During Friday’s White House press briefing, ABC’s Jon Karl asked Press Secretary Josh Earnest whether the White House was aware that when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state she was not meeting the Obama administration’s disclosure rules.
During Clinton’s time as secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received a $2 million donation from a Canadian mining company that was at the time selling uranium to a Russian state-owned nuclear energy company. The New York Times first reported that the deal included stakes in uranium mining the United States. The deal also needed to be approved by the federal government and the State Department.
Karl asked Earnest that since such a large donations to the Clinton Foundation were not disclosed if that bothered the White House. Earnest deflected and said there was no evidence to support that the large donations influenced in the federal government’s approval of the uranium deal.
"I have been in a position where there have been other, to put it mildly, conservative authors, that have written books based on what they report serious allegations against the president," Earnest said.
Earnest went on to say that he would often be in the position to defend the president from claims that he claimed that would not be accompanied by evidence and that this is what is happening to Clinton. Karl said that he was asking about the disclosure and if it bothered the White House that Clinton did not meet the standards that Obama had made.
"And that is something Secretary Clinton’s team can talk to you about is how they handled the situation," Earnest said.