Bill Clinton’s claim that Hillary did economic diplomacy because there was no Commerce Secretary
“She [Hillary Clinton] believed that part of the job as secretary of state was to advance America’s economic interests around the world. And, for much of the time she was secretary, for a number of complex reasons, we didn’t have [a] commerce secretary. And now we have got Penny Pritzker. And she’s very vigorous and very good, I think. But we didn’t have one. And so, if she hadn’t been doing this economic diplomacy work, nobody would have been doing it.”
— Former President Bill Clinton, interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union,” June 14, 2015
Former president Clinton, in rebutting accusations that Hillary Clinton helped donors to the Clinton Foundation while serving as secretary of state, made an interesting point on one of the Sunday politics shows — that she had to engage in “economic diplomacy” because “much of time she was secretary,” there was no Commerce Secretary.
This made little sense to us, and it’s certainly easy to check. Was there such a gap in Commerce leadership that it was left to Clinton to conduct the administration’s economic diplomacy?
The Facts
The Commerce Department is sometimes described as the broom closet of the federal bureaucracy, in that it contains a number of unrelated agencies, such as the Census Bureau, the National Weather Service, the Patent and Trademark office, the Economic Development Administration, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and so forth. The notion that the commerce secretary was some sort of globe-trotting promoter of American industry only began to take hold in Clinton’s administration, when Ron Brown became commerce secretary.
The Commerce Secretary, in the department’s mission statement, “serves as the voice of U.S. business within the President’s Cabinet.” Commerce Department Order 1-1 says “the historic mission of the Department is ‘to foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce’ of the United States.”
