HuffPo's Beth Fouhy says Hillary C. has offered three of her trusted legal team to work with the Obama transition team's lawyers to vet the former first couple:
Officials knowledgeable about the vetting said it has gone smoothly and that both Clintons were cooperating fully.
Okay. The article also says that Bill has agreed to take a step back from day-to-day running of his global efforts. Good news there. But that doesn't address the problems that may arise from extant relationships. And so, a little farther down in the story, we get this:
But another Democrat who advised Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign warned that Bill Clinton's business arrangements were more complicated than many people realized. During the campaign, few of her senior strategists knew anything about the former president's business deals and whether they would hold up under scrutiny if she won the nomination, this person said. The adviser spoke on background, not authorized to speak publicly for Hillary Clinton's political operation.
This sounds familiar to me, i.e., awfully similar to things I used to hear during the primary campaign. If Bill Clinton wouldn't disclose the entirety of his business arrangements to his own wife's campaign, what makes us think he's going to reveal them to the transition team of a guy he obviously doesn't like very much?
This is very knotty stuff indeed. Finally, here's an interesting angle on this whole business, also from the same article:
At the State Department, the prospect of Clinton as secretary is creating some anxiety among career foreign service officers worried that she would install her own loyalists and exclude them from policy making. Some at the State Department see her as a foreign policy lightweight, although there is grudging acknowledgment of her star power.
Hard to say how solid that sourcing is. Every secretary of state "installs" some of his or her own loyalists. Career appointees always have these worries when administrations change. But the point about HRC's foreign policy expertise is probably fair -- she hasn't sat on such a committee in the Senate, and the one big foreign-policy decision she had to make as a senator (Iraq), she whiffed. Perhaps strangely, she'd be more suited to running the Pentagon, because she really knows those issues cold.
