Emails show links between State Department and Clinton Foundation [View all]

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Source: CBS

Despite denials that the State Department and the Clinton Foundation had any significant ties to each other while Hillary Clinton served as the nation's chief diplomat, a new batch of emails sheds new light on the seemingly close relationship between the two entities.

The latest email release, obtained by the group Judicial Watch from a State Department Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, included several exchanges between a top foundation worker and State officials working under Clinton.

In one back-and-forth from April 2009, Doug Band, who worked for the Clinton Foundation (including its Clinton Global Initiative) as well as serving as a personal aide to Bill Clinton, appeared to push then-State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mill for "a favor" on behalf of a foundation associate.

Band said in his email that it was "important to take care of [redacted]," and Abedin responded "We have all had him on our radar" and that "Personnel has been sending him options."

Band, in another email to Abedin and Mills in April of that year, asked for the State Department's "substance person" in Lebanon to contact Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire philanthropist who was one of the Clinton Foundation's top donors.

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On Tuesday evening, Trump's campaign slammed the emails as "yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton lacks the judgment, character, stability and temperament to be within 1,000 miles of public power."

"She views public office as nothing more than a means to personal enrichment - and every dollar she takes comes at the expense of the public welfare," Trump's national policy director, Stephen Miller, said in a statement.

The Clinton campaign, however, has pushed back against those implications, saying that the emails never involved Clinton herself or the Foundation's work, according to a New York Times report.

Band, they said, had been operating as an aide to former President Bill Clinton and not as a Foundation official.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/emails-show-links-between-state-department-and-clinton-foundation/