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What Bill Clinton said in 2012 about not taking foreign donations

Jon Greenberg
By Jon Greenberg May 5, 2015

A 2012 Q&A session between Bill Clinton and Ashley Judd has surfaced as evidence in the case against the Clinton Foundation and its acceptance of foreign donations while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

In the video, Clinton’s words seem hypocritical.

Here’s how MSNBC host Joe Scarborough described it on his April 30, 2015, show.

"There is a clip of Bill Clinton saying we're not going to take foreign donations because if somebody had business before the State Department, there would be an appearance of impropriety," Scarborough said. "They not only burst through what the guidelines of the White House put up, they burst through their own self-pronounced guidelines."

Scarborough is right that there's a video clip of Clinton dicussing foreign donations, but as this fact-check will show, he misleads viewers by saying it's a sign the Clintons burst through their "self-pronounced guidelines" of taking foreign donations.

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What Bill Clinton said in 2012 about not taking foreign donations