The entire Bill Clinton interview will air on Sunday at 9 a.m. on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
Bill Clinton defended his wife’s trustworthiness in a new interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, saying he trusts her with his life.
But in the country as a whole, the former president sees a “trust deficit.”
Clinton was frustrated at a report in the conservative Washington Free Beacon that pointed out the Clintons gave $100,000 to a charity run by the New York Times in the same year the paper endorsed Clinton’s campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Somebody jumped on The New York Times because they accepted a contribution from our family foundation,” said Clinton, apparently referring to the Free Beacon report.
“We gave them some money,” he admitted, although he said it had nothing to do with the endorsement.
“Hillary told me that George Soros had given a substantial amount of money to The New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund to help the people who had worked on 9/11 and had residual health problems,” he said. “And I like that Neediest Cases Fund a lot. And that was a very important priority for her as a senator. So she said, please, let’s give them some money. And we sent it in. It had nothing to do with anything, but even somebody accuses a newspaper of, you know, were we trying to buy the endorsement?”
“But it’s a metaphor for all this trust deficit in the country,” he said.