Ken Berwitz

How much does the Secretary of State earn in a year?  I don't know for sure.  But I'm pretty confident it is less that $7.6 million dollars.

Why would that number come to mind?  Because if Hillary Clinton is offered, accepts, and is confirmed as the US Secretary of State, that's how much money she is likely to get over and above her salary.

Here are the specifics, from Kenneth P. Vogel, writing for www.politico.com.  And if they don't outrage you, you are immune to outrage:

State: HRC’s ticket to debt forgiveness?
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
November 18, 2008 08:17 PM EST

If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes Barack Obama’s secretary of state, she could wipe away her lingering $7.6 million presidential campaign debt.

As the nation’s top diplomat, she would be barred by tradition and ethics rules from partisan political activity, including raising cash to pay off debt from her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And that could give her a powerful case to make to the Federal Election Commission about why it should forgive her campaign debt through a settlement process not unlike filing for bankruptcy.

“Her ability to raise money would be ended by going into the administration,” said former FEC chairman Michael Toner, who recently served as the top lawyer on Fred Thompson’s failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

In deciding whether to grant a so-called “debt settlement agreement” and close out a campaign committee, Toner explained that commissioners “look at whether you have ability to raise funds, the length of time that’s passed and whether you are otherwise eligible to terminate.”

That means ensuring that there are no pending FEC complaints against her campaign – which is tough to determine since the commission doesn’t publicly list complaints it’s investigating – and that the vendors still owed money agree to forgive their unpaid bills.

Clinton’s outstanding invoices are almost entirely with Washington-based allies and political firms less likely to clamor for cash than mom-and-pop businesses outside the Beltway.

Firms that do a lot of work for campaigns understand that complaining to the press or suing over lingering bills are big no-nos, likely to get them blacklisted, David Louis Plevan, an official with Electrum Productions, told Politico after Clinton bowed out of the race in June.

At the end of September, his firm, which staged more than 500 events for the Democratic senator from New York, was owed more than $300,000 by her campaign. It also owed $5.3 million to pollster and strategist Mark Penn’s firm, $830,000 to her direct mail firm, $250,000 to the company of top spokesman Howard Wolfson and $235,000 to strategist Minyon Moore’s firm.

The Obama transition team declined to say whether Clinton’s debt was a factor in her vetting for secretary of state. And her spokesman, Philippe Reines, deflected a question about whether she would pay back the debt if she was tapped.

“Senator Clinton has said that paying off her campaign vendors is a priority for her, and she remains committed to that goal,” said Reines , adding that the campaign, which reported $7.9 million in vendor debt at the end of September had paid back about $300,000 in the last six weeks.

Overall, though, Clinton has had a rough time raising cash to retire her debt since dropping out of the presidential race. She already missed a deadline to recoup any of the $13.2 million in personal loans she made to the campaign, and her campaign hasn’t paid any of its outstanding bills to Penn or Moore, while it paid back only $17,000 to Wolfson.

It’s common for big campaigns, particularly losing ones, to let unpaid bills linger, sometimes for years (This year, for instance, Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign reported $219,000 in debts, though all of it was disputed).

Still, the size of Hillary Clinton’s vendor debt is unprecedented, and it likely would be the largest debt settlement in FEC history, eclipsing the $2.7 million debt that John Glenn’s ill-fated 1984 presidential campaign carried for more than 20 years before the FEC forgave it.

If Clinton remained in the Senate, she could “just keep reporting the debt and whittling away at it as she can,” said former FEC commissioner David Mason.

“But if she does go to the State Department, obviously that’s off the table, so she may have more incentive to get the debt taken care of right away,” he said, though he stressed that Clinton could petition the FEC for debt settlement regardless of whether she takes a Cabinet post.

There’s not a whole lot of precedent for forgiving the campaign debt of an incoming Cabinet member.

When Bruce Babbitt became secretary of the interior under Bill Clinton in 1993, the FEC forgave $128,000 in debt he had carried from his 1988 presidential campaign. And Mason recalled the case of a former House member who lost his seat and took a Cabinet post in his home state’s government, which forbade him from engaging in political activity.

“The commission took that into consideration in the debt settlement agreement,” said Mason, who posited that Clinton’s debt likely won’t play a role in her decision about whether to join the Obama administration. “It’s not really a problem for her, so going to State is not really a solution, because it’s not a problem in the first place.”

If Clinton became secretary of state, she’d also have to empty her leadership political action committee,  which had nearly $700,000 in the bank in mid-October, and her Senate reelection committee. It had nearly $6 million on hand at the end of September – a lot of which was rolled over from general election contributions to her presidential campaign, which could not be used to pay back her debt. She could give the cash from both committees to the Democratic National Committee, charity or dole it out among candidates.