Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is slamming an Associated Press report
that more than half the people outside government that she met with
while she was secretary of state donated to the Clinton Foundation.
“It 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,” Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a
statement on Tuesday.
According to the AP’s review of State Department
calendars, “at least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or
had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State
Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its
international programs.”
“Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156
million,” the AP reported. “At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each,
and 20 gave more than $1 million.”
The Democratic nominee’s team argued that the story “relies on utterly flawed data.”
“The data does not account for more than half of her
tenure as Secretary,” Fallon said. “And it omits more than 1,700
meetings she took with world leaders, let alone countless others she
took with other U.S government officials, while serving as Secretary of
State. Just taking the subset of meetings arbitrarily selected by the
AP, it is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton’s basis for
meeting with these individuals.”
Hillary
Clinton delivers remarks at a gathering of law enforcement leaders at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York on Aug. 18, 2016.
(Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
The Clinton campaign said that the people she met with would have had the meetings regardless of their donations.
“Melinda Gates is a world-renowned
philanthropist whose foundation works to address global health crises
and eradicate disease in the developing world,” Fallon said. “Meeting
with someone like Melinda Gates is squarely in the purview of America’s
top diplomat, whose job involves confronting these same global
challenges.”
The AP report also highlighted Clinton’s
relationship with Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize-winning Bangladeshi
economist and foundation donor who met with Clinton three times “during a
period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his
oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign
from the bank’s board.”
“President Obama awarded Yunus the
Presidential Medal of Freedom,” Fallon countered, “and Republicans and
Democrats voted unanimously to award him the Congressional Gold Medal.
Nevertheless, this story reduces Yunus to a charitable donation once
made by an organization he chaired. That is grossly unfair, inaccurate
and just goes to show how faulty this analysis truly is.”
The AP report came as the Clinton family
foundation is facing a new round of scrutiny. New emails released Monday
by the conservative group Judicial Watch showed a top foundation
official reaching out to Clinton’s State Department for favors.
Trump
supporters costumed as Bill and Hillary Clinton in prison uniforms sing
the national anthem before a rally for Donald Trump in Austin, Texas,
on Tuesday. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
Donald Trump seized on the AP report to blast Clinton as unethical.
“It is impossible to figure out where the
Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” the Republican
developer said at a Tuesday night rally in Austin, Texas. “It is now
abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from
public office.”
Last week, former President Bill Clinton said
that he would step down from the foundation’s board if Hillary Clinton
were to be elected president, and the foundation said that if the
Clintons return to the White House, it would accept donations only from
U.S. citizens.
USA Today described this proposal as plan “laughable and laudable.”
“Taking Bill off the board and ending his
official fundraising role won’t stop people from trying to buy access
through the foundation,” the paper said in an editorial published Wednesday.
“Ending foreign and corporate contributions is a good step, but
allowing them to continue at least through the first week of November
looks more like an influence-peddling fire sale (Give while you still
can!) than a newfound commitment to clean government.”
It concluded: “The only way to eliminate the
odor surrounding the foundation is to wind it down and put it in
mothballs, starting today, and transfer its important charitable work to
another large American charity such as the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. If Hillary Clinton doesn’t support these steps, she boosts
Trump’s farcical presidential campaign and, if she’s elected, opens
herself up to the same kind of pay-to-play charges that she was subject
to as secretary.”
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