Can’t They Get It Straight?
The White House now acknowledges that Hillary Clinton’s highly successful speculations in commodities didn’t end in July, 1979, with a net profit of $98,537. Mrs. Clinton instead traded into 1980, and made a further profit of $6,498. That capital gain was apparently unremembered--and not reported to the Internal Revenue Service--until a short time ago. David E. Kendall, the Clintons’ personal attorney, says his clients have subsequently atoned for their oversight by paying the Treasury $3,315 in taxes and $10,134 in interest.
One reads this latest gloss on the Clintons’ astonishingly involved financial affairs from years past with a mixture of frustration and skepticism.
These responses are unavoidably prompted by the apparent inability of the Clintons, their lawyer, their staffs and all the help they have borrowed from inside and outside the government to get their story straight, once and for all. For weeks the White House has been releasing information about the Clintons’ investments and tax returns. Yet, as the latest revelations show, nothing can yet be assumed to be definitive. Asked about earlier statements about Mrs. Clinton’s trading that purported to be conclusive, a senior aide dismissed them as “inoperative,” surely one of the most inapt word choices of the year. (Two decades ago “inoperative” achieved notoriety when President Richard Nixon’s press secretary used it to disown previous assurances that there was nothing to the Watergate scandal.)
The White House now also concedes that Mrs. Clinton did not, as it had earlier maintained, handle all of her own commodity trades. Instead that was left to James B. Blair, a professional commodities broker and family friend. The White House does, though, continue to deny that Mrs. Clinton benefited from any favoritism. If so, she was either remarkably astute or remarkably lucky, making money in 26 out of 31 trades in an area where, commodities traders note, about three-fourths of neophytes can be counted on to lose money.
What does it all mean? The Clintons are now, presumably, square with the IRS and nothing illegal is known to have taken place. But what has again been shown is that they do have a credibility problem, and with each amendment and extension of their story that problem deepens.
