In my foolish youth as a very loud activist social worker in a county agency (controlled by Republicans), I had occasion to take personal leave time and confront the Director of a state psychiatric hospital (controlled by Republicans) on behalf of a fellow activist, employed at that hospital, who’d been subjected to threats and physical harassment including damage to his car.
I was a mere county caseworker, right in the face of the Director of a state institution, threatening to hold him publicly accountable for any further harassment of my activist colleague, and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it… because I was acting on personal leave time, not as a county employee and not on behalf of my agency of employment.
The administrators of my agency of employment, who lived to nail me to the wall (and tried, unsuccessfully, on more than one occasion), similarly couldn’t do a fucking thing about it… because I was acting on personal leave time, not as a county employee and not on behalf of my agency of employment.
As a highly visible leader of a publicly-identified advocacy group, I was uniquely qualified to act in that capacity — provided I did so on my own time. My place of employment was no more relevant than my street address, my religion or the vehicle I drove.
… and even the frat-boy GOP knuckledraggers who, at the time, controlled both my county and my state had no choice but to acknowledge that reality.
According to all reports, Cheryl Mills was acting on her own time and her own dime when she traveled to NYC to interview two openly-identified candidates for directorship of the Clinton Global Initiative, a task for which she was uniquely qualified.
There was no quid pro quo, no ethical compromise and no intrusion into the affairs of the Department of State… except in the roiling, fetid swamp that is the ‘CDS’ (Clinton Derangement Syndrome), an affliction manifested by all self-identified Republicans and their shameless, stenographic enablers in what passes for the “press”.
… and you can count on continued parroting of the ‘CDS’ narrative, across all cable networks, with “news” trailers reporting that Mills traveled to New York (cue B-roll footage of train pulling into platform, ominous music track) to do something-something-we’re-not-quite-sure-but-it-must-be-bad.
THE “PRESS” IS DEAD… but the GOP sandbox imbeciles who live in an alternate universe, deny the realities of the terms of civil service employment and incessantly bleat “the appearance of impropriety” are very much alive… even as they avert their gaze from “the appearance of impropriety” exhibited by their own short-pants warriors — think Jason ‘Snot’ Chaffetz and Trent ‘Banjo Boy’ Gowdy — who unapologetically abuse their “agency of employment”, the U.S. Congress, to conduct amateurish ‘Star Chamber’ hearings which consistently blow up in their faces.
Like the scorpion in the parable, it’s in their nature.