Mika Brzezinski says Hillary Clinton’s long time aide Huma Abedin holding a position at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department simultaneously “raises questions about boundaries.”
Tuesday, the “Morning Joe” panel blasted Hillary Clinton and her aides Cheryl Mills and Abedin in the aftermath of a Washington Post article which revealed that Mills worked as Clinton’s chief of staff at state and held a job negotiating with Abu Dhabi.
According to the Post, Mills worked for the State Department and New York University at the same time while negotiating with officials in Abu Dhabi to build a campus for NYU in the Persian Gulf city. During Mills’s first four months at State, she was unpaid and designated a “Temporary Expert Consultant,” a status that allowed her to receive income from organizations other than the State Department.
Brzezinski explained, “Clinton aide Huma Abedin also received a special status to work simultaneously for the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Which actually I found that more, I don’t know, it kind of raises questions about boundaries.”
Panelist and Bloomberg Politics Managing Editor Mark Halperin insisted these revelations “raise this theme of Hillary Clinton and her aides playing by different rules.”
Halperin continued, “I don’t think anybody thinks it makes sense to simultaneously work for the government and work for private interest, particularly overseas.”
ABC News political commentator Cokie Robertson insisted, “All of these stories just play into the theme that there’s something shady there, there’s something that’s outside the bounds, and the Clintons don’t play by the same rules as everybody else. And the details of anyone of these stores gets lost in the fog of details, but the overall impression has certainly contributed to the fact most voters say they don’t find Hillary Clinton honest and trustworthy.”
Halperin further argued, “Hillary Clinton believes that people close to her get way more scrutiny than people close to some of the other candidates and would-be candidates.” Halperin explained in the future, “You will see the Clinton research operation start to make that point if Clinton’s aides and people close to her, like Cheryl Mills, continued to get dragged into the politics.”
