Being a Secretary of State or other politician and investing and sitting on the board only means that they thought it presented a reasonable investment opportunity and that they believed they could execute board governance requirements. I don’t think anyone believes Henry Kissinger could do due diligence on technology.
You would expect them to have both a lot of experience doing this, and being able to sniff out problems. I mean, that is what they've done their entire life, isn't it? You'd expect them to be half-decent at it.
Instead it very much looks like they backed this startup because of family and government ties, and one wonders if you'd look, would you find they backed it against advice by reasonable and knowledgeable people? You know "Trump stuff".
Worst part of this is, when it comes to testing many biomarkers simultaneously in a single small sample, there's a metric boatload of startups with credible stories (and testing 1 biomarker in a small sample is a difficult but solved problem. Any hospital can do that now). These startup aren't seeing investment ... and weren't seeing investment before Theranos either, but a lot of them aren't outright scams! They're trying to make it work, and slowly, very slowly advancing the state of the art.
These startups have to scrape together funds that come from testing crime scenes (if you can test very small samples, you can test blood found at a crime scene because only the top layer coagulates, there's a "liquid core" of a few cl inside ...)