Clinton's Friday announcement, to accept the publishing deal from Simon & Schuster – a New York company owned by media conglomerate Viacom – could be construed as ethically questionable on several levels, said Ron Rotunda, a visiting senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and a professor of law at the University of Illinois.
"She is more than the first lady writing her memoirs," Rotunda said. "She's a senator with power to affect all kinds of things.
"Will she disqualify herself in any matter related to Viacom? And if she does ... is she depriving her constituents basically of their voice?"
Viacom, he added, was a "huge" and "merging" corporation, whose officials bring "issues [to] Washington all the time."
The financial terms of the agreement are also "huge," according to Carol Schneider, vice president for publicity at Random House Publishers in New York. "It's a lot of money," she said.
A watchdog group, Congressional Accountability Project, asked Clinton on Monday to submit her book deal to the scrutiny of the Senate Ethics Committee because it could represent a conflict of interest.
"You can show your commitment to adhering strictly to Senate rules and other Senate standards of conduct," the group's executive director, Gary Ruskin, said in a seven-page letter.
The letter also was sent to Ethics Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and ranking Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada.
Clinton has reportedly said she will give "some" of the book advance proceeds to charity, but that promise does not "tell anybody how much," Rotunda said, and is therefore an "ambiguous" statement, meaningless until records prove she actually donated an amount high enough to satisfy all questions.
A Senate Select Committee on Ethics spokesman would not comment on the deal, but provided documents that showed royalties and advance fees for books are not considered earned income, and are therefore not subject to the same strict regulations applied to other senatorial sources of money.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott on Sunday said neither he nor the Republican Party would make an issue of Clinton's advance fee. Others, too, have argued there's nothing wrong with a political figure exerting free-market rights.
"Hillary Clinton is free to pursue whatever book deal she can get," said Lee Lerner, director of public affairs at Heartland Institute in Chicago. "There may be some political repercussions, but legally, ethically, I don't see anything wrong with it."
Lerner said most of the criticism for Clinton is likely to come from the media, especially if its members stress the lucrative nature of her book deal.
"A lot of times, politicians ... present themselves as altruistic public servants who are not interested in money," Lerner said. "So she may receive some criticism in the press, and that can hinder one's legislative agenda."
Still others see the conflict going deeper and focusing more on partisan politics.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich faced a similar controversy in 1994, when he was offered a $4.5 million book contract from HarperCollins, a publishing company owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Under pressure from Democrats – especially from Reps. David Bonior of Michigan, Carrie Meek of Florida and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio – Gingrich opted to receive payment for his book in the form of royalties only, accepting just $1 for the advance, according to his spokesman.
"From Newt's perspective, at the time, there wasn't a problem" with his book deal, Gingrich spokesman Mike Shields said, adding the practice seemed acceptable among politicians during the mid-'90s. "But [the Democrats], all of a sudden, they saw an opportunity [to attack]."
That attack, Shields continued, eventually led to the passage of House rules prohibiting members from accepting advances for books written.
Spokesmen for Bonior, Meek and Kaptur did not return telephone calls to explain whether they favored the implementation of such rules in the Senate and for Clinton, as they did in the House and for Gingrich in 1994.
Even without rules prohibiting such advances in the Senate, the ethical questions remain, according to Todd Gaziano, senior fellow in legal studies for the Heritage Foundation.
"We don't want our members of Congress to be bought," he said, "and we don't want our people getting sweetheart deals that show they might be bought. You can make it a free-market analogy ... but most other employers [in the private sector] demand a certain amount of loyalty from their employees.
"Don't run for Congress" if abiding the ethics expectations are problematic, he continued.
Clinton's spokeswoman Lissa Muscatine said Monday, "She's gotten advice from first-rate lawyers familiar with this kind of thing and they are comfortable with the fact that she's fully in compliance with the rules and regulations."
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