The Justice Department cleared Clinton of allegations that she mishandled classified information while she was Secretary of State but still criticised her use of the private email server. Powell says he doesn’t recall mentioning it to her until she was already a year into the job.
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Her defenders: US law says perjury requires a wilful intent to hide.
But it raises a troubling question: Earlier this summer, FBI Director James Comey said he had decided not to recommend criminal charges be filed against Clinton. They also go a long way toward confirming her critics’ allegation that the Clintons were in a global pay-for-play arrangement. He added: “We do not have a basis for concluding she lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation”.
Merrill did not return a request for comment.
Clinton’s campaign said she did nothing to favor donors to the foundation. More than half those people had donated either personally or through companies or groups to the Clinton Foundation or pledged to donate to specific programs through the charity’s worldwide arm.
“The exchanges include ones between top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and foundation executive Douglas Band about face time for Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain, whose scholarship program gave United States dollars 32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative”, the daily wrote.
There was an nearly immediate backlash, and the government went through the emails Clinton had turned over.
Former President Bill Clinton, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation Chelsea Clinton, discuss the Clinton Global Initiative University during the closing plenary session on the second day of the 2014 Meeting of Clinton Global Initiative University at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona March 22, 2014.
Her defenders: They’re outraged over the AP story. They describe it as a smear-job – with a cherry-picked headline number, selectively obtained by including only meetings with private citizens and excluding all the ones with public officials.
Among those who got face time with Hillary Clinton were a Ukrainian oligarch and steel magnate who shipped oil pipe to Iran in violation of USA sanctions and a Bangladeshi economist who was under investigation by his government and was eventually pressured to leave his own bank. Bahrain made separate donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Watch an interview with Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, on the next page. Band answers: “Then don’t”.
That became a big deal as Republican members of Congress started investigating the 2012 attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
“No matter how this group tries to mischaracterise these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation”.
The 15,000 emails weren’t “just recently found”, and they are not all work-related.
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After admitting in an August 23 court filing that it found documents that “satisfied the [Benghazi related] search terms” of the new Clinton emails, the State Department proposed a rolling production schedule, “under which State would make its first production of any non-exempt responsive records subject to FOIA on September 30, 2016, and complete production no later than October 31, 2016”. She salutes smartly and does as she is told.
