Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence insisted Sunday that the public has a “right to know” whether Hillary Clinton engaged in pay-to-play by granting State Department access to top Clinton Foundation donors during her tenure as secretary of state.
Asked if recently released emails show the Democratic presidential nominee traded access for donations, Mr. Pence said: “It looks that way more and more every day, doesn’t it?”
“The new emails that have been made public just in the last week seem to make a direct connection between favors done by State Department officials and major foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation,” Mr. Pence said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Rushing to Mrs. Clinton’s defense was Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, who insisted “there is no evidence there was any pay-to-play.”
“We know there’s no evidence based on what the State Department has said in the last few days, based on the all the investigations that have been done around an unprecedented release of emails in government, that there are no laws that have been broken,” said Ms. McCaskill on “Fox News Sunday.”
“No one has been investigated more in the history of presidential politics than Hillary Clinton,” she added.
Emails released last week by government watchdog group Judicial Watch show Doug Band, who donated at least $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, arranged through Clinton aide Huma Abedin to meet with a top U.S. official in order to lobby for a job on behalf of someone else.
Ms. McCaskill insisted that the donor was “asking for nothing,” prompting Fox anchor Chris Wallace to respond: “But we don’t know that.”
The Trump campaign accused the Obama administration on Thursday of “political favoritism” after CNN reported that the Justice Department turned down FBI requests earlier this year to investigate foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation.
“Certainly, officials at the FBI, we also found out this week, believe that there should be an investigation, and Obama’s Department of Justice apparently has shut that down,” Mr. Pence said.
“The public has a right to know, because really and truly, this is exactly the kind of pay-to-play politics the American people are, are sick and tired of,” the Indiana governor said. “But, frankly, it is just one more example of the way I do believe that the Clintons have been operating over the last 30 years.”
Famed investigative reporter Bob Woodward, part of the team that exposed the 1972 Watergate scandal, said Democrats behind the scenes are nervous about the ongoing focus on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.
“You find Democrats talking to reporters who cover national security asking, ’Do you know anything? What’s going on?’” Mr.Woodward said. “They’re holding their breath that there might be something here that would be damaging to her candidacy and, even worse, damaging to the national security.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.