Its lawyers said in a phone conference with the AP’s lawyers that the department now expects to release the last of the detailed schedules around December 30, weeks before the next president is inaugurated.
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Lawyers for the AP formally requested on Friday that the State Department publish the remaining documents by October 15 – well in advance of the presidential election. And I’m sure if that happens without an immediate switch over to equal services through another agency, lots of people will die needlessly. The meeting is scheduled for September 19-21, which means it will happen exactly one week before his wife’s first presidential debate in NY.
Clinton also said, according to the Washington, D.C., publication “The Hill”, despite “a lot of smoke” there is “no fire” in response to a recent Associated Press story reporting that as Secretary of State more than half her meetings with those outside the US government were foundation donors.
As if these developments weren’t problematical enough, former Secretary of State Colin Powell last weekend denied Clinton’s claim that he advised her to use a private server, as he had done, saying, “Her people are trying to pin it on me”.
I interviewed Clinton in Bahrain in late 2010, during her first trip there for the Manama Dialogue on security.
A federal judge has pushed the state department to finish its review of these emails by September 22, meaning they could be released only weeks before the election.
Chaffetz on Thursday demanded a list of employees who sought permission to perform Clinton Foundation activities, as well as what those activities were and any communications related to the request. She’s simply not above the appearance of potential conflicts of interests, and I’ve written before for Roll Call that I think she should tell the American public exactly what she intends to do to prevent donors past and present from influencing her if she’s president.
The AP said it did not include those meetings in its tally because, presumably, meetings with government officials were part of the daily duties for any secretary of state and would have occurred even if someone else was in the job.
“More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation”.
Yet she was the secretary of state, not an elected official.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been increasingly dogged by questions about the relationship she had with the Clinton Foundation while serving as secretary of state, adding a thorn in her side at a crucial point in the campaign season. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. Under its process, it is reviewing and censoring them page-by-page to remove personal details such as private phone numbers or email addresses.
The Clinton Foundation has from the beginning appeared to be just what the Sunlight Foundation – a “progressive” foundation promoting nonprofit transparency – described it as some years ago: “a slush fund”.
A federal judge ordered the schedules’ release in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
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. He also cited “mounting frustration that this is a project where the State Department may be running out the clock”.
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But finding the fire – the lie, the misdeed, the unethical act – is proving to be rather hard, as evidenced this week by an inaccurate tweet and arguably misleading story from the Associated Press that were quickly rebutted by the Clinton campaign and dismissed by many media outlets. For the protection of AP and its licensors, content may not be copied, altered or redistributed in any form.
