CNN investigative correspondent Drew Griffin narrated a segment Friday detailing various donations the Clinton Foundation had accepted from foreign governments prior to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, but he completely botched the repeatedly proven fact that the Clinton Foundation has failed to reveal the identities of over 1,000 foreign donors.
The Lead host Jake Tapper highlighted a shocking Associated Press report that revealed that Hillary Clinton held more than 75 meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors that were wiped from then-Secretary Clinton’s official State Department schedule. Tapper linked the new revelations about Clinton and her family foundation to questions currently being raised by Donald Trump concerning the aforementioned donations.
Part of Griffin’s report features Trump saying in a speech earlier this week that “Maybe the motivation lies among the 1,000 foreign donations Hillary failed to disclose while at the State Department.”
Griffin then falsely asserts that “There’s no evidence that is accurate.”
But in fact, last April, the Washington Post and Bloomberg News both reported that 1,100 hidden Clinton Foundation foreign donors were “bundled” into a $25 million donation from Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership.
“All of the money that was raised by CGEP [Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership] flowed through to the Clinton Foundation—every penny—and went to the [charitable] initiatives we identified,” Giustra, a Canadian mining financier, told Bloomberg News last April in an exclusive interview.
Those were the facts that CNN’s Griffin said, “there’s no evidence” of.
Before she became President Obama’s secretary of state, Hilary Clinton signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Obama administration promising to disclose all foreign donations during her tenure as head of the State Department.
Clinton violated the Memorandum of Understanding, according to the New York Times, the moment her family foundation accepted and failed to disclose a string of donations totaling $2.35 million from Ian Telfer, the foreign head of the Russian-owned uranium company, Uranium One, which Hillary Clinton approved to acquire U.S. uranium.
Clinton Foundation documents didn’t show Telfer’s donations. Why? Because, according to the Post, “Canadian law prevents charities in that country from disclosing their donors without the donors’ permission.”
“Clearly, there was an expectation and a commitment that large donations to the Clinton Foundation would be disclosed,” said former senator Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), who grilled Hillary Clinton about potential conflicts of interest before she became secretary of state.
Equipped with its army of journalists, researchers, and reporters, perhaps CNN can do some digging and connect the dots behind the still secret 1,000-plus foreign Clinton Foundation Donors.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson