Former President Bill Clinton issued a strong denial that his wife, former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, had ever given or received favors from Clinton Foundation donors while with the State Department.
“I never saw her study a list of my contributors,” said Bill Clinton on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, adding that he also had “no idea” who was doing business before the State Department.
Laughing slightly, Bill Clinton said his wife “was pretty busy” during those years.
Bill Clinton attacked the narrative that foreign governments had received favors because they gave large donations to the Clinton Foundation, which does international humanitarian work. The organization admitted to not disclosing some of those donations, but Bill brushed that criticism aside. “There is such a trust deficit in America today,” he said.
“She believed that part of the job as secretary of state was to advance America’s economic interests around the world,” said Bill. “For much of the time she was secretary … we didn’t have a commerce secretary … so if she hadn’t been doing this economic diplomacy work, nobody would have been doing it. But I never thought about whether there was any overlap.”
The former president said that in the case of one criticized $500,000 check from the Embassy of Algeria, the Clinton Foundation was unable to properly document that simply because of the chaos surrounding the Haiti earthquake.
“We didn’t report that not because we were ashamed of it, but because it was coming within two days of the earthquake and they were performing amputative surgery on the lawn outside the major hospital with a flashlight at night and vodka for anesthesia and antiseptic,” he said. “Nobody thought about it.”
