At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its worldwide programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.
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Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told MSNBC on Wednesday that Clinton does not have a conflict of interest with charitable work, and pointed to her rival’s business interests with Wall Street, China and Russian Federation.
Chelsea Clinton plans to remain on the board of the Clinton Foundation if her mother, Hillary Clinton, is elected president this fall, a foundation spokesman said Wednesday.
Hillary Clinton is sidestepping new questions about almost 15,000 recently discovered emails or her family’s charitable foundation – a stay-the-course strategy sure to be tested in the sprint to Election Day. The Clinton campaign denies Clinton ever took any action because of donations to the foundation. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
“Fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton”? “We need to look a lot more closely at Donald Trump“. Their donations to Clinton’s family organization totaled more than $170 million.
The list did not include 16 meetings with representatives of foreign governments who donated $150 million to the Foundation. “This is among the strongest and most unmistakable pieces of evidence of what we’ve long suspected: at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, access to the most sensitive policy makers in USA diplomacy was for sale to the highest bidder”.
Clinton appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s show this week where she joked about the newly released cache of 15,000 more emails the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered that were not disclosed by her attorneys. Trump himself highlighted the latest revelations as proof that Hillary Clinton was “bought-and-paid-for by the special interests”.
“Lie after lie after lie, Hillary Clinton is totally unfit to hold public office”, Trump said.
The AP distorted nothing. But these promises do nothing to relieve Hillary Clinton of obligations or pressures from the other 6,000 individuals who have given the Clintons more than $2 billion in charitable donations. And yes, it is indeed “outrageous” that a US secretary of state would engage in this sort of corruption while holding office.
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This report is creating new perception problems for the Clinton campaign and the State Department, which have both been arguing for days that foundation donors got no special treatment by the secretary, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes.
