“She sold favors and access in exchange for cash”.
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Trump made his remarks (at the 45:34 mark) during a rally in Austin, Texas, where he talked about the “new revelations about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal”.
“Well, first, What Trump has said is ridiculous”. My work as secretary of state was not influenced by any outside forces. “I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right to keep Americans safe and protect our interests overseas”.
There’s no evidence of pay-for-play, as Donald Trump keeps insisting. Terms like “Clinton Foundation”, “email server”, and “Benghazi” hover around her like a faint smoke that hints at the existence of fire.
The new emails follow an Associated Press report last week that found more than half the people outside the government who met or spoke by telephone with Clinton while she was secretary of state had given money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation.
Her remarks came amid continuing questions regarding conflicts of interest between the foundation and the Clinton State Department.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas, Trump said, “It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins”. And little by little, voters are learning that she likely used her family’s foundation to trade access to the State Department for hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars in donations. “I believe my aides also acted appropriately”, Clinton told MSNBC. As is their custom, they are indifferent to the importance of the foundation to world health, and they refuse to acknowledge the gratitude owed to President Clinton. That is the basis for corruption and it matters not what the former secretary of state’s intentions were.
Asked directly by Stelter if she would agree that the tweet is “inaccurate”, Carroll said the AP was better at “breaking stories and covering news… than we are on tweets”.
Paul Colford, the AP’s vice president and director of media relations, defended the AP’s reporting.
The AP “focused on Mrs. Clinton’s meetings and calls involving people outside government who were not federal employees or foreign diplomats, because meeting with US or foreign government officials would inherently have been part of her job as secretary of state”, Colford’s statement read. In order to come up with its blockbuster figure-that 85 out of the 154 people Clinton met with eventually donated to the Clinton Foundation-the AP “excluded from the denominator all employees of any government, whether USA or foreign”.
Recently released emails appear to further show a direct connection between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, including efforts to get foundation donors seats to an official lunch with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
In a statement, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon accused the AP of having “cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary Clinton’s schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation”. But when she was secretary of state, in control of day-to-day conduct of US foreign policy and with enormous influence over domestic affairs – well, not so much.
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Under the present rate, a government attorney working on behalf of the State Department said, it will take about four and one-half months – or until December 30 – to release all the remaining schedules through the end of Clinton’s term, in February 2013.
