Republicans charge that donors to the foundation, including foreign governments and corporations, got preferential treatment from the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Advertisement
“I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right to keep Americans safe and to protect US interests overseas”, she told Anderson Cooper in a phone interview broadcast live on CNN.
“This effort to shield Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation after more than a year of controversy is too little, too late”, Priebus said.
What’s remarkable to me is that no one – not Clinton, not her most loyal lieutenant, Huma Abedin, not Bill Clinton – saw the possible appearance of a conflict of interest inherent in this setup. Half of all of the nongovernmental people Clinton either met with or spoke to on the phone during her four years at the State Department were donors to the Clinton Foundation!
We noted in this space yesterday that a fresh batch of emails showed how the foundation intervened to get a meeting arranged between Clinton and Crown Prince of Bahrain after attempts to work through normal channels failed.
Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Monday night in OH called for the appointment of a special prosecutor amid the discovery of emails indicating a “pay-to-play” scheme at the Clinton Foundation and an apparent lie told to federal agents.
Unlike other charities, the Clinton Foundation spends the vast majority of its money on its own projects, rather than donating the funds it raises in the form of grants to other charities. It does. (That’s for you, my dearest Twitter haters.) But what the Clinton Foundation does with the money it receives isn’t the point here. In an interview with CNN, Senator Sessions, who is a Donald Trump supporter, suggested Clinton used her position to possibly “extort” money from worldwide governments for her family’s foundation.
House Republicans unwilling to accept the FBI’s decision to not recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server continue to pepper the agency with requests for more details of its investigation. After news outlets reported that Clinton told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an interview that it was Powell who suggested she use a private server, Powell accused Clinton’s team of trying to “pin” the blame on him.
Some of the emails were found on the servers of people with whom Clinton or her staff was communicating. That the Obama administration set up guidelines for Clinton while she was secretary of state in no way relieves her of her obligations to uphold her oath of office, nor would any handshake agreement with the White House absolve her of federal laws concerning corruption. Now she says nobody actually went through all her emails to determine what was work-related. “There are no excuses”.
Former President Bill Clinton, left, says hello to Megan Bartlett, of Decatur, Ga., and her 3-month-old daughter Hannah Rice, as he works the crowd at historic Manuel’s Tavern, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2016, during a stop in Atlanta.
There’s also the other glaring problem: Trump is calling the foundation a scam, despite the fact that he himself donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the charity. The Sabans donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation – among the largest gifts to the charity.
“It’s time for Hillary Clinton to come clean and level with the American people about the State Department and foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation”, he said.
Advertisement
On the subject of the Clinton Foundation and newly disclosed State Department emails, let us first dispense with Donald Trump’s unhinged calls for a special prosecutor to investigate what he terms a corrupt “pay for play” arrangement.
