Clinton camp rages against AP report The Democratic nominee's aides and surrogates rush to defend the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary Clinton's campaign went on a full-court press against a familiar opponent Wednesday: the media.

Ripping into an Associated Press report finding that more than half of the people outside the government who met with her as secretary of state donated to the Clinton Foundation, top-ranking officials with the Democratic nominee's team accused the media and critics of "cherry-picking."


"Well, because they took a small sliver of her tenure as secretary of state, less than half the time, less than a fraction of the meetings, fewer than I think 3 percent, the number they've looked at of all the meetings," chief strategist Joel Benenson told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day." "This is a woman who met with over 17,000 world leaders, countless other government officials, public officials in the United States. And they've looked at 185 meetings and tried to draw a conclusion from that."

In its report, the AP noted that 85 of the 154 people from non-government-related interests who met with or who had scheduled phone calls with Clinton either donated to her family's charitable organization or had committed funds. The article disclosed, however, that the analysis covered only the first half of Clinton's tenure and did not include the many meetings with foreign diplomats and U.S. government officials.

The report was just one of a slew of articles that have emerged in recent days detailing the overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Clinton's four-year tenure leading the agency. To add to the pressure on Clinton, Donald Trump's campaign has also been unusually disciplined about attacking alleged "pay for play" activity in which political and corporate leaders who donated to the foundation got access to Clinton and other power brokers.

While there's little sign that Clinton herself will soon offer a full-throated defense, her aides and surrogates have been flooding the airwaves and other media as they attempt to tamp down the latest flare-up in the long-running scandal.

Clinton Foundation President Donna Shalala has been heavily promoting the myriad changes the group announced this week, should Clinton be elected president, including Bill Clinton stepping down from the board and stopping his fundraising efforts.

"We're not responding to the outside criticism," Shalala told NPR on Tuesday. "I was brought in a year ago to help start thinking through what form [it] would take if she was elected, and the president wanted to do it very carefully."

Beyond Shalala, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, long-time Clinton ally James Carville, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon and Benenson have all offered up passionate defenses of the Clinton Foundation in the past 24 hours.

Fallon on Tuesday evening issued a lengthy statement, calling it "outrageous" that the AP would use a subset of Clinton's meetings to draw such a big conclusion.

On Wednesday, Benenson called the AP report "one of the most massive misrepresentations you could see from the data. And then they're trying to malign and implicate that there was some, something nefarious going on when, in fact, there wasn't.

"She met with noted people like a Nobel economist. That's who's on the AP list," he said, alluding to Muhammad Yunus as "somebody who got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, who was unanimously given the Congressional Gold Medal, by Democrats and Republicans. How many unanimous things did you have in a Democratic and Republican Congress in the last eight years?"

Cuomo shot back on CNN that Benenson was also "cherry-picking."

"You know the game very well. You know politics. You know journalism very well," Cuomo remarked. "The idea that this many people on the private citizen side as opposed to all officials were connected to the foundation and meeting with her at the State Department smells bad. You say nefarious. I'm not saying it's illegal. I'm not saying it's a felony. That shouldn't be the bar for wrongdoing either. It seems wrong and inappropriate. Isn't that enough to draw criticism?"

Benenson responded by pointing to Clinton Foundation donor Melinda Gates, whose work fighting AIDS and malaria coincides with State Department priorities.

"People support this foundation because of the good work it's done, just like they support [the George H.W. Bush-founded Points of Light], just like they support other foundations," Benenson added. "We shouldn't forget that's what's going on in the world."

Mook offered a similar defense on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," poking at Trump, who he called connected "to all kinds of international entities."

"The Bank of China. A number of large Russian companies. Goldman Sachs. He is indebted or reliant for income on a number of these entities and nobody is asking him to disclose or divest," Mook protested. "Hillary Clinton doesn't have a conflict of interest with charitable work. That's all it is. So, I think we need to look a lot more closely at Donald Trump if we're going to drill down this deep on Hillary Clinton."

Asked whether Clinton would end her 263-day streak without a news conference as a result of the AP's latest story, Mook was noncommittal.

"We're considering everything every day. She's been answering questions, she's gonna continue to do that," Mook said. "I think all we would ask is that people don't cherry-pick 100-something meetings and then say that half of them were with Clinton Foundation donors at the exclusion of 1,700 other meetings."

Carville, who earlier this week suggested people could "die" if the foundation is forced to pull back its charitable work, said on Wednesday that the group's track record of success cannot be denied.

"The three things by Bill Clinton, who I love, his three greatest achievements in my mind was he stopped the genocide. He did the human genome project which is going to save our children and grandchildren, extend life and the Clinton Foundation. I think it is a terrific organization," Carville said.

Benenson, in his defense, made note of the Republican nominee's past $100,000 contribution to the foundation, sarcastically asking if he was "paying for play," as it has been suggested of the other donors.

"People give donations to this foundation because they believe in the work of this foundation," Benenson said. "And to say that meeting with 84 [sic] people out of 3,000 people over the span of your tenure says something you know, even inappropriate is going on I think is a completely flawed premise. And that's the problem with the AP report looking at this data, lumping together 85 people out of 3,000 that she met with, including people like a Nobel Prize winner who's been awarded by the president and Congress for his work in the developing world, helping entrepreneurs start businesses and improve their lives. If that's wrong, then Donald Trump's living on another planet, which he may be anyway."