The White House on Thursday released new commodities futures records that confirmed that Hillary Rodham Clinton had received preferential treatment from her commodities broker as she turned a $1,000 investment into profits of nearly $100,000 in the late 1970s.
The records showed that the first lady had earned her initial $5,300 of profits without depositing the $12,000 in cash, or margin, that normally would have been needed for the purchase of a contract for 400,000 pounds of cattle.Brokerages are required to deposit $1,200 per cattle contract with the commodity exchanges, and they typically demand that their customers put up the money in case, as sometimes happens, the market moves against them and the customers lose more than their original investment.
The Clintons' lawyer, David Kendall, said the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's records of Hillary Clinton's trading activity were obtained from the exchange at her request about a week ago.
Several commodities experts said the failure to enforce the margin requirements amounted to favorable treatment. But Kendall said she would have been liable had the market turned against her.
"I don't think it was a favor," he said. "She was under margin, that's true, but she was still on the hook. If they needed the money, they could have gotten it from her. They knew who she was. She violated no rules. Margin is for the protection of the broker."
The documents did not conclusively settle questions raised by some commodity experts about whether her broker had improperly allocated winning trades to her account.
"It doesn't suggest that there was allocation, and it doesn't prove there wasn't," said Leo Melamed, the former head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, to whom the White House directed press questions. "I told them I couldn't say it wasn't."