Halperin: Clintons Didn’t Avoid Intermingling Between Foundation and State Dept, ‘This Is How Clinton Inc. Operates’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bloomberg Politics Managing Editor Mark Halperin stated that newly-released emails regarding the Clinton Foundation showed the Clintons didn’t follow the spirit, and possibly the letter of their agreement to avoid “inappropriate intermingling” between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, and “This is how Clinton Inc. operates, to their benefit.”

Halperin said, “Look, every administration has friends who use their personal connections to try to get special access. Everyone does. What makes this different is, when Bill Clinton — when Hillary Clinton took the job as Secretary of State, they knew there were issues related to this, and they promised that there would not any inappropriate intermingling between Bill Clinton’s portfolio and hers. This shows clearly, that they did not stay true to the spirit of that, and maybe the letter, by asking for special access for people who were donors to the foundation.”

He added, “This is how Clinton Inc. operates, to their benefit.” And “[T]hey’ll say the foundation does good work. These are all good people. They deserve a hearing before the State Department. They deserve jobs. They deserve access. That’s the way they view it. But you can’t do that in the context of trying to have and promising to be a separation between these two worlds, and you also can’t do it at — when there are all the overlapping relationships, as their critics have pointed out, led to their getting rich during this period.”

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