Hillary Clinton's campaign manager says the former secretary of state "doesn't have a conflict of interest" with her charitable organization, just days after former President Bill Clinton announced the Clinton Foundation would no longer accept corporate or foreign donations if his wife becomes commander in chief.
"Hillary Clinton doesn't have a conflict of interest with charitable work, that's all it is," Robby Mook said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"We need to look a lot more closely at Donald Trump if we're going to drill this deep on Hillary Clinton," he suggested.
Mook slammed a report released by the Associated Press on Tuesday that revealed that at least 85 of 154 nongovernment donors to the Clinton Foundation gained access to Clinton herself while she was serving as the nation's top diplomat. In total, the donors contributed a combined $156 million to the foundation, according to the report.
"By our count, there were over 1,700 other meetings that she had," Mook said in his dismissal of the report. "She was secretary of state, she was meeting with foreign officials and government officials constantly. So to pull all of them out of the equation, cherry pick a very small number of meetings is very outrageous."
He continued, "At every juncture, the foundation set up the highest possible standards to prevent any conflict of interest and the State Department itself has said there was no conflict of interest."
Instead of digging into the ties between Clinton's State Department and her charitable foundation, Mook suggested that the media look more closely at Trump and his ties to "international entities."
"Hillary Clinton and her family had a foundation, it was charitable, they don't receive a salary from it," he said. "Donald Trump and his bottom line and his net worth are directly connected to all kinds of international entities ... and nobody is asking him to disclose or divest."
Mook declined to say whether Clinton plans to have a press conference to specifically address mounting questions about her foundation's operations during her tenure at the State Department.
"We're considering everything every day," he said. "She has been answering questions, she will continue to do that."