“I have been asked many, many questions in the past year about emails, and what I have learned is that when I try to explain what happened, it can sound like I am trying to excuse what I did”, Clinton said. Suspicious that the guy is stealing something, the guard looks in the straw but can’t find anything.
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Ben Boychuk. She’s crooked, you know.
The guy smiles and says, “Wheelbarrows”.
Hillary Clinton dismissed the AP story as “absurd”, calling it “all smoke, no fire”, even as her surrogates claimed donors may have got “access” but not any “favours”. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation found no evidence, Comey said, that foreign adversaries or anyone else ever hacked their way into Clinton’s emails. Their release was delayed in part because of Clinton’s decision to use an unauthorized private email server for her work without informing record-keeping officials. No one in the Clinton family should be there. That’s not shocking; she’s famous for doing that.
“I have the utmost respect for Secretary Powell”, Clinton said.
“Given Secretary Clinton’s exclusive use of an illicit private email server, we can not even now be certain the entirety of her official public records are in the proper custody of the federal government”, he said of the Democratic presidential nominee. It turned out it was more like a turnstile.
In addition to State Department functions, Band also corresponded with Abedin about personal requests of some Clinton Foundation supporters.
The emails also included a list of names Band wanted invited to a State Department lunch with Chinese President Hu Jintao in January 2011. When faced with a tough story or what she views as an adversarial press, she tends to hit back hard – dismissing questions out of hand and, in the process, backing herself into a corner.
“If you are planning…to run for president…don’t set up a foundation where you are beholden to scumbags from other countries”.
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 US sanctions and a Bangladeshi economist who was under investigation by his government and was eventually pressured to leave his own bank.
To which the obvious response is, “Duh”.
She may or may not be guilty of selling favors.
“So we’ve already released, I don’t know, 30,000 plus, so what’s a few more?” she flippantly told a comedy show.
This whole argument misses the point.
In emails dated December 2010, Clinton State Department aide Huma Abedin and then-top Clinton Foundation official Doug Band discussed potential guests for the lunch with the Chinese president – including three executives from groups that had donated millions to the foundation, according to an ABC News report late Saturday. But clearly some wouldn’t have.
“The Associated Press’ reporting relied on publicly available data provided by the State Department about Hillary Clinton’s meetings, phone calls and emails, cross-referenced against donor information provided by the Clinton Foundation and its related charities on its websites”, Colford wrote.
Fine. Maybe. We’ll see.
Adam Davidson, a journalist who writes for NY magazine and hosts a show on NPR, said that numerous events are “all about buying access”. It really doesn’t matter if there’s nothing “inside” the wheelbarrows; the meetings and conversations alone were valuable.
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Seven months ago, a federal judge ordered the State Department to release monthly batches of the former secretary of state’s daily schedule. In America and even more so overseas, possessing a reputation for having friends in the highest places is a priceless asset.
