Maybe:
A Tennessee congressman said yesterday that he may reintroduce legislation to require disclosure of large donations to presidential libraries, following a report in The New York Sun that President Clinton’s new archive and museum in Arkansas was built in part with millions of dollars in gifts from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf countries.
“I tell you, it stinks,” Rep. John Duncan Jr. said in a telephone interview from his home in Knoxville. “It just doesn’t pass the smell test, what’s going on with these libraries.”
Mr. Duncan, a Republican who sits on the House Committee on Government Reform, first proposed a law mandating disclosure of gifts to presidential libraries in 1999. The measure received little attention until a scandal erupted in 2001 about pardons granted by Mr. Clinton as he left office, including one to a fugitive financier, Marc Rich. It was reported that Mr. Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, gave $450,000 to Mr. Clinton’s library fund while he was considering the pardon.
An overall reform of the funding system would be good, especially given the Rich incident. But if Mr. Duncan goes ahead and tries to do this using the Saudi giving as the main reason, he's going to run head-first into one of the most powerful lobbying shop in the world. Good luck to him.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 11:44 AM
