Hillary Clinton did not break any laws by heavily redacting the calendar of her years as Secretary of State. But Associated Press reporter Stephen Braun says the omission of details of her many meetings with people who could one day help her get elected president raises questions. He says the AP’s effort to get access to that information began in 2013. Finally, after suing the government, a judge ordered the State Department to hand over the documents to the AP.
“I began going through the calendar, trying to find out what was there,” Braun said. “In the process, we found scores and scores of meetings with all sorts of political heavyweights; business leaders who contributed to the (Clinton) Foundation, some who were political donors. It gave you a clear sense that all through her State Department tenure, you know, she was meeting with people who would potentially be very helpful in a presidential run in 2016.”
Braun’s report identifies at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests.
“The question that we’re raising is – you know she had a number of internal planners that she was getting – in which there would be all this detailed material – but the actual personal calendar that she left behind at the State Department was, in many cases, stripped of this material, which, again, raises questions about transparency.”
Why didn’t she turn these things in a lot earlier? The same practice was in effect with her handling of her emails. The irony, said Braun, is that under public records law, as Secretary of State, Clinton was afforded wide discretion in selecting emails for the public record. Had she used a government server for her email instead of her private one, no one is likely to have accused her of lack of transparency, or of permitting her office to function at times as a backdoor channel for shady, quid pro quo dealings.
Braun was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.
By Sandy Wells
KABC News
