Cooper Allen

USA TODAY

The Associated Press on Thursday deleted a tweet posted two weeks earlier regarding a review the news organization had conducted of meetings Hillary Clinton held with individuals from the private sector while secretary of State.

The original tweet, posted on Aug. 23, read: "BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation."

In its place, the AP tweeted Thursday: "AP review: Many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation." The tweet included a link to the August story.

In a memo explaining the decision, John Daniszewski, vice president for standards for AP, wrote the original tweet "fell short of AP standards by omitting essential context."

The story in question detailed how, among the individuals Clinton met with at the State Department who were outside of government, "an extraordinary proportion" had donated to her family's foundation personally or by way of some other entity — a finding, the AP wrote, that indicated "her possible ethics challenges if elected president."

Specifically, the AP review found that 85 of the 154 people who'd had in-person or phone meetings scheduled with Clinton and who weren't government officials were also foundation contributors, according to the State Department calendars that were available.

However, Daniszewski wrote Thursday, the tweet promoting the article "omitted the important distinction between discretionary meetings and official meetings."

In other words, the now-deleted tweet gave the impression that a far higher percentage of Clinton's total meetings while secretary were with donors than was concluded by the story's analysis, given that the 154 people included in the review did not encompass the many government officials she was interacting with during her tenure, meetings that Daniszewski wrote "made up the bulk of her workday."

Clinton and her campaign blasted the story not long after it was published. Speaking with CNN's Anderson Cooper last month, the Democratic presidential nominee said of the growing controversy regarding the relationship between the State Department under her leadership and the Clinton Foundation: "I know there is a lot of smoke and there is no fire."

Of the AP report, Clinton said: "It draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders."

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP "cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary's Clinton's schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation."

State Dept. to give AP all Clinton schedules before election

The AP review included only the portion of Clinton's daily schedules it had acquired following a Freedom of Information Act request. Last week, the State Department said it would produce the remainder of Clinton's schedules by Oct. 17 after having previously said they would not be released until December, weeks after the election.

The AP memo explaining the decision regarding the Clinton tweet also addressed the organization's new policy regarding the deletion of tweets, a practice it said was formally left to "AP news managers to decide on a case-by-case basis."

“We have to be the AP, wherever our work is being distributed,” says executive editor Kathleen Carroll in the memo, which announced that messages on Twitter would now be given "the same internal review and response process as other AP content."