Many big Clinton Foundation donors met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

At least 85 people who donated a combined $156 million to Clinton Foundation charities met or spoke on the phone with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state, according to an Associated Press review of State Department calendars. That's more than half of the 154 people from private interests AP found, and 20 of the 85 people donated or pledged more than $1 million to the Clinton Foundation or its international aid programs.

The meetings "do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former President Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009," AP says. "But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton." AP also found no evidence that these meetings influenced State Department policy — what Donald Trump calls "pay to play."

AP focused its report on Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus, whose U.S. branches of his nonprofit "microfinance" Grameen banks gave $125,000-$300,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative and whom Clinton met with three times as Bangladesh's government worked to oust him from his bank's board; Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, a GOP donor whose company has given heavily to the Clinton Foundation, whom the State Department assisted with a visa issue a day after he met Clinton at a breakfast luncheon; Nancy Mahon of MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of Estee Lauder's MAC Cosmetics, which partnered with the State Department for a project in South Africa; and S. Daniel Abraham, a Clinton fundraiser who founded the Center for Middle East Peace and met with Clinton eight times. AP's Stephen Braun explains what his team found and didn't find:

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

YouTube

Watch On

At a rally in Austin on Tuesday night, Trump cited the report, saying it "is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office." Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon accused AP of "outrageous" cherry picking, calling the report "a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation."