The State Department has released all Clinton’s calendars and about half her detailed daily schedules as secretary of state, after The Associated Press sued for access in federal court. That’s 85 meetings with Clinton Foundation donors during the first two years of her term as the United States’ chief diplomat.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as well as his surrogates including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, compared Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state with the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. “I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right to keep Americans safe and protect our interests overseas”, Clinton said.
Hillary Clinton is defending the work of her family foundation, saying the organization needs more time to ensure the continuity of their programs.
The Clintons, while denying any wrongdoing, have planned a series of changes – including refusing to accept foreign and corporate contributions and shifting some of its programs to other charities – created to reduce appearances of impropriety if Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 presidential race.
The investigative report follows on the heels of new emails turned over by the State Department that reveal numerous conversations between Bill Clinton’s top aides at the foundation and Hillary Clinton’s top staffers at State asking for special favors for foundation donors. “She did so knowing full well it would put American lives at risk by making classified information highly vulnerable to foreign hacking”, he said, adding that she deleted emails from the server to “cover up her crime”. This narrowed down the denominator to a small subcategory of people Clinton met with as secretary of state, since the majority of her diplomatic work would involve representatives of foreign governments.
Davidson also laid out the differences between the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation. The foundation won’t accept foreign donations, and he will stop personally raising money for the foundation, he said.
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.
In the US, it has a school program affecting more than 30,000 schools and 18 million children that focuses on improving child nutrition, health education and physical education and reducing drug addiction.
Friday of this week also marked 265 days since Clinton has held a formal press conference. “I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right”, she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this week. Others we found by reviewing the archived government email accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond. She waited until Thursday to say, “I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire”.
Changing the foundation’s name from the “Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation” to the “Clinton Foundation” will convince precisely zero people that everything is on the up and up.
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“There’s sort of these explicit ways in which you get access”, he said.
