Donald Trump’s call for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and potentially illicit ties with the Clinton Foundation "strikes fear" in the hearts of her allies, CBS reporter Nancy Cordes said Wednesday.
Trump said Monday there should be an "expedited investigation by a special prosecutor" into the ties between the charitable foundation and Clinton’s State Department. A new Associated Report this week shows that 85 of 154 private individuals who met with Clinton while she was secretary of state were Clinton Foundation donors, many of them giving millions of dollars to the organization.
Reporting for CBS This Morning, Cordes noted Trump’s call for a "special prosecutor" brought to mind the Kenneth Starr investigation that uncovered Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s.
"The term special prosecutor strikes fear in the hearts of longtime Clinton-ites, who still recall when Kenneth Starr was appointed to look into the Whitewater controversy, an investigation that metastasized to include Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and eventually contributed to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment," Cordes said.
Trump has blasted Clinton as "unfit for public office" and said it was "impossible to figure out" where the Clinton Foundation ended and Clinton’s State Department began.
The Clinton campaign pushed back against the AP report on Tuesday as using "cherry-picked" data. Campaign manager Robby Mook said Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that the story was "outrageous."
In addition to the AP story, news broke this week that the FBI had uncovered nearly 15,000 documents in the investigation of her private email server use that were not disclosed by her attorneys.