“I gotta pay our bills,” Bill Clinton said recently when explaining his exorbitant speaking fees. Well, the Associated Press reports on the State Department’s enabling of Bill’s gravy train: “State Department officials gave speedy and sometimes only cursory consideration to potential conflicts of interest when approving former President Bill Clinton’s lucrative speeches to global companies and foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. … Again and again, the ethics office responsible for vetting his appearances hurriedly signed off on them, even in cases where questions had been raised about the behavior of organizations hiring Bill Clinton to appear. It approved at least 330 requests for the former president’s appearance at speeches, dinners and events. More than 220 of those were paid events that earned the family nearly $50 million [emphasis added].”

One example was a speech to Barclays, the British bank that soon thereafter was fined $300 million for violating financial sanctions against Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan. And then there was the time Bill spoke to British-based HSBC, under investigation for — get this — money laundering. It’s no stretch to conclude that Hillary Clinton wasn’t about to use her authority at State to block Bill’s payday. They were “dead broke,” she told us, and that money was helping them just get by.