Why the Clintons just can't quit Clinton Inc.

After years of complaints about shady dealings with mining magnates and brutal authoritarian petro-states, the Clintons are drastically scaling back the operations of the Clinton Foundation. BuzzFeed News reports that should Hillary Clinton win the election, the foundation will no longer accept money from foreign and corporate donors, and will aggressively downsize its operations. The Clinton Global Initiative will be straight up shuttered.

This is a highly welcome development. Yet it does not fully address the problems with the foundation, nor the largely accurate perception that the Clintons are prone to influence peddling. They ought to fully close the foundation, and take further steps to remove themselves from the sway of the rich global elite.

All this comes in the context of the release of a fresh batch of emails showing wealthy donors to the foundation jostling for access to the Clintons while Hillary was serving as secretary of state. As usual, they do not show any explicit quid-pro-quo, and include many instances of donors being turned down for things they wanted. But they still show Clinton's staff going out of their way to arrange meetings between her and various donors, including the crown prince of Bahrain — a nation that would later get a big increase in U.S. weapons exports.

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There's no smoking gun. But the whole thing is... fishy, and seems to confirm everyone's worst suspicions of the Clintons. This, from The Associated Press, is awfully unsettling.

Maybe this doesn't hold a candle to the time Bill helped a Canadian mining magnate (who has donated $100 million to the Clinton Foundation) obtain a uranium-mining contract in Kazakhstan. Perhaps it doesn't compare to the time a Russian hedge fund that was attempting to buy U.S. uranium mining claims (and whose chairman donated $2.35 million) flew Bill to Moscow to give a speech for $500,000 while Hillary signed off on the purchase as secretary of state. It arguably doesn't even rank with Bill's casual chat with Attorney General Loretta Lynch while the Department of Justice was deciding whether or not to press charges against Hillary for mismanaging her email server. (They ultimately did not, which was almost certainly not the result of a behind-the-scenes conspiracy.) But boy does it look bad.

There are excuses and explanations for nearly every individual incident. But taken together — along with the ultra high-dollar speeches given to various Wall Street players — you get a picture of a couple comfortably ensconced in the supranational world elite, who see basically nothing wrong with serving as powerbrokers between wealthy interests. To that end, the Clinton Foundation is basically an old-fashioned political machine where wealthy people can help support the Clintons — and provide jobs for Clinton loyalists on the side — in return for being able to bend the Clinton ears about their views of the world's problems.

There needn't be an explicit quid-pro-quo agreement for this to create a strong whiff of trading donations for favors.

The Clintons have evinced no sign of understanding how living at the absolute pinnacle of the world elite can warp one's perspective. The most valuable thing presidents possess is their own time and attention, and regularly giving that to people based in large part on how rich they are will inevitably shade one's views in certain ways — especially against the sort of large tax increases on the wealthiest people that will be necessary to pay for a decent paid leave program that Hillary says she wants.

Scaling back the Clinton Foundation — which was largely the result of Chelsea Clinton's efforts — is a worthy first step towards establishing some propriety for a second Clinton administration. But if they really cared to address the perception of influence peddling, they'd shut it down altogether, and speak more frankly about the potential downsides to taking money from, say, Goldman Sachs. But given Hillary's squirrelly answers, the Clintons will likely stop well short of that. For them, things are working out just fine. Why change?