Thanks to the Clintons, It’s Perfectly Legal for Jared Kushner to be Senior White House Advisor

Liberals can thank a Kennedy-hating law pushed by LBJ for the limits on presidential powers to hire familial relations. Liberals can also thank the Clintons for making White House staff exempt from that law.

The basic upshot of the law, passed in 1967 under the direction of LBJ, was this: if a Kennedy retakes the White House, they can employ all their family in the White House, but not outside the White House in any agency of the executive branch. In other words, you can have the White House, but not the Justice Department too. Who affirmed this standard? The D.C. Circuit in 1993. On whose behalf? The Clintons.

On January 25, 1993, President Clinton established the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. The President appointed his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as the chairman of the Task Force. The Task Force directly advised the President, held public hearings, and met in private with cabinet staff to formulate a health care plan — Hillarycare.

Hillary, shock shock, wanted to keep the records of the Task Force secret. A variety of doctor groups sued to disclose them. In its defense in the case, the Clinton administration insisted the Task Force was exempt from publicly disclosing its records because all of its members–including Mrs. Clinton–were “government officers and employees” engaged in certain acts of privacy-protected policy. The doctor groups opposed that designation of Hillary as an “employee” on grounds the Kennedy-hating LBJ statute of 1967 statutorily barred her from appointment as an officer, colloquially known as the Anti-Nepotism Act. See 5 U.S.C. § 3110.

The D.C. Circuit ultimately concluded open government laws did not apply to Hillary’s actions for the Task Force. It only could conclude that by holding that Hillary was an officer or employee of the White House. It could only hold that by concluding the anti-nepotism law did not forbid such an appointment. (AAPS v. Clinton, 997 F.2d 898 (D.C. Cir. 1993)).

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