Hillary Clinton's conflict-of-interest problems

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3. More:

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Thanks to the Washington Post, we have learned that Bill Clinton made almost $105 million giving speeches from 2001 to 2012 — and his biggest fees came from foreign hosts while his wife was secretary of State: $1.4 million from a Nigerian media firm (for two visits to Lagos); $750,000 from the Swedish telecommunication giant Ericsson; $600,000 from Dutch financial firm Achmea; and $500,000 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin.

The former president did take one sensible precaution: He cleared his speech gigs with State Department ethics lawyers. According to records obtained by the gadfly group Judicial Watch, the lawyers approved every one of the 215 speeches that were proposed.

There's nothing illegal about any of that; other former presidents have accepted giant speaking fees, too. Ronald Reagan once picked up $2 million for a trip to Japan — and that was in 1989 dollars.

But there's nothing pretty about that picture, either. Even though the lawyers approved the deals, dozens of the firms that paid Bill Clinton were doing business with the U.S. government at the time. Surely Hillary Clinton's 2009 promise to avoid “even the appearance” of any conflict of interest should have applied to her spouse as well as the family foundation — right?

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