The Hillary File: Mixing Money & Politics at State

“Add Jonathan Mantz to call list,” Hillary Clinton emailed an assistant on February 11, 2009. She had been secretary of state less than a month. The email was squeezed out of the State Department in ongoing Judicial Watch litigation. It’s a little vignette that speaks volumes about how Mrs. Clinton mixed money and politics at State.

Mantz was a familiar figure in Clintonworld: a money man, up through the Clinton ranks, in 2009 a newly minted lobbyist for the BRG Group in Washington. His BRG bio notes he is a “leading political strategist [who] has raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career with Democratic campaigns.” Mantz served as National Finance Director for Mrs. Clinton’s first presidential campaign, raising “more than $235 million in an 18-month period.”

Mantz had contacted Secretary of State Clinton at her non-governmental email address about a titan of Democratic Party finance, mega-donor Walter Shorenstein. A longtime supporter of the Clintons, Shorenstein had donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and was a partner in a Clinton Global Initiative project in New Orleans. Mantz emailed Mrs. Clinton: “Wanted to let you know that I received great news from Walter Shorenstein today.”

What was the “great news” a top Clinton fundraiser received from a major Democratic Party donor and was so eager to share with his former boss, a once and future presidential candidate?

Alas, we don’t know. The FOIA fragment ends inconclusively with Mantz on the Clinton call list, like a Beckett tramp waiting endlessly for Godot.

Mantz did not respond to Judicial Watch’s request for an explanation of the email. But based on everything we know about the Clintons’ insatiable thirst for money, you can bet the rent that when the nation’s new foreign policy chief got together with a top fundraiser-turned-lobbyist, the conversation wasn’t about matters of state.