Hillary Clinton: Report about Clinton Foundation donors 'a lot of smoke,' but 'no fire'

On Wednesday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump's claims that as secretary of state she gave foreign governments and business leaders who donated to the Clinton Foundation something in return "ridiculous."

In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Clinton said that throughout her tenure as secretary of state, her work was "not influenced by any outside forces. I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right." Regarding an Associated Press article from Tuesday that said more than half of 154 private citizens she met with while at the State Department made donations to the Clinton Foundation, Clinton said she knows "there's a lot of smoke, and there's no fire."

The AP report "draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders," she continued. "That is absurd. These are people I would be proud to meet with, as any secretary of state would have been proud to meet with, to hear about their work and their insights."

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