This is just not an accurate portrayal of the charge. It isn't that simple, and it's not that people who donated to the foundation had no legitimate business with the State Department. It's that their business was almost certainly prioritized if they gave to the foundation. It is the same issue with campaign finance. There doesn't necessarily need to be personal corruption for massive donations by private interests to have a corrupting effect.
That's kind of a dubious claim, though. "Their business was prioritized" - over what? I'd assume that the Secretary of State is going to prioritize causes she supports in the conduct of her job, which would likewise be represented in the work her foundation does as well. There is a large intersection between global charities and the Secretary's office generally; I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a decent reason why her priorities would be different given the existence of the Foundation.
And yeah I'd say your first complaint applies well to the Republicans, but Glenn Greenwald's treatment of this is certainly not 'arbitrary cynicism' nor is it 'selective outrage.'
Sure it is. We can be cynical about the reasons for these donations, but not their solicitation. The Clintons are calculating enough to sell access to the Secretary (which isn't very calculating), but not calculating enough to promise extra access which she had no intention of granting in order to get more money. We can be upset that someone would take money from repressive regimes, but we aren't supposed to take the fact that it was spent on charity
or the fact that the Secretary of State kind of has to be nice to them for strategic purposes, into account when deciding that this is a terrible thing she did.
The whole line of attack from liberals on this is absurd. "Repressive regimes OMG!!" Give me a break. Their money spends the same as everyone else's.
Again, this is a strawman. Your post here reveals a kind of simplistic view of the matter that forcefully reminds me of idiotic right-wing defenses of the Citizens United campaign finance regime. You don't need this kind of crude self-enriching corruption to know that massive flows of cash into election campaigns from private interests corrupts the political process. Similarly, you don't need clear evidence of quid pro quo (not that you could really get such evidence unless someone was stupid enough to put something in writing, or you could read a person's mind) to know that the whole business with the Clinton Foundation is not how you want public officials behaving.
It's not a strawman, that's exactly what she's being accused of, at least by Trump - intentionally selling access. It's a more interesting discussion about to what degree one can divorce oneself from these things, but one thing I will say, which goes to the whole campaign finance issue - the higher up one gets, the more money one gets from more sources, the less corrupting it is. Campaign finance at the House level is an absolute disgrace - candidates can and do get funding from one single interest. Of course it's going to influence them. Senators, probably in less contested races it's the same thing.
But you start talking about thousands of donors giving a lot of money - whose wins? You can't functionally divide your loyalties more than a couple different ways. At some point the donations are just noise. You keep soliciting them because you need the cash, you probably tell people things they want to hear, but it's absurd to think one's loyalties can be bought for a few million dollars, when they're collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from so many different donors. Even subconsciously, there is no way to assign loyalties based on donations.
None of this is to say we needn't reform campaign finance, or that Citizens United isn't an absolutely idiotic decision. Or that the optics of the Foundation aren't exactly as bad as you're saying. But a lot of critical voices are making arguments that just don't make a whole lot of sense.
Should a Senator refuse to accept his paycheck because the tax dollars are coming from scummy shady people? I'm gonna have to think about this a little more.
This means that to get where you want to go, you'll need either a new amendment to the Constitution or a new Supreme Court ruling, reversing the previous one.
