NewsMax.com
Thursday, February 15, 2001

The Associated Press is reporting that:

New York's new junior senator requested – and now says she has received – the blessing of the Senate Ethics Committee for her $8 million book deal.

It was an after-the-fact request. The deal she made to write the memoirs of a first lady was cut a month earlier – after she had been elected but before she was sworn in.

That technicality – that she wasn't yet a sitting senator – excused her from having to obtain approval of the committee.

The Democratic senator issued this statement Wednesday that the deal had received approval of the committee the Senate has set up to monitor its own ethics:

"I am pleased that the Senate Ethics Committee has found that my agreement with Simon & Schuster fully complies with the Senate ethics rules."

That deal calls for her to receive $8 million, believed to be the second highest ever for a nonfiction book, just half a million below the $8.5 million purportedly received by Pope John Paul II.

The $5.3 million balance of her advance is to be paid out over several years.

According to her staff, the senator has yet to begin writing the book, due to be published in early 2003.

They also say she still hasn't made up her mind which of the more than 40 applicants she will engage as her "collaborator" – a publishing euphemism for ghost writer.

Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project, a watchdog group concerned with ethics, had written to her on Dec. 18, asking that she not accept an advance but rely on straight royalties.

She ignored that but did agree to his request that she run the deal by the ethics committee.

When its decision came Tuesday, Ruskin was disappointed.

"This is part of the liberal permissiveness about public corruption of our ethics laws that has been embraced by both parties," he said.

A few years ago, controversy over a $4.5 million book-advance deal by then House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich prompted him to cancel the agreement and the House to revise its ethics guidelines, barring members from accepting advances.

In the Senate, though, there is no similar ban – so long as a book deal is "usual and customary."

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Sen. Hillary Clinton