Shoes
Showing No Sign of Stopping Dropping
During that same period in early December, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern published two anti-Rice pieces on Consortiumnews.com and appeared on DemocracyNOW! in a segment about Susan Rice with the title: "Beyond Benghazi: Partisan Rift over Susan Rice Ignores Hawkish Record on War, Africa and Keystone XL."
Given Rice's tenacious efforts to defend Rwanda in the United Nations in recent months, one of McGovern's findings raised the stakes for conflict of interest questions:
It
also turns out that Rwandan President Paul Kagame was a major client of Susan
Rice at the "security analysis" firm Intellibridge, where Rice was a Managing
Director from 2001 to 2002. Intellibridge is noted for its jobs program for
former Clinton administration officials, providing them with out-of-government
employment. But this kind of work can also create a clear
conflict-of-interest over the longer term. (Rice moved on to the Brookings
Institution for the rest of Bush's term.)
The same day this story appeared, Susan Rice withdrew from consideration for Secretary of State. And despite more potent explanations, most of the media blamed Republicans. Even an otherwise very smart piece in The New Yorker said nothing about conflict of interest.
In the early coverage, apparently only The Guardian's Michael Cohen touched all the currently known factual elements of the story, along with an overview that this was all just a President being practical: "this is completely typical Obama -- ruthless, pragmatic, cold-blooded" --
Put
all of this together and it raised legitimate questions about Rice's
suitability for the job. None of this is to say that -- had Obama fought for her
-- she wouldn't have won approval. It's quite possible she would have gotten
through the Senate hearing, but at what cost -- both to herself and to the Obama
administration?
Instead
of waging that fight, Obama cut his losses.
Baseless
and Incoherent Republican Attacks
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