Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night defended the Clinton Foundation and responded to Donald Trump’s accusation that the foundation “sold access” to Clinton while she was secretary of state.
“What Trump has said is ridiculous,” Clinton said during a phone interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “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 to protect U.S. interests abroad.”
The Clinton Foundation has come under increased scrutiny with emails showing that foundation representatives asked for Clinton to meet with prominent donors. And the Associated Press reported this week that many donors to the foundation met with Clinton while she was secretary of state.
Clinton on Wednesday told CNN that the AP excluded many of her meetings and only “looked at a small portion of my time.”
“It draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders,” she said. “That is absurd. These are people I would be proud to meet with, who any secretary of state would have been proud to meet with, to hear about their work and their insights.”
Cooper asked Clinton why the foundation accepted foreign donations while she was secretary of state but will not if Clinton wins the presidency.
“Obviously, if I am president, there will be some unique circumstances,” Clinton replied.
“Didn’t those unique circumstances exist when you were secretary of state?” Cooper then asked.
“No, no, look — I know there’s a lot of smoke and there is no fire,” Clinton responded.
Unfortunate choice of words by Clinton.
Yep. Five points off for rhetorical faux pas. It’s like a football fumble, mistakes born of only-humanness will nevertheless cost you.
Just as Republicans in congress have Obama Derangement Syndrome, the media has Hillary Derangement Syndrome. No other politician would have been called out for running a freakin’ non profit charity who wasn’t named Clinton.
How did Hillary get so far, given her difficulty making herself understood?
There is no smoke. There is just fog generated by right-wing gasbags. The woman is running for President–why can’t she get such simple ideas across?
I thought it was a great interview by Secretary Clinton. The Clinton Foundation stuff is just getting really old and ridiculous…there was no evidence of pay-to-play and I thought her explanation of the examples the AP used to show supposed wrong-doing were great. I am getting pretttty tired of the pundits bringing up that horrid AP report as some sort of gotcha for her and I am glad she talked about it and I am glad she answered questions on it (because of course that was yet ANOTHER criticism on her that SHE has yet to speak up about it).
At some point, is anyone going to ask HO about his refusal to dis-invest from his businesses should he win? His business ties in China and Russia? HRC was literally DOING HER JOB and we have all these people frothing at the mouth over it while Trump sits around with fawning profiles from the AP and people discussing his “softened” immigration stance.
It’s getting old and infuriating.