Donald Trump said on Aug. 22 that the Clinton Foundation should be “shut down immediately.”
“Hillary Clinton is the defender of the corrupt and rigged status quo. The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people,” said the Republican nominee in a statement.
“It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately,” he added.
His comments come after newly released emails showed ties between the Clinton Foundation and the U.S. State Department while the Democratic presidential candidate was secretary of state.
Trump also went on Fox and Friends on Monday to speak against the Foundation.
“Well, number one, they should shut it down, and number two, they should give the money back to a lot of countries we shouldn’t be taking—and they shouldn’t be taking—money from,” Trump said.
But the recently released emails put the organization in a tough spot. They showed Doug Band, who at the time was a top official with the Clinton Foundation, pushing for a job for an associate by asking Clinton’s aides at the State Department for help.
Band told the aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, in an April 2009 email under the subject line “A favor…” that it is “important to take care” of a person whose name had been redacted. Abedin then replied to Band saying, “We have all had him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.”
In another 2009 email, Band asks Abedin and Mills to help a top Clinton Foundation donor, Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury. Band asked the aides to get Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Chagoury was convicted in Switzerland in the year 2000 for money laundering and aiding a criminal organization.
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