President of group leading charge on emails: ‘Even the Clintons are admitting there's something wrong’

In a Tuesday interview with Yahoo News, the head of conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch said that Clinton Foundation’s move to shut down funding was an admission of error.

“Even the Clintons are admitting there’s something wrong,” said Tom Fitton, the organization’s president, “which is why they’re running away from their own foundation’s activities.”

Fitton was referencing the Clinton Foundation’s new promise to stop taking foreign and corporate donations should former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton win the presidency in November. Former President Bill Clinton also promised to step down from the board should his wife win.

On Monday, Judicial Watch released a new batch of emails that included conversations between members of the foundation and State Department employees. Among the message were requests regarding officials from Bahrain, the band U2, soccer players from the United Kingdom.

“You have a meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain that was moved along by the foundation’s Doug Band, who was an executive there,” said Fitton. “Why did this important ally have to go through the Clinton Foundation and rely on their donor-friend relationship with the Foundation to get a meeting with the secretary of state? It looks like foreign policy was being outsourced by Mrs. Clinton to the Foundation. If you were a foreign national or a foreign head of state it was your connections to the foundation that got you special consideration at the State Department. Wildly improper and a violation of Mrs. Clinton’s explicit promises to keep the two situations different.”

“We don’t know because we haven’t been given any of the documents,” Fitton replied when Yahoo News Guest Anchor Stephanie Sy asked about he expected to find in the next round of emails set to be released by the FBI. “Mrs. Clinton deleted these records and we didn’t know what was in them.”

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that many Clinton Foundation donors from outside of government met with Clinton while she was at the State Department.

Both the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation have insisted that nothing improper occurred between the family foundation and Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. Many Republicans, including Donald Trump, have repeatedly raised the possibility of Clinton exchanging government favors for charitable contributions. The Clintons have also responded to the criticism by touting their foundation’s accomplishments around the world.

“No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents,” Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said in a Monday statement, “the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

Last week a U.S. District Court ruled that Clinton is required to answer questions from Judicial Watch related to their records request about the private email account and server she maintained for official State Department business.

“I don’t think she’s been grilled effectively,” Fitton said Tuesday when asked by Yahoo News about what his organization intended to learn from Clinton while she was under oath. “We don’t know what the FBI asked her.”

Fitton also said that, while his organization has until Oct. 14 to submit the questions to the Democratic nominee, it plans to do so far sooner in order to get answers prior to the election. Clinton will have 30 days to respond per the court’s ruling.