More Clinton appearance of conflict of interest

"CNN Debate Moderator Was Member of Clinton Global Initiative"

The Clinton Foundation later told Mediaite that none of these journalists were asked to pay the $20,000 membership fee required of  members. However, it's safe to say that access to big name journalists was a key selling point for paying Clinton Global Initiative members. In a nutshell, Anderson Cooper helped Hillary Clinton raise money, and now he's presented as an impartial moderator for tonight's debate.

Then there is this story at the Washington Post.... "While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi"

During her first four months at the State Department, [Cheryl] Mills also held another high-profile job: She worked part time at New York University, negotiating with officials in Abu Dhabi to build a campus in that Persian Gulf city.

At the State Department, she was unpaid in those first months, officially designated as a temporary expert-consultant — a status that allowed her to continue to collect outside income while serving as chief of staff...

Mills reported her NYU income on public federal disclosure forms. She did not reference the Abu Dhabi element of her role on the forms, which ask only that employees identify the sources and amounts of their outside income....

Under ethics laws, employees are prohibited from participating in matters that would have a direct and predictable effect on themselves or an outside employer.

Mills said she didn’t “recall any issues” at the State Department that would have required her to consider recusing herself and said she would have consulted with the ethics office if one had come up....

In recent years, more than 100 State Department employees annually have typically been granted a designation that allows them to hold outside employment, including scientists, foreign affairs officers and Abedin, a senior adviser. But experts said that a dual employment arrangement is rare at the chief-of-staff level and that the nature of Mills’s non­governmental work made her situation even more atypical.

“This is exceedingly unusual, perhaps exceptional in the history of modern federal bureaucratic leadership. I’ve never seen it before,” said Paul C. Light, an NYU professor who has studied government employment in depth...

After Clinton spoke at an NYU graduation ceremony in New York in May 2009, a top university official e-mailed Mills to thank her for her “help and guidance” in getting Clinton to the event, according to correspondence recently released by the State Department.

In 2011, Mills forwarded to Clinton an e-mail she had received from a university official describing a new NYU campus planned for Shanghai.