Bill takes vow of silence for sake of Hillary's job

Hillary Clinton to be named today as US Secretary of State. (Extract from The Independent, UK, 2 Dec 2008)

Barack Obama will hold a veto over Bill Clinton's $400,000-a-pop speaking engagements under a detailed legal deal that allows the former president's wife, Hillary Clinton, to become Secretary of State.

The President-elect will unveil his national security team today, gambling that appointing the former first lady as foreign policy chief will restore some heft to American diplomacy.
To prevent the announcement getting bogged down in the Clinton soap opera, aides to Mr Obama revealed details of the agreement with Mr Clinton, whose post-White House business and philanthropic dealings threaten to expose a thicket of conflicts of interest.
The vetting of Mrs Clinton for the State Department job turned into a detailed examination of the funding of Mr Clinton's charitable foundation and of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which works to find solutions to Aids, climate change and poverty.

The former president will reveal the names of 200,000 donors to the two institutions and publish details of future contributions. US law does not require such disclosures but Mr Clinton's refusal to do so was exploited by opponents of his wife's bid for the presidency, including Mr Obama, who said during the primaries that the Clintons were "veterans of non-disclosure".
With Mrs Clinton at the State department, her husband's business dealings had threatened to be an even more serious embarrassment.

Read the article in full here.

Clinton signs for Obama's dream team

From The Independent, UK, 22 Nov 2008

"Hillary Clinton has finally agreed to become President-elect Barack Obama’s Secretary of State and spearhead efforts to restore America’s credibility in the world.
Once confirmed, Mrs Clinton will be the highest-ranking cabinet official in the next administration and she is expected to become a powerful diplomatic force, dealing with some of the international community’s most intractable problems, including terrorism and climate change.

News of her readiness to accept the job came as the Obama transition team said that the new Treasury Secretary will be Timothy Geithner, a decision that sent stocks soaring. He is highly respected and will replace Hank Paulson. This transition is the most sensitive because of the magnitude of the credit crisis, and markets have become increasingly concerned that there is a power vacuum at the heart of economic policy, just when new initiatives are needed to stop the world sliding into a deep recession.

The Dow Jones index jumped 6.5 per cent on the news that Mr Obama was ready to announce his economic team next week. New Mexico’s Governor, Bill Richardson, is to be named Commerce Secretary. Mr Obama passed over Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, whose subsequent tenure as president of Harvard University ended in controversy over remarks about women’s aptitude for the sciences. However, Mr Summers will be an economic adviser to the White House and was tipped last night as a future chairman of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank.

Expectations are already building that a combination of Mrs Clinton’s experience and the force of her personality could achieve what her husband failed to do and lay the foundations for a Middle East peace settlement. She has shown herself to be extremely hawkish on the subject of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and on the campaign trail for the presidency once threatened the regime with nuclear annihilation".

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