The State Department has for months released regular batches of Hillary Clinton’s daily meeting schedules from her time as Secretary of State, but it has now said that not all the schedules would be released by the time the election rolls around. According to the Associated Press, State Department lawyers say they’ll have all the schedules released by December 30 of this year, but that’s more than a month after the country decides upon its next leader.
The schedules were in the news this week after the AP analyzed the sample it had, finding that most of the meetings with private individuals in its set came with people who had one way or another given money to the Clinton Foundation. The AP, which first asked for the schedules in 2010 and again in 2013, and then sued the State Department in order to obtain them, has been criticized by media reporters for publishing its report based on too small a data set. Only those meetings with individuals outside the government have been analyzed by the AP, and Clinton says that analysis is flawed because the AP isn’t looking at the full picture.
“These are people I would be proud to meet with, as any secretary of state would have been proud to meet with, to hear about their work and their insights,” Clinton told CNN, saying that whether or not these people were going to give money was not taken into account when she agreed to meet with them. Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon criticized the AP for only looking at “a limited subset” of the data to provide a skewed analysis. The AP had only analyzed 154 of the meetings by the time they published their findings.
Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement released Friday, “It is unacceptable that the State Department is now refusing to release her official schedule before the election in full. Voters deserve to know the truth before they cast their ballots.”
According to the Clinton Foundation’s official website, the charity “convene[s] businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for girls and women, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.” Bill Clinton said last week that if Hillary is elected president, the foundation will stop accepting foreign or corporate donations.
