WASHINGTON — A new batch of State Department e-mails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.
In one e-mail exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the US ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
In another e-mail, the foundation appeared to push aides to Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request.
Clinton’s presidential campaign, which has been shadowed for 17 months by the controversy over the private e-mail server she used exclusively while at the State Department, had no immediate comment on the documents.
The State Department turned the new e-mails over to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents included 44 e-mails that were not among some 55,000 pages of e-mails that Clinton had previously given to the State Department, which she said represented all her “work-related’’ e-mails.
New York Times
Trump says ISIS honors Obama as its founder
SUNRISE, Fla. — A day after his remarks that appeared to suggest physical harm could befall Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump sprayed his fire at President Obama on Wednesday, accusing him of creating the Islamic State and saying the terrorist group honors him.
“In many respects, you know they honor President Obama,’’ Trump told a raucous and rowdy crowd in Florida on Wednesday night. “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.’’ He added, “I would say the cofounder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.’’ During an extended riff on the crisis in Crimea, Trump added extra emphasis on the president’s full name, saying that it occurred “during the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.’’
Trump’s statement marked an escalation in his recent criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the terror threat, as he had previously only accused Clinton of a founding role in the terror group. His suggestion that the president was honored by ISIS recalled an earlier controversy when Trump seemingly implied that the president had some connection to the terrorist massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June.
“He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,’’ Trump told Fox News in June. And the use of the president’s middle name recalled Trump’s questioning of Obama’s faith during his crusade several years ago to prove that Obama, who is Christian, was not born in the United States.
The Republican candidate also found himself in an awkward camera framing, immediately after criticizing the Clinton campaign for the appearance of Seddique Mir Mateen, the father of the gunman at the Pulse nightclub, at her own campaign event this week.
“Wasn’t it terrible when the father of the animal that killed these wonderful people in Orlando was sitting with a big smile on his face right behind Hillary Clinton?’’ Trump said.
Yet sitting behind Trump was Mark Foley, a former Republican congressman who resigned after being confronted with a series of sexually explicit messages he sent to underage congressional pages.
Trump seemed not to be aware of the disgraced former congressman’s presence as he tried to cast doubt on the Clinton campaign’s account that it had not known who Mateen was.
“When you get those seats, you sort of know the campaign,’’ Trump said.
New York Times
Appeals court stays ruling on voter ID in Wisconsin
NEW YORK — A federal appeals court Wednesday blocked a lower court from allowing voters in Wisconsin to cast ballots without photo identification, stating that the lower court had been too lenient in loosening a state voter ID law that had already been declared discriminatory.
The injunction, issued by a three-judge panel of the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, adds a new measure of confusion into a fierce battle over the 2011 law in a battleground state, three months before the presidential election.
But it did not affect a second federal court ruling in July that loosened Wisconsin’s photo ID law in a different manner: allowing any registered voter struggling to get one of the accepted forms of ID to obtain voting credentials at any state motor vehicle office.
The July ruling also broadened the types of ID that college students can present at polling places.
New York Times
