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While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi
- The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/while-at-state-clinton-chief-of-staff-held-job-negotiating-with-abu-dhabi/2015/10/12/e847b3be-6863-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html?postshare=3431444674772998

While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi

For the four years that Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, her
longtime friend and adviser Cheryl D. Mills served next to her as chief of
staff. Clinton has said Mills helped her run the State Department’s
sprawling bureaucracy, oversaw key priorities such as food safety, global
health policy and LGBT rights, and acted as “my principal liaison to the
White House on sensitive matters.”

During her first four months at State, 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 State, she was unpaid, officially designated as a temporary
expert-consultant — a status that allowed her to continue to collect
outside income while serving as chief of staff. She reported that NYU paid
her $198,000 in 2009, when her university work overlapped with her time at
the State Department, and that she collected an additional $330,000 in
vacation and severance payments when she left the school’s payroll in May
2009.

The arrangement, which Mills discussed for the first time publicly in an
interview with The Washington Post, is another example of how Clinton as
secretary allowed close aides to conduct their public work even as they
performed jobs benefiting private interests. Another key Clinton aide, Huma
Abedin, spent her last six months as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in
2012 simultaneously employed by the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global
charity, and a consulting company with close Clinton connections.
Similarly, Mills remained on the Clinton Foundation’s unpaid board for a
short time after joining State.

*[A Q&A with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/10/12/a-qa-with-former-clinton-chief-of-staff-cheryl-mills/>]*
Former Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, second from right, with House Select
Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., second from left, and
ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., left, on Thursday, Sept. 3,
2015. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Mills’s situation raises questions about how one of the State Department’s
top employees set boundaries between her public role and a private job that
involved work on a project funded by a foreign government. The arrangement
appears to fall within federal ethics rules, but Republican lawmakers have
accused Clinton of allowing potential conflicts of interest at the State
Department.

In the interview, Mills rejected the suggestion of a conflict. She said her
employment status was approved by career professionals at the State
Department and was arranged because she initially intended to serve as
Clinton’s chief of staff only briefly before returning full time to her job
as general counsel at NYU. Her goal, she said, was to help Clinton
transition to her new role and then hire her own replacement.

“Here’s what I do. I try to understand the rules and follow them,” she
said. “And I try to make sure that I’m disclosing my obligations. . . . Our
government anticipates that there will be occasions where people are
working outside, so they are earning outside income and doing other things.
What they do is have a framework for how you actually need to follow those
rules. That’s certainly something I try to do.”

She added: “I don’t know if I’m ever perfect. But I was obviously trying
very hard to make sure I was following those rules and guidelines.”

*[How Huma Abedin operated at the center of the Clinton universe
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-huma-abedin-operated-at-the-center-of-the-clinton-universe/2015/08/27/cd099eee-4b32-11e5-902f-39e9219e574b_story.html>]*

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

When asked whether a State Department ethics officer had reviewed the
specifics of her work on the UAE project, she did not directly answer.
Instead, she said that generally the ethics office “gives everybody advice
and guidance on their things, because anybody who is an employee who is
coming in might have any number of things that require guidance.”
White House deputy counsel Cheryl Mills begins her defense presenatation,
arguing against the obstruction-of-justice charge, in the Senate
impeachment trial of President Clinton, Jan. 20, 1999, in Washington. (AP)

A State Department spokesman indicated that Mills was not required to file
a financial disclosure form for the period. In any case, the disclosure she
filed for 2009 reflected the outside income and was signed by an agency
ethics officer after she had joined the department full time.

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 State that would have required
her to consider recusing herself, but said she would have consulted with
the ethics office if one had come up.

Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, declined to comment.

Mills’s service on the board of NYU’s campus in the Middle East was first
reported in June by the Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative Web
site. But the extent of her work on the project during those months has not
been previously reported.

Mills, 50, has been a trusted adviser to both Clintons since she went to
work for Bill Clinton’s White House as a young lawyer educated at Stanford
Law School and later helped defend him during impeachment proceedings. She
has largely kept a low profile, providing legal counsel and other advice to
the couple, including working for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential
campaign. She rarely grants interviews.

In recent months, Mills has emerged as a central player in various
controversies that have dogged Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

She was one of few staff members who knew from the beginning about Hillary
Clinton’s decision to use only a personal e-mail account as secretary of
state. She oversaw last year’s process that determined which e-mails from
Clinton’s account were considered work-related and should be turned over to
the State Department for public release, and which were personal and could
be deleted. And, last month, she testified for nine hours behind closed
doors before the Republican-led House committee investigating the 2012
attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya.

Committee Democrats have indicated that they will release a transcript of
Mills’s testimony this week.

*[FBI probe of Clinton e-mail expands to second data company
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-probe-of-clinton-e-mail-expands-to-second-data-company/2015/10/06/3d94ba46-6c48-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html>]*

Mills’s decision to join Clinton at State in 2009 — as recalled by both
women — was a difficult one.

“She told me she would help with my transition to State but did not want to
leave NYU for a permanent role in the government,” Clinton wrote of Mills
in her book, “Hard Choices.” “Thankfully, she changed her mind about that.”

Clinton also described how she had come to rely on Mills’s counsel over two
decades. “She talked fast and thought even faster; her intellect was like a
sharp blade, slicing and dicing every problem she encountered,” Clinton
wrote. “She also had a huge heart, boundless loyalty, rock-solid integrity,
and a deep commitment to social justice.”

Mills, in the interview, said she could not, at first, envision doing the
job while also devoting herself to her twin children, who were 3 at the
time.

But, she said, Clinton is “a very persuasive woman,” and she found a way to
balance the job with her home life.

Although a chief of staff typically would be part of the “senior executive
service,” Mills was for her first four months assigned a lower federal rank
of “GS-15,” a designation more commonly assigned to career employees. She
was given the higher executive rank when she became a paid employee in May
2009, earning $177,000 a year.

The distinction was important: Federal regulations limited outside income
allowed for senior executive officials, while there was no limit on GS-15
employees. In 2009, the cap for senior executive service employees would
have been about $26,000.

In addition to her payments from NYU, Mills’s disclosures and Federal
Election Commission records show she collected $60,000 from Clinton-related
political action committees in her first weeks at the State Department. She
indicated that the compensation reflected work completed before she began
as chief of staff.

Mills said she was not aware at the time what designation the State
Department had given her. “I had to sit down and say, ‘Look, I’m not
intending to stay. I’m going to be working part time and I’m ultimately
going to transition out. And I want to make sure that whatever is the right
way to do that, I do it that right way,’ ” she said.

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. However, experts said that a dual employment arrangement is
rare at the chief-of-staff level, and that the nature of Mills’s
non-governmental 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 for
decades and is a former head of the Center for Public Service at the
Brookings Institution.

“I’m amazed that anyone would take on such a wide-ranging agenda and live
to tell about it, especially given the competing demands on her time and
the sharp boundaries between the worlds she had to navigate,” he said.

Richard W. Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer under
President George W. Bush, said Mills’s work probably complied with the law
provided she did no work at State that would financially affect NYU and its
overseas campus.

Still, he called the appearance of the arrangement “problematic” and said
he thinks it would have been best handled if State Department lawyers were
“closely monitoring” both Mills’s responsibilities for NYU and the
university’s interests around the world.

“At this level, that you would make someone a GS-15 and yet have them
continue to be a lawyer for a large academic institution or a large law
firm — that I’ve never seen,” said Painter, who is a professor at the
University of Minnesota Law School.

Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer for Mills, said: “When Ms. Mills began her public
service at the State Department, she followed the ethics rules. No one
disputes that she disclosed her work with NYU to the department, and that
the Ethics Office reviewed and certified her disclosure form finding she
had no conflict of interest.”

For Mills, part of the quandary, she said, was that she loved her work for
NYU, which she began in 2002.

At the time, her focus was on opening NYU’s campus in the United Arab
Emirates, a project administered by the private university but, according
to NYU, funded by the Abu Dhabi government. Mills had worked on the project
since it was announced in 2007 and it remained in the planning phase as she
entered the State Department in 2009.

Mills said her responsibilities included negotiating free-speech provisions
for students and faculty, navigating how same-sex and unmarried couples
could work at the university given the country’s conservative laws, and
working to ensure labor protections for workers constructing campus
buildings.

The talks took place, she said, with “quasi-governmental if not
governmental” officials designated by the Abu Dhabi-owned investment
company that was developing the campus.

The issues were difficult, she said, because “UAE’s culture is very
different than ours. So when you are taking a university like NYU and
placing it in an environment that has different laws and different customs
and different rules, there’s a whole set of different challenges.”

The UAE has in recent years become one of the United States’ most important
allies in the Middle East. However, the relationship is complex, in part
because of human rights concerns in the Gulf nation. Abu Dhabi is the UAE’s
capital city.

Mills said she decided to take no pay from the U.S. government during her
first four months as Clinton’s chief of staff because she considered the
job “a matter of service.”

*[Clinton e-mails reinvigorate inquiry into allies who got special job
status
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-e-mails-prompt-another-inquiry-on-capitol-hill/2015/03/09/db3cd3b4-c374-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html>]*

Both during and after the four-month period of Mills’s dual employment,
there were occasions when she seemed to function as a conduit between NYU
and her State Department boss.

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.

NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus accepted its first students in 2010 in temporary
quarters before moving to a newly constructed campus. Last year, the New
York Times reported that construction workers at the site had been
mistreated, in violation of a 2009 statement of values adopted by NYU that
was to govern construction. NYU apologized and promised to investigate.

In May 2014, the school held its first graduation in Abu Dhabi, and Bill
Clinton delivered the commencement address.

John Beckman, a spokesman for NYU, called Mills a “highly valued, respected
and hard-working member of the senior leadership team at NYU” who worked on
“important projects” during her seven years with the university.

The arrangement has drawn the attention of Republican lawmakers such as
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), who has criticized Clinton for allowing
her top aides to work for private entities.

Grassley said Mills’s work on a foreign project adds pressure to the State
Department to release more details of her roles, including any ethics
agreements that governed the arrangement.

“The public should have the information to know whether the State
Department properly manages conflicts of interest,” he said in a statement.
“The rules are meant to ensure that the public comes first and that no one
is taking unfair advantage.”

Mills declined an offer to join Clinton’s 2016 bid and now runs her own
company building businesses in Africa, offering advice to the campaign, she
said, only informally.

“While I appreciate she is someone who has an outsized public persona,
she’s also a very real human being, and someone who is very near and dear
to my heart,” she said. “So I do my best to be a good friend.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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