President Donald Trump got it wrong. Hillary Clinton did not donate $700,000 to the campaign of the acting FBI director’s wife, as CNN’s Jake Tapper explains in this week’s video collaboration with FactCheck.org.
In a series of tweets on July 25 and 26, Trump criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not removing Andrew McCabe, the acting head of the FBI, who Trump said “got big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives.” Trump also said McCabe was “the person in charge” of investigating Clinton’s use of a private email account and server as secretary of state.
The nearly $675,000 donated to Dr. Jill McCabe, who unsuccessfully ran for a Virginia state Senate seat in 2015, didn’t come from Clinton or her campaign. Instead, it came from the Virginia Democratic Party and Common Good VA, a political action committee run by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and supporter of Hillary and Bill Clinton. The PAC donated even larger amounts to other candidates as part of a failed effort by the governor to help the Democrats take control of the state Senate that year.
McCabe had lost the election by the time her husband became deputy director of the FBI in February 2016. It was in that job, according to a Wall Street Journal story, that he “assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”
Read our previous articles about the donations here and here. And see more of our fact-checking videos with CNN’s “State of the Union” on our website.