Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager declined to address new concerns on Sunday about the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with the State Department, claiming instead that both the agency and Democratic presidential hopeful have always operated at the “highest possible ethical standards.”
“The State Department has been clear repeatedly [that] there was never any special favors,” Robby Mook told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“Nobody has put up any evidence that any of this actually happened and the Obama White House and the Department of State does put in the highest possible ethical standards and there’s never been any evidence of pay-to-play at all,” he added.
Mook said he couldn’t comment on recent emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed aides to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton afforded special attention to individuals they identified as Friends of Bill (“FOB”) or William Jefferson Clinton VIPs (“WJC VIPs”) in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
“I can’t comment on what might have happened at the State Department and what would have been highlighted or not,” he said.
The head of the Clinton campaign also dodged questions about leaked emails showing Clinton solicited $12 million from the Moroccan government, which her State Department had long considered corrupt.
“This was [Hillary Clinton’s] idea,” her top aide Huma Abedin wrote in an email about the donation request. “Our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. … It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months.
“[Clinton] created this mess and she knows it,” Abedin noted.
Mook said the email could not be verified because it was stolen by WikiLeaks.
“It was known for a long time that the Clinton Foundation’s conference was held in Morocco … so there isn’t anything new here,” he said, adding that “the Russians illegally stole these emails [and] they’re selectively dealing them out.”
