The New Republic writer Alec MacGillis said the scale of former Clinton aide Doug Band's profiteering off of his relationship with former President Bill Clinton "sets [him] apart" from other former public sector employees who leverage their connections in business Monday on MSNBC.
MacGillis noted the "transactional thing" is common among Washington aides looking to profit after their public service, but few do it on the scale and with the Clinton connections like Doug Band has:
CHRIS HAYES: Like, I guess the question is, there seem to be two plausible stories about the Clintons. One is that they involve themselves in shady dealings, they have these hangers-ons who sort of trade on their name for all kinds of unseemingly transactional stuff, Doug Band one possible story. The other story is they're basically like any other prominent, wealthy, powerful family or figures in America, and our level of scrutiny 100 times higher because they're the Clintons. Persuade me we're talking about the former and not the latter.
ALEC MACGILLIS: I think it's the scale. The amount of money we're talking about here is just on a whole different order of magnitude, because I mean, a lot of people sort of, you know, do the transactional thing, but few do it with some of the richest people in the world. We're talking about private jets flying all around to meetings with a lot of petrocrats and sort of top-level, this is really Davos-level consorting.
CHRIS HAYES: And you guys are basically saying there's essentially this kind of tacit favor trading, even if not explicit quid pro quo, which is I give to the Clinton Global Initiative as a philanthropic gesture, Bill Clinton endorses me to Uzbek ruler and I then get a middle resources deal with the Uzbek government because Bill Clinton essentially played an intermediary --
ALEC MACGILLIS: That actually happened. The other part of it is just the amount of money coming into the Clinton circle is just on orders of magnitude different. Hundreds of millions of dollars in speaking fees. Doug Band is already up to a 200-person company, living in a palatial apartment overlooking Central Park South. This is success on a different level than I think we're even used to.
MacGillis said the "increasing overlap" between Doug Band's private sector endeavors and the "public good" that the Clinton foundation is supposedly focused on smacks of impropriety.
To evidence his point, The New Republic writer relayed a story about how Doug Band was able to use his Clinton connections to attain an increased price from U.S. Postal Service for a building owned by his family: