Donald Trump distorted the facts about former secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails when he said in Texas that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation found thousands [of emails] she never turned over, and now just recently found another 15,000 more”.
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The Clinton campaign figures her late-summer advantage gives her few incentives to personally push back against the email criticism or allegations of pay-for-play.
It was a shocking system even by Clinton standards.
“If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she’s tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done”, said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Barack Obama’s top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic. It came hours after Trump called the foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”.
To get to the seventh floor of the Clinton State Department for a hearing for one’s plea, the cover charge was high.
The Clintons have proven they are neither transparent nor trustworthy. On Tuesday alone, she raised more than $6.2 million at four events in Southern California and the Bay Area.
“State Department employees interviewed applicants for Clinton Foundation positions and sought a Libya expert on behalf of Clinton Foundation donors”. But this week, Trump’s campaigncharacterized his hardline immigration policy as “to be determined”. But that speech has been delayed, a campaign source said. Bahrain also reportedly gave the Clinton Foundation between $50,000 and $100,000, while Bahrain Petroleum contributed another $25,000 to $50,000. As Matt Yglesias outlines in Vox, the actual numbers used by the AP to arrive at their widely shared claim of “more than half” of Clinton’s meetings are cherry-picked down to nearly nothing. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its worldwide aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities. She said that the public knows more about the Clinton Foundation than Trump’s wealth and his business interests.
This isn’t the first time Trump has brought up the foundation or emails, but a previous attack didn’t end up going well.
Missing emails are being unearthed at State, through Freedom of Information Act requests, that are filling out the picture Clinton thought had been blotted out when her 33,000 “private” emails were erased by her lawyers.
The Associated Press article also noted Clinton having met with the head of an worldwide AIDS charity, who also contributed to her husband’s foundation. “If Hillary is elected, we will transition those programs out of the foundation to other organizations committed to continuing their work”, the former president said in a statement on Monday. “Throughout the process, our top priorities have been preserving our most important programs, supporting the people who work for the Foundation and its affiliated programs, and resolving legitimate conflict of interest questions”. Judicial Watch notes that “Danny” has donated $5-$10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
The emails — released as part of a public records lawsuit by conservative group Citizens United and shared exclusively with ABC – reveal what the group claims is new evidence Foundation allies received special treatment.
Moreover, the AP only analyzed 154 meetings, based on what has been made available by the State Department, and thus its review only accounts for a fraction of Clinton’s meeting schedule during her tenure as secretary of state.
One of those donors, Gilbert Chagoury, has pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. Some of the foundation’s projects will also be absorbed by other organizations. But none of the exchanges appeared to show a direct quid pro quo.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill Monday, congressional Republicans subpoenaed three technology companies involved in her unusual home server setup.
“What we did when I was Secretary of State, as I said, went above and beyond anything that was required”, Clinton said.
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Her last full-blown news conference was December 2015 in Iowa, more than 260 days.
