financial interest of a member of Kadzik’s household.” What Kadzik told the IG was that, legally speaking, his son wasn’t a member of the household: “[H]is son lived in New York City and supported himself financially.” He proved that by providing a copy of his tax return showing that he did not count his son as a dependent. The inspector general duly concluded that his efforts to get his son a job “with the Clinton campaign did not require Kadzik to recuse himself.”

But let’s look at that a little more closely. His son was employed in New York City, but not entirely independent of the Kadzik household: He was working hourly for the public relations company owned by Kadzik’s wife.

Federal ethics rules are written with the knowledge that there will be clever fellows such as Kadzik who try to outsmart the specific language of the statute. That’s why there is a catch-all provision prohibiting behavior that, as the IG puts it, “would lead a reasonable person to question an employee’s impartiality in a matter.” Without concluding that Kadzik had explicitly violated federal ethics law, the IG “found that his failure to recognize the appearance of a conflict by participating in Clinton-related matters when he, his wife, and his son were trying to get his son a job with the Clinton campaign demonstrated poor judgment.”

You think?

Advocating for Marc Rich’s pardon; helping give Lois Lerner a pass; feeding inside details about Hillary Clinton matters to the Clinton campaign team while asking them to hire his son: To say that Peter Kadzik has a history of poor judgment is to put it very generously indeed.