State Department Press Director Elizabeth Trudeau said Thursday that the department is not aware of any actions being influenced by the Clinton Foundation, leading to an exchange with a skeptical reporter.
Top officials at the Justice Department pushed for an investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which has been linked to Hillary Clinton’s State Department in pay-for-play allegations and overlapping interests in newly released emails. Clinton has claimed repeatedly that the foundation’s donors wielded absolutely no influence over her decision-making as secretary of state.
Trudeau said State Department officials are regularly in contact with a range of outside individuals and organizations, and nothing was out of the ordinary in this case.
"The nearly 55,000 pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails released by the department over the past year give a sense of the wide range of individuals, inside and outside the government, that State Department officials are in contact with on a range of topics," Trudeau said. "The Department’s actions under Secretary Clinton were taken to advance administration policy as set by the president and in the interest of American foreign policy. The State Department is not aware of any actions that were influenced by the Clinton Foundation."
"Any action at all over the course of Secretary Clinton’s tenure?" Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked.
"Correct," Trudeau said.
Lee said he wanted to be sure the department could make that frank assessment.
"That’s a rather sweeping statement," Lee said.
"It is. I think everyone’s aware of the scrutiny that this department is under," Trudeau said. "We would obviously take any questions seriously ... I stand by my statement."
"Right, but the question has been raised just in the last two days," Lee said. "So I’m just wanting to make sure that people have looked at this and determined that there was no impropriety."
"Correct," Trudeau said.